Trump pardons convicted Tennessee lawmaker once represented by the White House counsel
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(WASHINGTON) — A former Tennessee lawmaker who was once represented by White House Counsel David Warrington said he received a pardon from President Donald Trump after pleading guilty to an illegal campaign finance scheme in 2022.
The White House has not said anything publicly about former Sen. Brian Kelsey’s pardon, but sources familiar with the matter told ABC News that Trump signed the pardon paperwork on Tuesday.
The White House counsel’s office normally reviews presidential pardons, and it was not immediately clear if Warrington recused himself from his former client’s pardon.
Warrington was recused from the Kelsey matter and was not involved in any way, a White House official told ABC News.
Kelsey was two weeks into his 21-month prison sentence when he received the pardon. Bureau of Prisons records reflected that Kelsey was no longer in custody at FCI Ashland as of Tuesday.
According to federal prosecutors, Kelsey illegally funneled tens of thousands of dollars from his state campaign committee to a federal committee to fund his failed 2016 congressional campaign. He originally pleaded guilty to one felony before later withdrawing his plea while he was represented by Warrington.
“Defendant Brian Kelsey entered his plea agreement hastily with an unsure heart and confused mind,” Warrington wrote in a court filing, arguing Kelsey was confused when he decided to plead guilty after his father died and his wife gave birth to twins.
“The fog and sleep deprivation of taking care of his newborns while dealing with everything else in his life led to his confused mind. Once his mind began clearing, Mr. Kelsey acted quickly to seek to withdraw his plea,” he wrote.
But U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw denied the request, finding that Kelsey – who attended law school and practiced law – understood his actions when he initially pleaded guilty. The Supreme Court denied his request to hear his case on in the summer of 2024. He was eventually sentenced to 21 months in prison, though he was allowed to delay serving his sentence while his appeal played out.
Kelsey reported to his minimum-security prison on Feb. 24, spending about two weeks behind bars before Trump issued his pardon. “Praise the Lord most high! May God bless America, despite the prosecutorial sins it committed against me, President Trump, and others the past four years. And God bless Donald J. Trump for Making America Great Again!” Kelsey wrote on social media.
(WASHINGTON) — Outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who for four years has been a target for Republican criticism, said that national tragedies should not be used for “political disagreements.”
“There are people that lobby vitriol in public, and have relationships in private, that are quite inconsistent with the vitriol,” he told ABC News in an exit interview from his office at DHS headquarters in Washington.
“Times of tragedy should drive unity of effort and unity of care, whether that be the hurricanes and tornadoes of Helene and Milton, or whether that be the wildfires in California, or whether that be the tragic death of 14 individuals on in the early morning hours of January 1, and not be ammunition for political disagreement,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to a place where we can disagree and we can unify when the American people need it.”
He said his hope is that “we can disagree with civility and mutual respect.”
Mayorkas’ time as DHS secretary saw one crisis after another, including big increases in migrants crossing the southern border illegally to an unprecedented threat environment to an evolving cybersecurity landscape.
Through it all, he said remains proud of the department’s work.
“I am on the ground with the people of this department in in times of success, in times of tragedy,” Mayorkas said.
He personally traveled to funerals for Border Patrol agents who died in the line of duty, recalling how at one he was moved by the outpouring of honor and respect.
“… along the highway in Texas,” he said, “one saw police officers, firefighters, citizens standing outside of their cars at bus stops all along the multi-mile stretch of highway, saluting the car and the motorcade. Incredibly powerful message of the impact of our work and the impact of people doing the work on the broader community.”
For Mayorkas, who spent 11 years working at DHS, serving as secretary was the honor of a lifetime.
“I love this job. I love the mission. I love the people who perform it, and it’s going to be very hard to leave,” he said.
Regrets, he said, are “unproductive.”
“If I said no, there’s nothing we could have done better, I would be basically saying that we achieved perfection, and that obviously is not the case,” he said. “In any large, multifaceted organization such as an administration, there are disagreements over policy and practice, and decisions are made, and then we all march as one in executing.”
He maintained he is leaving DHS in better shape than how he found it, and, he insists, that starts with the border.
“We have built and delivered a model where the border is more secure now than it was in 2019 and we have safe, lawful and orderly pathways that have delivered humanitarian relief to people in need and cutting out the smugglers, we have modernized the system of border security and humanitarian relief in unprecedented ways,” he says of the department’s work, noting the border has seen the lowest daily average of migrants in December since July 2020.
Mayorkas said that the incoming Trump administration’s critical rhetoric “misses everything that we have tried to do, and I view it as rhetoric that is a political and not substantive.”
“For example, they speak of focusing on public safety and national security threats when they talk about mass deportations,” he said. “Well, they speak of it as something new, when in fact, that is a continuation of precisely what we’ve done.”
Mayorkas also said that the incoming administration will have access to “tools at their disposal that were not tools that we had at our disposal,” meaning potentially increased funding from Congress.
In June 2024, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive actions on the border, that DHS says curbed illegal immigration by nearly 55%.
When asked by ABC News why the Biden administration didn’t act sooner to take the actions that President Joe Biden ordered in June 2024, during the presidential campaign, he said there was “bipartisan pressure” to not lift the order established by then-President Donald Trump to curb migrants at the border due to a public health emergency, known as Title 42.
