Slotkin Threatened Young Trump Staffers. Now the White House Is Weighing Mass Pardons to Protect Them

Sen. Elissa Slotkin wanted young conservatives to think twice before working for President Trump. Now the White House is looking at a way to make her threat worthless.

White House lawyers are weighing mass pardons for junior staffers, The Washington Sun reported Saturday morning, citing two people familiar with the talks. Hours later, standing outside the Palm Beach County elections office after casting his own ballot, Trump made clear he likes the idea. "I certainly don't want to see innocent people go through hell and lose all their money," he said.

What the White House is weighing

The Sun's scoop, by Jasmine Wright and Jeff Stein, says the talks reach "a far greater number of White House staff than has been previously reported." One source called a pardon for every junior staffer unlikely. The likelier path is blanket pardons by policy area, covering everyone who worked on deportations, war or trade.

Allies have been pushing. The Heritage Foundation and American Moment, a group that places young conservatives in government jobs, have pressed White House counsel to either prepare pardons or line up money for legal fees, so junior aides aren't left to fight criminal probes, congressional subpoenas or lawsuits on their own, according to the Sun.

Slotkin lit the fuse

The push sped up after Slotkin's Oct. 13 remarks at the University of Chicago, the sources told the Sun. The Michigan Democrat said that if her party wins power, she wants to go after "the people who enabled" Trump, so graduates look at a Trump job and think, "Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don't want." She called it a "deterrence message," as Fox News and CNN reported and UNGA NEWS laid out last week. Her own Sept. 30 speech text called for a list of "signature cases."

Mike Davis, the Article III Project founder who has been pressing the White House, put it bluntly. "After listening to Elissa Slotkin threatening to go after young people who joined the Trump administration, President Trump should issue very broad preemptive pardons for anyone who worked for him or in his orbit," he told the Sun. On X, he was shorter: "Good."

Nick Solheim, who runs American Moment, wouldn't discuss private talks but said political appointees "operate on behalf of the president," and "the left will do everything in its power to hunt down conservatives who are implementing the president's agenda."

"Margo, you're not going to have to worry"

Trump took questions for nearly 20 minutes after voting, the Washington Examiner reported. Asked about the Sun's story, he pointed straight at the man who set the precedent. "It would be very unfair to go through what we went through for four years with the corrupt weaponization that took place," he said. "So in light of what Biden did — as you know, Biden shielded many people, including the Congress, if you look at what they did with Congress, when they set up the special committee which was a fraud, they all got shielded. So certainly, I haven't thought about it. But certainly I'd be allowed to."

Then he turned to Margo Martin, his longtime communications aide, who was standing near the press pool, Mediaite reported. "If she becomes a target, you know she's a very honest person. But they're going to drag her into a grand jury," Trump said. "Margo, you're not going to have to worry about it, okay?"

That's the whole case in one exchange. Martin films the president, posts his clips and answers to him. She isn't a power broker. If someone like her can be hauled before a grand jury just for doing her job, a pardon is less a get-out-of-jail card than a fire extinguisher on the wall: nobody plans to use it, but everyone inside sleeps better knowing it's there.

Biden wrote the playbook

Democrats can hardly cry foul. On his last morning in office, Jan. 20, 2025, Joe Biden handed preemptive pardons to Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley and the members and staff of the House Jan. 6 committee, plus the Capitol Police officers who testified to it, AP reported. Minutes before Trump was sworn in, he added five members of his own family. None had been charged with anything. Biden had already pardoned his son Hunter weeks earlier.

Even Biden's own pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, told the Sun those pardons set a "really bad precedent." Trump has said the same thing for months. "Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody," he told Time in September. "But you mean I'm not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe's allowed to give them?" Earlier this month he told Newsmax: "I don't want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing."

Trump isn't promising cover for real wrongdoing, either. The Justice Department is looking into contract misconduct claims against his longtime aide Corey Lewandowski, and Trump said, "I want my people to be honest. And if they're not going to be honest, they have to be prosecuted," the Sun noted.

What a pardon can and can't do

The Constitution gives the president "Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." Congress can't vote a pardon away, and a Democratic House couldn't undo one. The limits: it covers federal crimes only, not state charges, and it doesn't stop a congressional committee from calling witnesses.

No decision has been made, and the White House didn't comment to the Sun. Trump has more than two years left in his term, and the midterms are Nov. 3. Slotkin told young people that working for Trump could buy them "a ton of problems." The president's answer Saturday was simple: not on his watch.