Trump grants clemency to 2 of Hunter Biden’s ex-associates
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has granted clemency to a pair of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, both of whom accused former President Joe Biden’s son of improperly leveraging his father’s political power to broker overseas business relationships.
Last Tuesday, Trump issued a full pardon to Devon Archer, who was sentenced to more than a year in prison for defrauding a Native American tribal entity in 2022.
Later in the week, Trump commuted the 189-month sentence of Jason Galanis for his role in multiple fraudulent schemes.
Archer and Galanis charted a similar path to their presidential pardons: Both men brokered business ties with Hunter Biden, were later found guilty of unrelated fraud schemes, pleaded with the Biden administration for executive clemency, and, when rebuffed, publicly accused Hunter Biden of improperly trading on his family name to secure overseas business deals.
Galanis went a step further than Archer by retaining a high-powered Washington lawyer with close ties to the Trump political machine: Mark Paoletta, whom Trump recently tapped for general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Paoletta did not respond to a request for comment regarding Galanis’ commutation.
Last year, Galanis testified before the House Oversight Committee about the Biden family’s business arrangements from a jail cell in Alabama. He asserted that Joe Biden was more engaged in Hunter Biden’s business dealings than the former president publicly let on, and that “the entire value add of Hunter Biden to our business was his family name and his access to his father, Vice President Joe Biden.”
Joe Biden has forcefully denied any wrongdoing and Republicans were unable to find evidence that he used his political perch to support his son’s businesses. A House impeachment inquiry concluded last August without any articles of impeachment drawn up.
Matthew Schwartz, an attorney for Archer, told ABC News that “the American jury system is an amazing thing, but as the trial judge held in finding serious questions about Devon Archer’s innocence, sometimes juries get it wrong.”
Schwartz said that Trump’s “pardon corrects a serious injustice, and finally allows an innocent man to be free of the threat of misguided prosecution. Mr. Archer is deeply appreciative of the President.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump signed four executive orders on Monday that reverse several Biden administration initiatives related to the military and deliver on promises he made on the campaign trail.
Trump signed the orders while onboard Air Force One, White House staff secretary Will Scharf told reporters.
“First is an executive order, as he alluded to in his speech earlier, reinstating members of the military who were terminated or forced to separate because of the vaccine mandates. The second item was an executive order establishing a process to develop what we’re calling an American Iron Dome; a comprehensive missile defense shield to land the American homeland,” Scharf said.
“The third executive order that President Trump signed relates to eliminating gender radicalism in the military, and the fourth is about eliminating DEI set asides and DEI offices within the military,” Scharf added.
In addition those items, Trump signed a proclamation commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Reinstating military members who refused vaccinations
Trump signed an order directing the secretary of defense to “reinstate service members who were dismissed for refusing the COVID vaccine, with full back pay and benefits,” according to the White House.
The fact sheet on the order estimates that more than 8,000 troops were discharged between 2021 and 2023 following the Biden administration’s policy requiring vaccinations for service members. The order adds that the discharged military personnel will “receive their former rank.”
In August 2021, then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for all military personnel. The fact sheet said that the decision was made in “spite of the scientific evidence,” and added that it led to the discharge “healthy service members — many of whom had natural immunity and dedicated their entire lives to serving our country.”
The White House also says the vaccine mandate had a “chilling effect on recruitment,” noting that the Department of Defense fell 41,000 recruits short of its fiscal year 2023 recruiting goals.
Service members were given the opportunity to rejoin the military in 2023 when the vaccine mandate was rescinded, but the White House fact sheet said that only 43 service members elected to do that. The issue of full back pay is complex and would likely require congressional approval.
The order follows one of Trump’s promises from his speech on Inauguration Day, when he said he would make this move shortly after he was sworn in.
Transgender service members
Trump signed an order directing the Department of Defense to update its guidance “regarding trans-identifying medical standards for military service and to rescind guidance inconsistent with military readiness.”
The order will require DOD to update all medical standards “to ensure they prioritize readiness and lethality.”
The order will also end the use of pronouns in the Department of Defense and will also prohibit males from “sharing sleeping, changing, or bathing in facilities designated for females.”
Last week, Trump revoked a Biden administration order allowing transgender people to serve in the military. In 2016, the Pentagon under then-President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on transgender people serving in the armed forces. But in 2017, Trump announced on what was then Twitter that transgender service members would no longer be able to serve openly in the armed forces, citing concerns over costs and readiness. The policy was implemented in 2019 and required transgender service members to serve in line with their biological sex unless they had already successfully transitioned or were grandfathered in under the Obama-era policy.
In 2021, the Trump policy was reversed under the Biden administration, allowing transgender service members to again serve openly and access related medical care.
“This change to the standards meant that men and women could join the military for the express purpose of transitioning, be nondeployable for a year, and take life-altering hormone therapy that would mean they would be nondeployable unless the military could guarantee the supply of medication,” now-Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said of the changes under Biden in one of his books.
