Lawyer Liz Oyer on Trump’s Corrupt Pardons

The Al Franken Podcast

Government, Progressive, Politics, Senate, Liberal, Senator, Minnesota, Franken, News, Saturday Night Live, Comedy, Snl

4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Donald Trump's second term, we've seen a flurry of pardons and commutations. Of course, every President is granted the pardon power, but with this administration, pardons often seem to have a price tag. We're joined by Liz Oyer, former US pardon attorney (appointed by Biden and fired by Trump), to discuss some of the shadier pardons doled out during Trump's second term (so far).

Oyer lays out how several of Trump’s pardons are motivated by money, loyalty, and retribution. Of course, we discuss the blanket pardon of the January 6th rioters, but we also examine the pardon of cryptocurrency-crook Changpeng Zhao, who Oyer says "might be the most corrupt pardon in American history."

We dig into Trump's current pardon attorney, Ed Martin, a political operative who believes in "No MAGA left behind." Even Republicans found him too extreme to be a US Attorney, so Trump put him in charge of pardons and commutations.

Plus, we get Oyer's unfiltered opinion of the Ghislane Maxwell/Jeffrey Epstein saga AND Hunter Biden's pardon at the end of Joe Biden's term.

READ Liz Oyer's Substack at https://www.lawyeroyer.com/

Check out our sponsor Ollie for premium dog food! Go to https://www.ollie.com/franken and use code FRANKEN to get 60% off your first box.

Check out our sponsor OneSkin for all of your skincare needs! Go to https://www.oneskin.co/FRANKEN and use code FRANKEN to get 15% off of your order.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, everybody. We've got a great one today, you know, for a change.
0:08.6	Liz Oyer, who was the partner attorney during the Biden administration, joins us to talk about
0:14.7	the pardons that Trump has been giving out, but not for free necessarily.
0:19.7	Turns out that he's departed from the practice that presidents have been using since
0:25.4	George Washington, pardon those who fought in the Whiskey Rebellion, Trump's been giving them
0:30.8	to supporters and has been profiting from them.
0:34.6	But first, the news of the week earlier this week, the Coast Guard said it would no longer
0:42.5	classify the swastika as hate speech, but it reversed itself. But why the Coast Guard is classifying
0:51.8	hate speech? Well, evidently, if a ship is within three miles of our coast
0:57.2	and is flying a flag with a swastika or a noose,
1:01.8	the Coast Guard can fire on it.
1:05.5	The Coast Guard is also in charge of defining what is or isn't pornography.
1:13.7	Okay, the real news. President Trump hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House this past week, first at a press
1:20.4	conference in the Oval Office. MBS is, of course, a brutal dictator, but he does a lot of
1:27.3	business with the Trump Organization,
1:30.2	which has been developing a bunch of extremely lucrative projects in his country.
1:35.7	And in exchange, Trump is selling the Saudis F-35 jets and providing them access to the most advanced AI chips.
1:49.6	Things at the press conference turned testy when an ABC reporter asked about the murder,
2:03.8	Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, who in 2018 was strangled at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by Saudi agents and then dismembered with a bone saw.
2:11.5	The last few minutes of Keshoggi's life were recorded on the consulate's audio tape and transcribed, but his body was disposed of and never found.
2:16.7	U.S. intelligence concluded that MBS had ordered the murder.
2:21.4	So when the reporter asked about it, Trump got very angry at her and lied, saying that the U.S.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 1 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Al Franken Podcast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Al Franken Podcast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.