All the President’s Pardons
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son and President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to set free people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, bring back memories of what’s considered the most controversial pardon ever: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford’s pardon of the former president in 1974 sparked outrage among politicians and the American people.
“I had a visceral feeling that the public animosity to Mr. Nixon was so great that there would be a lack of understanding, and the truth is that's the way it turned out,” Ford said in an interview broadcast for the first time on Reveal. “The public and many leaders, including dear friends, didn’t understand it at the time.”
This week on Reveal, we look at the politics of pardons and discover that beyond those that make headlines, there is a backlog of thousands of people who’ve waited years—even decades—for presidents to make a decision about their petitions for clemency.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2019.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, hey, it's Al and for nearly four years, |
| 0:04.2 | Reveal reporter Will Evans has pushed through layers of secrecy and hype |
| 0:09.2 | to find out what's really going on in Amazon. |
| 0:12.3 | After exposing its warehouse safety crisis, |
| 0:14.8 | and Amazon's attempt to hide it, |
| 0:17.0 | Will showed how Amazon failed to protect the data of its customers and sellers. |
| 0:22.5 | And then he looked at Amazon's climate impact |
| 0:25.2 | and found it was drastically undercounting its carbon footprint. |
| 0:29.6 | The deeper the truth is buried, the harder will dig to find it. |
| 0:34.0 | But we need your support to continue this work in 2023. |
| 0:38.0 | Please donate to support journalism like this, journalism that perseveres. |
| 0:43.4 | Just go to revealnews.org slash 2023. |
| 0:46.7 | Again, thank you. That's revealnews.org slash 2023. |
| 0:51.4 | And thanks. From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. |
| 1:07.6 | I'm Al Etzane. |
| 1:09.1 | The House select committee's investigation into the January 6 attack on the capital continues. |
| 1:14.9 | And so do the hearings. |
| 1:16.4 | Last month's ended with stunning testimony about what supporters of Donald Trump did behind the scenes |
| 1:22.7 | to try and overturn the 2020 election. |
| 1:25.6 | Some of them apparently knew they were breaking the law. |
| 1:29.0 | Ms. Hutchinson, did Rudy Giuliani ever suggest that he was interested in receiving a presidential pardon related to January 6? |
| 1:37.5 | He did. |
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