Trump Pardons Mega-Donor Days After Contribution to GOP Candidate

President Donald Trump has pardoned yet another person who has made significant donations to his past campaigns and to Republican Party causes, casting more doubts upon the legitimacy of his use of the constitutionally unchecked power.

Adam Kidan, a key figure involved in the Jack Abramoff fraud and lobbying scandal, served a prison sentence of around two and a half years in the mid-2000s. A supporter of Republican causes, he has donated millions of dollars to GOP campaigns over the years — including over a quarter of a million dollars to Trump-backing political action committees in the 2024 election.

Kidan, who has also hosted fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, recently gave $2,600 to the campaign of incumbent Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pennsylvania), whose seat is considered one of the most competitive in the nation for the 2026 midterms. That donation occurred on June 30. On July 3, Trump issued his pardon of Kidan.

The pardon likely means that Kidan will not have to pay back much of the $21 million in restitution payments he was ordered to make following his sentencing. Kidan has thus far paid little of that amount (if any) despite living a life of luxury.

The pardon from Trump to Kidan follows other acts of clemency from the president during his second term. Indeed, the pattern is so noticeable that even some right-wing voices are calling it out.

“The problem isn’t that Trump is pardoning insider traders, campaign finance abusers, and child pornography possessors. The problem is the seedy but legal and lucrative market he has created of quid pro quo deals, insider enrichment, and abandonment of due process,” wrote Timothy P. Carney earlier this year in an op-ed for the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

Beyond allies who have donated to Trump or other political causes he supports, the president has also pardoned people who have shown immense loyalty to him in other ways — including the over 1,500 individuals who were charged or found guilty of taking part in the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election on his behalf at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Trump’s clemency orders have also flouted the traditional process that people requesting them typically have to go through. According to Reuters, 96 percent of clemencies Trump has given during his second term so far “have gone to recipients who didn’t fulfill longstanding DOJ guidelines for such requests” (for comparison, only 1 percent of clemencies issued under former President Joe Biden didn’t meet those guidelines).

Some groups are challenging Trump’s pardons. Earlier this year, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), noting that sizable donations to Trump have “become a well-documented tactic for those seeking to obtain benefits, including favorable treatment by others facing civil and criminal enforcement for illegal activity, from the Trump administration.”

CLC cited this fact to issue a grievance over a specific pardon of a Venezuelan billionaire that Trump granted after the billionaire’s daughter made large donations to a political action committee backing Trump, despite her lacking the financial means to do so.

“The sequence of events before and after the daughter’s contributions strongly suggest that she was an illegal ‘straw donor’ used by her father to secure political favor and, consequently, clemency from the Trump administration,” CLC said in a social media post after its complaint was filed.

Presidential pardons (or other acts of clemency) are absolute — the Constitution grants chief executives the power with no oversight from either of the other two branches of government. The only possible “check” against a president issuing questionable pardons is for Congress to deem such a move an impeachable offense, meaning it would have to be viewed by the legislative branch as advancing an act of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”