“Everyone expected that when we lifted it, calamity would ensue, 18,000 encounters, 20,000 encounters in a day, from on both sides of the aisle and that calamity did not occur,” he said. “And then we turned to Congress for funding, more ICE officers, more Border Patrol agents, more Office of Field Operations personnel, more immigration judges denied. We went to Congress again, again, denied. We entered the bipartisan Senate negotiations, mission accomplished, political torpedo, no legislative reform,” he said, noting how how then-candidate Donald Trump told congressional Republicans to block the measure. “And then the president acted,” he said of President Biden.
Mayorkas also became the first Cabinet-level secretary to be impeached because, after House Republicans claimed his failed to handle the immigration issue.
“It should never have occurred. And I wish that the members of Congress had followed the law, and if they had, it would not have occurred,” he said. “And it’s unfortunate when the law is overridden by politics.”
He also said the country is in a “heightened threat environment,” and to look no further than what happened on January 1st in New Orleans as an example.
Mayorkas said that the department under his watch is helping state and local governments take a public health approach to stopping mass attacks.
“If one takes a look at the assailant in Buffalo, the assailant in Uvalde, Texas, the assailant at the July 4 parade outside, in a suburb outside of Chicago, those three assailants exhibited signs manifested externally, signs of radicalizing to violence for different reasons,” he said, adding if someone notices them, the assailant can get help.
Mayorkas said he also has focused on positioning DHS to take on the challenge posed by artificial intelligence by personally recruiting people to come work on the issue and setting up the AI Safety Board — a collection of private and public partners who help shape the department’s AI policy.
The DHS secretary oversees 22 agencies with more than 260,000 employees – on issues ranging from the border to federal disaster management to the Secret Service.
He said that he wishes he could stay on to see reforms being made to the Secret Service after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July, which he described as an agency “failure.”
“Let me be clear, I consider the Secret Service to be the best protective service in the world. Success is when nothing occurs, and there are countless examples of that success,” he said.
Mayorkas, who said he plans to stay on the job until Monday at noon, told ABC News he has had “substantive and very productive and very collegial” conversations with Trump’s pick to be the new DHS secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump shook hands with his former Vice President Mike Pence and spoke extensively with former President Barack Obama during the state funeral for late President Jimmy Carter on Thursday.
All five living U.S. presidents attended Carter’s service at Washington National Cathedral. Carter, the nation’s 39th president, died in late December at the age of 100.
Trump was the first of the presidents to arrive and sit in the second row, joined by his wife Melania Trump.
As he took his seat, Pence stood and the two men shook hands. It was a notable exchange as they have not interacted publicly in four years, after Pence broke with Trump by refusing his demands to unilaterally reject the 2020 election results.
Pence later launched his own campaign for the Republican nomination, though he dropped out before primary voting began. Pence also declined to endorse Trump for president.
Trump was seated next to Obama at the church. Before the program began, they were seen talking to one another and smiling in an extended conversation. Former first lady Michelle Obama was not in attendance.
Also in the second row were former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, as well as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.
After they were all seated, Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff arrived and took their places in the front row.
Harris, who faced Trump in the 2024 election and lost, did not greet Trump but at one point looked back as Obama and Trump were chatting with one another.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden joined Harris and Emhoff in the front row. Biden will deliver the eulogy for Carter.
Other high-profile figures spotted at Carter’s funeral were former Vice President Al Gore, Biden’s son Hunter Biden and former Vice President Dan Quayle.
(WASHINGTON) — Delivering the Democrat response to President Trump’s joint address to Congress, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan accused him of having no credible plan to deal with high grocery and home prices.
But she opened her remarks with an emphasis on unity.
“My dad was a lifelong Republican, my mom a lifelong Democrat. But it was never a big deal because we had shared values that were bigger than any one party,” Slotkin said.
Speaking from Wyandotte, Michigan, Slotkin began by focusing on kitchen table issues, such as the rising costs of consumer goods that helped her to win her competitive Senate race in Michigan even as Trump carried her state.
“Americans made it clear that prices are too high, and that the government needs to be more responsive to their needs,” Slotkin said. “America wants change, but there’s a responsible way to make change and a reckless way, and we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country and as a democracy.”
“Grocery and home prices are going up, not down. And he hasn’t laid out a credible plan to deal with either of those.” she said. “His tariffs on allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber and cars and start a trade war that will hurt manufacturing and farmers. Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more, because the math on his proposals doesn’t work without going after your health care. Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down,” she said.
“And if he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession,’ she added.
“In order to pay for his plan, he could very well come after your retirement. The Social Security, Medicare and VA benefits you worked your whole life to earn,” she said.
She warned about Elon Musk’s power in the government, criticizing the Department of Government Efficiency and Trump for what she called the “mindless” mass firings of federal workers, only to hire some of them back days later.
“The president claims he won’t. But Elon Musk just called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. While we’re on the subject of Elon Musk, is there anyone in America who is comfortable with him and his gang of 20 year olds using their own computer servers to poke through your tax returns, your health information, and your bank accounts?” she asked.
Slotkin also commented on Trump’s heated exchange with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last week, saying former President Ronald Reagan “must be rolling in his grave” after the near-screaming match. She also argued that Trump’s approach that day speaks to his “whole approach to the world.”
“In closing, we all know that our country is going through something right now. We’re not sure what the next day is going to hold. Let alone the next decade,” she said.” But this isn’t the first time we’ve experienced significant and tumultuous change as a country. I’m a student of history, and we’ve gone through periods of political instability before, and ultimately we’ve chosen to keep changing this country for the better.”
America gets through such moments thanks to “engaged citizens and principled leaders,” she said.
“Hold your elected officials, including me, accountable,” she said. “Watch how they’re voting. Go to town halls and demand they take action. That’s as American as apple pie.”
