President Donald Trump has granted widespread clemency to the people involved in his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, even if they were not accused of a crime, a Justice Department official announced Sunday. The announcement follows months of revelations about the overreach of the Biden administration’s investigation into the 2020 election, as well as Biden’s issuance of similar preemptive pardons in January of this year.

The proclamation, titled “Granting Pardons for Certain Offenses Related to the 2020 Election,” confers “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens” for any activities related to “any slate or proposed slate of Presidential electors … in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election,” or “efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

The number of those pardoned under the proclamation “includes but is not limited to” 77 people mentioned by name in the document. This list included those who served on the alternate slates of electors, President Trump’s lawyers who challenged state election results in court, and even former Trump administration officials like former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

The proclamation protects those named — and, presumably, others who are not named — from hypothetical prosecution by a future Democratic administration seeking to pick up where the Biden administration left off.

This year, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has exposed how the Biden administration’s “Arctic Frost” investigation, led by prosecutor Jack Smith, evolved into an “indiscriminate election case” against Republicans, targeting “at least 430 named Republican individuals and entities,” at Grassley’s most recent accounting.

The president’s pardon power extends only to federal crimes, meaning that Trump lacks the ability to shield individuals from state-level prosecutions regarding the 2020 election. Some of the named individuals, including Rudy Giuliani and Jeffrey Clark, have faced disbarment or other penalties in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere over their efforts to challenge the 2020 election.

Strangely, the pardon proclamation did not immediately appear on either the Justice Department’s comprehensive list of “Clemency Grants by President Donald J. Trump (2025-Present)” or the repository of presidential proclamations on the White House’s own website. The Justice Department shows no pardons after November 7, although the web page was last updated on Monday, while the White House shows two presidential proclamations issued Monday. Attempts to search for the pre-emptive pardons (recognizing the possibility that the undated pardon proclamation was issued at an earlier date) turned up no results.

As a result, the only place where Trump’s pre-emptive pardons for 2020 election activities have been announced is on social media. U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin published images of the document on X, first on his private account at 10:54 p.m. on Sunday, then on his official DOJ account at 2:01 a.m. on Monday morning.

TWS contacted the U.S. Department of Justice and the White House to verify the legitimacy of the proclamation. The Justice Department did not respond (on Veterans’ Day during a government shutdown), but the White House did.

“These great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement provided to TWS. “Getting prosecuted for challenging results is something that happens in communist Venezuela, not the United States of America, and President Trump is putting an end to the Biden Regime’s communist tactics once and for all.”

The press office did not elaborate further on the legitimacy of the proclamation.

The pardon proclamation follows a precedent set by President Joe Biden himself when he pre-emptively pardoned his family members, persons associated with the January 6 investigation, General Mark Milley, and Dr. Anthony Fauci for any federal crimes, thus shielding them against any prosecution by the incoming Trump administration.

“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” Biden declared at the time.

FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter disagreed. “While these pardons provide Fauci, Milley, et. al., amnesty from past crimes, the American people will see this as an admission of guilt,” he told TWS. “Not only that, but the last fumes of legitimacy of the Democratic Party have blown away. It will take them a generation to gain back the trust of the American people on the rule of law.”

The issuance of broad-based, pre-emptive pardons has no precedent in American history beside the last-minute actions of President Biden and now the apparent proclamation by President Trump.