5 Presidential Pardons From History People Were None Too Pleased About

5 Marc Rich

One of the reasons pardons often rub people the wrong way is that we like to think that all people are equal in the eyes of the law. Anyone over 12 knows this isn’t true, but you can still hold out hope that somehow justice won out on the rare occasions that a rich person is actually convicted of a crime. So when someone like Marc Rich, a massive Democratic Party donor, ends up fleeing the country after dozens of charges of every flavor of fraud? You can understand how the optics of pardoning him would be less than ideal. Bill Clinton apparently didn’t care, and it was received about as well as you'd think.

4 Richard Nixon

This is an article about presidents and crimes, so, of course, Nixon is going to show up. It won’t be his last appearance, either. In this case, his connection to an unpopular pardon is as direct as can be: It was his own pardon, granted by his replacement, Gerald Ford. The reasons behind it, at least in theory, were to “help the country heal,” and to avoid any more public airing of dirty laundry. The problem is, the country you’re telling to heal sometimes feels like the best way for that to happen would be to see a president punished for their illegal actions. It was received poorly to say the least, even within Nixon's own ex-staff.

3 Pretty Much Everyone Involved in Iran-Contra

If you’re not familiar with Iran-Contra, it was a double-dip of illegal acts during the Reagan administration. They sold arms to an embargoed Iran, and then turned around and gave the profits to the Contra rebel group in Nicaragua, who they were also not supposed to be funding. From tip to tail, it was illegal, and it would be a massive scandal for everyone with a whiff of involvement, including Reagan and his vice president, George H.W. Bush. 

Bush, though, was elected president despite Iran-Contra's stink, an odor that only grew stronger when he ended his presidency by pardoning basically everyone involved. His stated reasoning was basically that they did this bad stuff… for America! The tinfoil hat theory is that he needed to shut down the trial so his own involvement wouldn’t be fully revealed.

2 Jimmy Hoffa

We’re back to Nixon. Before he himself was a known criminal, he was just knee-deep in questionable ethics via pardoning a man now mostly known for being dead and hard to find: Jimmy Hoffa. 

Hoffa was in prison for pension fraud and jury tampering, two charges that don’t exactly beg sympathy. He’d never serve his full sentence, however, with Nixon pardoning him in what seemed, even then, to be a pretty clear case of quid-pro-quo. Nixon gets Hoffa out of prison, and Hoffa and his union connections help Nixon win the White House for another term. You don’t need much more than a single strand of red yarn to figure this one out.

1 The Entire Confederate Army

It sort of feels like intuitively, one of the hardest crimes to be pardoned for would be treason, right? Attempting to overthrow the government doesn’t seem like something that would make the government feel inclined to help you. For example, if a group of people seceded from a country, declared war with the country they’d just been part of and then lost? It would be surprising if that country welcomed them back with open arms. 

Yet that’s exactly what Andrew Johnson did on Christmas Day, 1868. He issued a blanket pardon for the “offence of treason” to every soldier who had fought for the Confederacy. Again, it was positioned as a strategy for healing the nation, but Union soldiers that had just finished taking Confederate musket balls to the gut weren’t too keen to put it all behind them that quickly.