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A former county sheriff, a former Arkansas state senator, a former Las Vegas councilwoman - all three are convicted on federal corruption charges, and all three are among more than a dozen former elected officials and their associates who have received pardons from President Trump in his second term. Legal experts say that's but one way the Trump administration has undermined the fight against public corruption. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas reports.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: In October of 2024, a federal jury needed just two hours to return a guilty verdict against former Las Vegas Councilwoman Michele Fiore on conspiracy and wire fraud charges. The Republican was convicted of pocketing some $70,000 of donations meant for memorials to honor police officers killed in the line of duty and spending the money instead on cosmetic surgery, rent and her daughter's wedding. But then just weeks before she was scheduled to be sentenced in May 2025...
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Well, this is the executive grant of clemency signed by President Donald Trump letting Michele Fiore off the hook.
LUCAS: Fiore is one of at least 15 former elected officials or their coconspirators convicted of or charged with corruption who have received pardons from President Trump since the start of his second term.
DAN GREENBERG: I think that there are all sorts of things that the administration has done that suggest an increasingly casual perspective on public corruption.
LUCAS: Dan Greenberg is a senior legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
GREENBERG: I think that pardons are an important piece of that puzzle.
LUCAS: Greenberg says every president occasionally makes mistakes in the pardon process, including President Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Greenberg likens such mistakes to a hailstone coming out of a clear blue sky. But the pardons under Trump, he says, are more like a hailstorm.
GREENBERG: There's just a pile of pardons that, I think, appear to any reasonable person to be not just highly questionable, but just obviously disturbing.
LUCAS: There's Trump's pardon for a Virginia sheriff who was convicted of taking $75,000 in bribes in exchange for appointing businessmen as deputies. There's the pardon for a former speaker of the Tennessee State House and his aide, who were convicted of a kickback scheme with taxpayer-funded mailer services. A Trump administration official helping lead the pardon process, Ed Martin, posted on social media last year, quote, "no MAGA left behind," end quote. In total, more than half of the former elected officials to receive pardons from Trump are Republicans. Again, Greenberg.
GREENBERG: I have to think that it sends a message that maybe you're a little more likely to get off scot-free as long as you're one of the president's supporters. And that is, of course, immensely troubling.
LUCAS: In a statement to NPR, the White House defended Trump's pardons and said the only pardons anyone should criticize are those issued by President Biden. Presidential clemency is just one aspect of what legal observers say has been the Trump administration's pullback from efforts to combat public corruption. The administration also has decimated the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, a specialized unit that was created after Watergate to root out and prosecute cases of public corruption as well as election crimes.
JOHN KELLER: That has been what the section has done, investigate and prosecute sensitive high-level cases, especially involving members of Congress or high-level officials in the executive branch as well as state and local officials, mayors, governors, state representatives.
LUCAS: That's John Keller. He worked in the Public Integrity Section for more than a decade. He was acting chief when he resigned in February 2025 after the Trump Justice Department leadership directed him to dismiss a corruption case against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Blowback over the Adams case prompted a wave of resignations and marked the start of the Public Integrity Section's dismantling. The unit has dropped from 40 or so full-time prosecutors when Trump returned to office in January 2025 down to just two today, according to current and former officials.
Cases that were already opened before the change in administration have been allowed to proceed, but many have been declined or handed off to U.S. attorney's offices, where they are often dropped. As a result, the number of investigations and charged cases the section is handling has plummeted from around 200 to now around 20. What does the pullback by the Justice Department mean for public corruption? Again, Keller.
KELLER: If you don't have enforcement, what happens over time is that the kind of corroding effect of corruption leads to just a broken system of government where public officials are serving themselves first and the public second.
LUCAS: Public corruption cases are notoriously complex. They are time and resource intensive. Big-city U.S. attorney offices, like those in New York, Chicago and LA, have the means to do them on their own. It's the smaller states and more rural areas that will be hit hardest by the demise of the Public Integrity Section. And that's because in those places, the unit often stepped in to hold corrupt state and local officials to account.
Keller says these were some of the units most impactful cases. He points to the prosecution of a former small-town Pennsylvania police officer who was convicted of bribery and other crimes, including using his position to obtain sex from two women in exchange for favors in prosecutions.
KELLER: And because Public Integrity no longer exists, those cases aren't being done, and there's no one to step into the shoes of the Public Integrity Section to do those cases.
LUCAS: The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. The dismantling of the Public Integrity Section, the presidential pardons for former elected officials, these are just pieces of a whole. If you pull back and look at the administration's actions on the public corruption front in their entirety, Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault says the Trump administration appears indifferent, at best, to tackling the problem.
RICHARD BRIFFAULT: They're acting as if corruption is simply not an issue and people who were convicted of corruption were unfairly treated.
LUCAS: In other words, he says, there's kind of a disdain for the very idea that corruption is a problem.
Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington.
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