Tracking Presidential Pardons.
Clemency by day in office
Cumulative clemency from each inauguration, mass commutation days set aside
Each line is one administration’s individually signed grants, cumulative from its own inauguration. An eight-year presidency spans the whole width, a term still in office stops where the record does, and the vertical cliffs are single signing days.
Since 1989 the Justice Department has published 7,319 named grants of clemency and 54,137 named petitions refused. 11.9% of named outcomes were grants, mass commutation days included.
55% of every named grant fell on just two days.
A mass day is one on which an administration commuted more than 50 sentences at once: one presidential act covering a list, mostly Obama's clemency initiative and Biden's final-year batches. Setting those 5,710 grants aside compares individually signed clemency like for like; pardons are never set aside. The record list always counts every grant.
A pardon forgives a federal conviction and restores the rights it took, like sitting on a jury. A commutation cuts short a sentence still being served: the conviction stands and no rights come back.
The Constitution gives the president one power that, outside cases of impeachment, no one can appeal, veto or review: mercy for federal offenses. Clemency is the umbrella word for every use of it.
A pardon does not erase the conviction or overturn the verdict and, in the Justice Department’s own words, does not signify innocence. The department’s rules ask petitioners to wait five years after release, or after conviction where no prison term was imposed, before applying.
Someone released by commutation is still, on paper, a convicted person, which is why most commutations go to people serving long sentences.
A president can also forgive a whole class of people in one proclamation (the Vietnam draft cases, simple marijuana possession, January 6), remit a fine, or delay a punishment with a reprieve.
The power reaches federal offenses only, which is why a person can be pardoned and imprisoned at once.
The Justice Department route
Share of classifiable pardons filed with the department and past the five-year wait
A person applies to the Office of the Pardon Attorney; the application is docketed, the department’s word for filed; the file is reviewed and a recommendation goes to the White House.
The department’s own rule asks pardon seekers to wait five years after release, or after conviction where no prison term was imposed. None of that is in the Constitution: a president can pardon anyone, any time, and skipping the route is legal.
Filed through the department asks whether the grant began as a docketed petition. Docketed means filed, never that the department recommended the grant; whether it recommended any individual case is not public, and no number here claims it.
The match checks printed names or reviewed same-day name variants, relief type and a 45-day window, pairing each case with only one grant. Every docket share is a floor.
It recovers 98.7 to 100.0 percent of the department’s own published counts for the administrations with validation targets.
Pardons inside five years counts pardons signed within five years of sentencing. For recipients who served prison time the rule’s clock starts later, at release, so the flag is a floor.
Textbook grants are pardons that pass both tests at once: filed with the department and past the five year mark. Under most presidents, most classifiable pardons look like this.
Mass initiative cohorts were categorical by design. An individually signed grant with no matched petition cannot be assigned a route from the match alone. Sentencing dates were printed unevenly by era, which is why every row prints its own denominator.
What was forgiven
Offense families as a share of each president’s own grants, mass commutation days set aside
Families are read from the offense text the Justice Department printed, and they overlap: one case can be both a drug case and a firearms case, and every family it touches is counted.
Grants whose pages publish no offense text match no family and are absent from every row, a fact about how the record was kept, never a count of zero. The grants under each portrait are that president’s in the view shown.
Donations to the pardoning side
Share of checked recipients with a corroborated donation to the pardoning side, mass commutation days set aside
A checked recipient is one who could be searched against itemized records. The donation must reach the president’s own committees, party, inaugural fund or aligned super PAC and survive timing, offense and location corroboration. None of it is a verdict on any person.
Contributors are generally named only after aggregate giving exceeds $200 in the election cycle, or calendar year for PACs: a reporting floor, not a gift size.
Dollars are conservatively summed: a transfer routed through a joint fundraising committee counts once, one person is one unit, and money after a pardon is computed separately and never added here. The share axis runs to a printed maximum, never to 100.
These are bare name-match rates, not the corroborated rates above, and they run far higher because both populations carry people who merely share a donor’s name. That noise is roughly symmetric, so the difference between the two rates is the signal.
| Administration | Granted, name match | Denied, name match | Difference | 95% interval |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bush 41R | 11.7% | 8.0% | +3.7 | -3.7 to 11.0 (includes zero) |
| ClintonD | 16.3% | 10.0% | +6.3 | 2.7 to 9.8 |
| Bush 43R | 33.5% | 17.3% | +16.2 | 9.6 to 22.9 |
| ObamaD | 36.4% | 26.0% | +10.4 | 7.8 to 13.0 |
| Trump IR | 45.6% | 25.6% | +20.0 | 11.0 to 29.1 |
| BidenD | 34.5% | 32.5% | +2.0 | -0.1 to 4.1 (includes zero) |
| Trump IIR | 39.5% | 29.8% | +9.7 | 1.9 to 17.5 |
The 91 people named in the January 6 commutations and the 2020 election pardons are never pooled into the rows above; measured apart, 23 of 91 carry a corroborated record, on $111,461 given before the grant.
The same query runs for every administration, but the searchable surface is not equal across eras: aligned super PACs exist only from 2010, and Bush 41 and Clinton have no findable inaugural or joint fundraising entity. An older administration’s rate is a deeper floor.
A surname must match whole; a match is promoted only with a gift before the pardon, a plausible offense profile and a location signal. The Trump-Vance 2025 inaugural’s $247.7 million from 951 disclosed donations was recovered from the committee’s own filings.
Computed 2026-09-14 from federal clemency and contribution records.
Every named grant on the federal record
As the Justice Department published each one, newest first, every grant counted
Loading the clemency record.
The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney publishes every grant, every named denial (54,137 since 1989) and the docket of every petition filed. The Federal Election Commission’s itemized contribution records supply the donor side.
The Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Act filings report who paid a registered lobbyist to seek a pardon. Nothing here is drawn from a secondary account of any of these records.
Practical itemized contribution coverage begins in 1989, and so do the published denial lists. The Reagan era was searched and returns no corroborated matches, and the earlier pages publish no offense text, no sentence text and no denial lists to compare.
The 2,341 named grants from the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan administrations stay in the reserve rather than drawn as rows of absence.
Contributors are generally itemized only after aggregate giving exceeds $200 in the election cycle, or calendar year for PACs. A person with no match may have given quietly, or given nothing; the two cannot be told apart, and absence is never read as innocence.
Only the corroborated tier is ever shown beside a name. A bare name match is routinely a different person with the same name; the weaker matches are a review queue never printed against anyone.
Docketed is not recommended. A grant counts as matched when a petition under the same name or a reviewed variant, with the same relief, is marked granted within 45 days. Whether the department recommended any grant is not public.
The five-year figures are floors on uneven coverage: this page measures from sentencing, while the waiting rule’s clock runs from release. Every rate prints its own denominator.
A case group is a set of candidates, not a verified docket: grants made the same day, in the same district, for the same offense. Confirming co-defendants needs the court record.
Trump I’s comparison carries the widest interval: the department published only 180 named denials for that term, all from one day, which widens every estimate built against it.
Offense families and the state of conviction are derived from the free text the Justice Department printed, with the parsers the reserve itself uses. Families overlap, and a grant can match several.
The state is the venue where a case was tried: 6,979 of the 7,319 grants resolve to one of 51 jurisdictions, and the other 340 name a district this record cannot place, most of them military venues.
Clemency record computed 2026-10-03, severity profile 2026-10-03, institutional profile 2026-10-03.