CBS Goes After Trump’s Pardon Program While Missing the Real Story

So 60 Minutes is taking aim at Trump’s pardon record, and they’re rolling out the hidden cameras like this is some groundbreaking exposé. The segment drops Sunday, and if the teaser tells us anything, it’s that CBS thinks they’ve caught lightning in a bottle. They’re calling it “The Pardon Economy,” which already tells you everything about their frame of mind.

Here’s what we know. Ed Martin, who just left his post as United States pardon attorney after serving more than a year under Trump, sat down with Lesley Stahl for what sounds like an extensive interview. Martin confirmed to The Daily Wire that he participated, and honestly, good for him. When the mainstream media comes knocking with their narrative already half-written, sometimes you’ve got to walk right into the room and set the record straight yourself.

The hook for CBS appears to be rapper Boosie Badazz, who claims far-right lobbyists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman promised to secure him a pardon from Trump for $600,000. The contract, littered with typos apparently, outlined how these two would craft a compelling narrative for his pardon petition. Wohl and Burkman say the rapper never signed it. The whole thing smells like the kind of shady freelance hustle that exists in every corner of Washington, not some systematic corruption emanating from the White House.

But let’s step back. You know what gets lost in all this breathless reporting about supposed pay-for-play schemes? The actual substance of what Trump accomplished with presidential pardons. The man issued more than 1,500 pardons in his second term. That’s not a typo. Fifteen hundred acts of clemency.

Most presidents treat the pardon power like some ceremonial relic they dust off in December of their final year. They grant clemency in the dark of night as they’re packing boxes and heading for the exit. Trump flipped that script entirely. He used pardons the way the Founders intended them to be used, as a check on an often merciless criminal justice system.

Martin gets this. In his interview comments, he emphasized that Trump views pardons through the lens of mercy, not justice. “A pardon is not about justice,” Martin said. “It’s mercy.” That’s a critical distinction that our media class refuses to understand because it requires acknowledging that Trump operated from a coherent moral framework.

In an April piece for Chronicles, Martin grounded Trump’s approach in Christian principles of forgiveness. He dubbed 2025 the Year of Trump Mercy, cataloging how the president pardoned cops, freed rehabilitated prisoners, and forgave debts. These weren’t midnight deals cut with lobbyists. These were deliberate acts that Trump paired with legislative achievements like the First Step Act, which he signed back in 2018 to reduce prison sentences.

The First Step Act was bipartisan, by the way. Trump got Democrats and Republicans to agree on criminal justice reform, then he actually followed through by using his executive power to extend that same spirit of redemption to individuals the system had chewed up and spit out.

Now CBS wants us focused on a couple of hustlers who may or may not have scammed a rapper. Fine. Let’s investigate that. But don’t pretend that’s the story of Trump’s pardon record. The real story is that a president finally treated the pardon power as something more than a political bargaining chip or legacy builder.

Martin told The Daily Wire he was confident going into the 60 Minutes interview because he knows how the system worked under Trump. “I’m the guy who knows how this worked,” he said. “I know what President Trump thinks and how it was.” That confidence comes from someone who watched the process from the inside and saw it operate with intention, not corruption.

Whatever CBS captured on their hidden cameras, we’ll see Sunday. Maybe they’ve got something genuinely damning. More likely, they’ve got peripheral actors doing what peripheral actors always do in Washington, trying to cash in on proximity to power. That’s not a Trump problem. That’s a swamp problem, and it’s existed long before Trump showed up and will persist long after he’s gone.

The pardon power is vast and largely immune from judicial review for good reason. The Founders understood that rigid justice without the possibility of mercy creates tyranny. Trump understood it too, which is why he granted clemency early and often instead of waiting for some politically convenient moment when the cameras weren’t watching.

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