George Santos, recently sprung from prison when President Donald Trump cut short his sentence, has plenty of company among former House Republicans.
Trump on Oct. 17 commuted the New York Republican’s sentence after the disgraced ex-lawmaker served three months of his seven-year sentence in federal prison, due to his guilty pleas on fraud and identity theft charges.
Santos, in the process, became the 10th former House GOP lawmaker to earn a pardon, sentence commutation, or clemency from Trump. This figure starts with Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021, and continues once he resumed office on Jan. 20.
It’s a list that harkens back decades in House history, and with Santos, relatively close to the present.
To be sure, Trump is hardly alone in issuing questionable presidential pardons. Several pardons and commutations issued by former President Joe Biden sparked controversy. Most notably, his Dec. 1, 2024, pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, weeks before his scheduled sentencing on federal gun and tax charges. The decision reversed an earlier promise by Biden not to pardon his son, with the president later stating he believed “raw politics” had infected the process.
Biden also drew bipartisan criticism for using his clemency power to protect family members, former officials, and others from what he argued would be politically motivated prosecutions by the incoming Trump administration.
Nor was Trump the first president to pardon convicted former House members of his own party. In his final weeks in office, President Bill Clinton gave executive clemency to two former Democratic Illinois congressmen, Dan Rostenkowski and Mel Reynolds.
Days before Christmas in 2000, Clinton issued a full and unconditional pardon to Rostenkowski, the once-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski had already served his 17 months at the Oxford Correctional Facility in Wisconsin after pleading guilty in 1996 to two counts of mail fraud.
Weeks later, in January 2001, Clinton commuted Reynolds’s federal sentence for campaign and bank fraud charges. That allowed the former congressman from Chicago’s South Side to serve out the more than two years he still had left of his sentence in a halfway house. Reynolds was convicted on the federal charges in 1997, two years after he was convicted in state court for having sex with a 16-year-old campaign worker.
Neither Rostenkowski nor Reynolds was even the most notorious Clinton pardon. That dishonor belongs to Clinton’s pardon, just before leaving office, of fugitive financier Marc Rich in 2001. The move was highly controversial due to Rich’s evasion of over $48 million in U.S. taxes and charges of illegal oil trading with Iran. The pardon led to accusations of influence peddling, as Rich’s ex-wife made significant donations to the Democratic Party and the Clinton presidential library.
All that said, Trump’s willingness to forgive the legal sins of former GOP congressman is a notable footnote to an often wretched history of pardon perfidy engaged in by presidents of both parties. Santos, 37, was the most recent recipient (though in his case, a sentence commutation).
An Inauspicious Club
Santos was sentenced to prison in April after admitting last year to deceiving donors and stealing the identities of 11 people — including his own family members — to make donations to his campaign.
He reported to the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, in southern New Jersey, on July 25 and was being housed in a minimum security prison camp with fewer than 50 other inmates.
Santos was once a GOP rising star, having flipped a House seat in 2022 representing parts of Queens and Long Island. But Santos was expelled from the House within a year of taking office after it was revealed that he had fabricated much of his life story.
That was after federal prosecutors in 2023 charged Santos with stealing from donors and his campaign, fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits, and lying to Congress about his wealth. Santos pleaded guilty the following year just as he was set to stand trial.
Former House Republicans from New York state have been particularly rich Trump pardon recipients. Though a prominent ex-lawmaker from Trump’s first term, Chris Collins, hailed from the other end of the state. In 2012, Collins, a Republican and longtime western New York businessman, won a suburban Buffalo House district. But he resigned in October 2019 after pleading guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI.
Collins began serving a 26-month prison sentence in October 2020. During the final weeks of his first term, Trump pardoned Collins on Dec. 22, 2020.
Collins, 75, has since moved to southwest Florida. He’s now seeking the Republican nomination for Florida’s open 19th Congressional District, covering Fort Myers and the Cape Coral area.
Closer to Santos’s old congressional territory, former Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) received a pardon from Trump in late May. Grimm had pleaded guilty to underreporting wages and revenue at a restaurant he ran in Manhattan. Grimm served eight months in federal prison, getting released in May 2016.
Trump’s pardon beneficence has also shone on former House Republicans in Southern California, notably a pair who each once represented parts of the San Diego area.
Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham received a conditional pardon from Trump on Jan. 20, 2021, just hours before leaving office. Cunningham, who died in August 2025, had previously served more than eight years in federal prison for bribery and tax evasion. The pardon was conditional on Cunningham continuing to pay the restitution and fines ordered as part of his sentence, totaling over $3.6 million.
A month earlier, on Dec. 22, 2020, Trump had granted a full pardon to former Rep. Duncan D. Hunter for his conviction related to the misuse of campaign funds. The pardon cleared his criminal record but did not erase the civil penalties he incurred.
In December 2019, Hunter pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to misuse campaign funds. He and his wife, Margaret Hunter, were indicted in 2018 for spending more than $250,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses, including vacations, family meals, and other household goods.
Following his guilty plea, Hunter resigned from his congressional seat in January 2020. He was later sentenced to 11 months in federal prison and was scheduled to begin his sentence in January 2021.
Trump’s last-minute first-term pardons extended to former Rep. Robin Hayes, also a onetime North Carolina Republican Party chairman, who had pled guilty on a charge related to lying to FBI agents about a bribery scandal.
Also, among 73 people pardoned by Trump in the final hours of his first presidency was Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman in Arizona from 2003 to 2009. Renzi served nearly two years in prison for extortion and money laundering convictions.
Trump, weeks earlier, had issued a smaller, though still sizable, pardon batch of 15 people. On Dec. 22, 2020, Trump also commuted the sentences of five people, including former Republican Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas.
Stockman was more than two years into a 10-year prison sentence. That was due to a federal jury’s 2018 conviction of the former Texas Republican congressman on fraud and conspiracy charges for misusing charitable donations to pay for personal and political expenses. Two former Stockman staffers also were found guilty in a scheme to bilk conservative foundations out of at least $775,000 that was meant for charitable purposes and voter education.
GOP Lawmakers From An Earlier Era
The bulk of Trump’s pardons and commutations were for former Republican House members who held office during the current era of House Republican dominance. When the current Congress concludes on Jan. 3, 2027, Republicans will have held the House majority for 24 of 32 years.
But the Republican breakthrough in the 1994 elections ended a full 40 years of Democratic House control. And a couple of Trump legal beneficiaries go back to that era.
One was Mark Siljander, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, whom Trump pardoned on Dec. 23, 2020. Siljander had served time for charges related to work he did for an Islamic charity that federal authorities had linked to terrorist groups.
Siljander represented southwest Michigan from 1981 to 1987. He pleaded guilty in 2010 to obstruction of justice and to acting as an unregistered foreign agent in federal court in Missouri, where the Islamic American Relief Agency was based. The former congressman was sentenced in 2012 to one year in prison and six months of supervised release.
A Siljander House Republican colleague from that era, when Republicans were buried deep in the House minority, also got a Trump pardon. However, John Rowland of Connecticut was better known for the nine-and-a-half years he spent as governor, starting in January 1995. Rowland was a House member from 1985 to 1991.
SANTOS SAYS HE’S ‘VERY GRATEFUL’ FOR TRUMP COMMUTATION AND WANTS TO PURSUE PRISON REFORM
Trump, on May 28, pardoned Rowland, a once-rising star in Republican politics brought down in a corruption scandal, and who served time in two federal prison stints.
Rowland was convicted in two separate federal criminal cases. The first spurred his resignation from the governorship in July 2004. In the second, he was sentenced to a 30-month prison term in 2015 for his illegal involvement in two congressional campaigns.
