Today, President Trump announced he was pardoning Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Quayar and his wife,

who were indicted last year on bribery and money laundering charges.

They were alleged to have accepted roughly $600,000 in bribes and entities connected to

Azerbaijan. The president said Quayar was targeted for criticizing President Biden's border

policies.

As White House correspondent, Liz Landers, reports it's the latest in a series of controversial pardons the president has signed.

To help explain some of these controversial pardons were joined by Liz Oyer.

She served as the Department of Justice pardon attorney in the Biden administration.

Liz, thank you so much

for joining News Hour. Let's start with this news about the Democratic congressman who was pardoned today,

Henry Quayar. How does this fit into a larger pattern that we've seen from President Trump

pardoning elected officials? Donald Trump has pardoned historic numbers of elected officials.

Typically, crimes involving public corruption are taken very seriously, and corrupt public

officials are rarely considered for presidential pardons because of the betrayal of public trust

that's involved in the underlying crimes.

In this case, Donald Trump is really sort of normalizing public corruption by liberally

pardoning corrupt public officials who are charged with offenses that involve abusing their

political offices to enrich themselves.

That's the case with this congressman.

Notably, this congressman had not yet stood trial for these charges.

So, you know, Trump is saying that this

was an unfair prosecution in some way by the Biden administration. If that is the case, we could

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