Iron Dome
Trump has now officially begun the process of creating “the Iron Dome for America,” a nod to the Israeli missile defense system.
The order “directs implementation of a next generation missile defense shield for the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next generation aerial attacks,” according to a fact sheet obtained by ABC News.
There are very few details about how this type of a system would be developed. There are no details in the fact sheet on a timeline for creating such a system, nor any mention of cost to construct it.
The order follows through on a pledge Trump made a number of times on the campaign trail.
“Americans deserve an Iron Dome and that’s what we’re gonna have we’re gonna have an Iron Dome,” Trump said during an New Hampshire rally in October 2023.
As ABC has previously reported, experts say replicating an Iron Dome system for the U.S. wouldn’t make much sense, given the U.S. has allies to the north and south, and oceans on either side.
Banning DEI
Another order that Trump signed takes aim at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs at the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. The order will ban the use of “discriminatory race- or sex-based preferences,” according to a fact sheet about the move.
The order directs Hegseth to internally review cases of “race- or sex-based discrimination” based on past DEI policies and requires DOD and DHS to review curriculum to “eliminate radical DEI and gender ideologies.”
The fact sheet adds that Trump is committed to a merit-based system with “sex-neutral policies and colorblind recruitment, promotion, and retention.” It blamed the so-called “‘woke’ assault” for the military’s flagging recruitment numbers.
This is just the latest of actions the Trump administration has taken to shut down DEI programs throughout the federal government and among federal contractors and to put pressure on private entities to end similar programs.
Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in an exclusive interview on ABC News’ “This Week” Sunday that tech billionaires’ planned attendance at Monday’s inauguration is a sign of their “official surrender” to President-elect Donald Trump.
“As soon as [Mark] Zuckerberg said, ‘I’ve been invited. I’m going,’ the floodgates opened up and they were all there knocking, trying to be supplicants. So I look at this and I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs, he broke them and they surrendered,” Bannon told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
Meta’s Zuckerberg and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos are among the tech executives set to appear at the inauguration, alongside close Trump ally Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Meta and Amazon are just two of the tech giants who have given money to President-Elect Trump’s inaugural fund.
In the wake of Trump’s victory in November a handful of tech’s most powerful executives have made trips to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida for meetings with the president-elect. But despite the show of support, Bannon remains skeptical of their allegiance to Trump and the MAGA movement, specifically citing Zuckerberg’s recent alignment with the right.
“Zuckerberg’s, you know, road to Damascus came a little late. It was after the Fifth of November,” Bannon told Karl. “It’s very, you know, now wants to be a bro. He Kung Fu fights. He’s going to UFC. He’s got his hair done differently. He’s, he’s cut. That doesn’t hack it with me. That guy will flip on President Trump and he’ll flip on us in the second. When it’s convenient for him. He will flip.”
Meta declined to comment on Bannon’s remarks.
Bannon, a stalwart of the MAGA movement and major influence in Trump’s sphere during the early days of his first administration, has been one of the strongest supporters of the 45th president throughout his political career.
He frequently echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and served four months in prison after defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
During his interview with Karl, Bannon insisted that Trump’s message during Monday’s inaugural address will be less dark than the first time around.
“I think he’s going to try to unify the country around a course of action that we have to take, I think he’ll lay out the challenges, and he’ll lay out the beginning in some sort of 65-, 60,000-foot level — what his policies and proposals are. But I think it’ll all be about unifying the country and going forward together.”
Bannon cited the broad coalition that led to Trump’s return to the White House as a reason for the shift in tone.
“It’s a whole ecosystem … You have working-class African Americans. You have South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, people are now prepared not just to stop voting for Democrats, but to vote for him.”
Bannon, told Karl that Trump has the ability to hold that wide-ranging coalition together like few other figures in American history.
“If you had to have somebody to do it, he’s the guy to do it,” Bannon said. “That’s why he is at the level of Washington and Lincoln.”
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge on Wednesday entered an emergency order barring the Trump administration from implementing major parts of its executive order that sought to target the law firm Perkins Coie over its representation of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
District Judge Beryl Howell, ruling from the bench, found that attorneys for Perkins Coie had met the bar for her to enter a temporary restraining order — determining they would suffer immediate and irreparable harm if provisions of the order targeting the law firm’s work with government contractors as well as restrictions on their attorney’s access to government buildings were implemented.
In an extraordinary hearing in which the Justice Department put forward Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, to present its arguments, Howell repeatedly questioned the logic and legality surrounding the order — which she said had extraordinary breadth and whose language was unlike any other order she’d ever read.
“Regardless of whether the President dislikes the firm’s clients … issuing an executive order targeting the firm based on the President’s dislike of the political positions of the firm’s clients, or the firm’s litigation positions is retaliatory and runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protection,” Howell said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
