When the president pardons people convicted of large-scale financial fraud — money laundering, Ponzi schemes, crypto crimes — and the pardons also wipe out the restitution owed to their victims, what do religious traditions and the Constitution say about mercy that is paid for by the people who were wronged?
The pardon power is broad by design, and mercy toward the guilty — including the use of clemency to correct harsh sentences — is something every religious tradition honors. But every one of those traditions also insists that mercy to a wrongdoer cannot be paid for by the person he wronged: repentance and restitution travel together, and a debt to a victim is not the government’s to cancel on the victim’s behalf. When pardons cluster among wealthy financial criminals, follow organized lobbying, and erase the restitution owed to defrauded investors, the result is not mercy in the sense the traditions mean. It is a transfer — the loss moved off the criminal and back onto the victims — using a power the founders granted for mercy and a convention delegate warned could be turned to exactly this kind of favor.
Religious perspectives
Religious traditions take mercy extremely seriously — and precisely because they do, they are emphatic that mercy toward a wrongdoer is never the same thing as canceling what he owes the person he wronged.
Judaism: Jewish law draws a bright line. Teshuvah (repentance) for a sin against another person is incomplete until the wrong is repaired: the Mishnah states plainly that the Day of Atonement atones for offenses against God, but "for transgressions between a person and his fellow, Yom Kippur does not atone until he appeases his fellow" (Yoma 8:9). The Torah's restitution laws are detailed — a thief restores what was taken and adds to it (Exodus 22), and one who defrauds another must "restore it in full and add a fifth" and return it to the person wronged (Leviticus 6:1-5). Forgiveness from God does not erase the debt to the victim.
Christianity: The clearest New Testament picture of true repentance is Zacchaeus, the tax collector, who responds to grace by saying, "if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount" (Luke 19:8) — and Jesus calls that the day "salvation has come to this house." Repentance and restitution arrive together. Mercy that leaves the defrauded investor unpaid is not the mercy the Gospel describes.
Islam: Islamic ethics distinguishes the rights of God (huquq Allah) from the rights of people (huquq al-ʻibad). God may forgive sins against Himself upon sincere repentance — but wrongs against other people are not forgiven until the wronged person is repaid or chooses to forgive. A wrongdoer who has not made his victims whole carries that debt regardless of any official pardon.
The shared insight: Every tradition allows, even celebrates, mercy toward the guilty. None of them allows mercy to be financed by the victim. A pardon that forgives the fraud and simultaneously erases the restitution does not extend mercy to the wronged — it quietly transfers the loss from the criminal back onto them.
Constitutional & legal framework
The presidential pardon power is real, broad, and intentionally so — but the founders who granted it also named, in advance, the abuse this raises.
Article II, Section 2: The president has power "to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." The power is plenary; courts do not review the wisdom of a pardon, and it can extend to fines and to restitution owed to the government.
What the founders said: In Federalist No. 74, Alexander Hamilton defended a broad pardon power as a channel for "mercy" and a tool to restore peace after rebellion. But at the Constitutional Convention, George Mason warned of exactly the corrupt case — a president who could "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or shield confederates. The framers accepted the risk because they assumed the political process and a sense of honor would constrain it; the pardon power has almost no internal legal check.
The pattern (2025-2026): Analyses by news organizations found that a large share of this term's pardons and commutations went to people convicted of white-collar crime — securities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion. Recipients included cryptocurrency executives (the founder of Binance, who pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering failures, after the company mounted a substantial lobbying effort) and operators of large investor-fraud schemes, including one Ponzi-type fraud that cost more than 10,000 investors over a billion dollars. By several estimates, the pardons relieved recipients of well over a billion dollars in combined fines and restitution.
The restitution problem: When a pardon remits a restitution order, the victims’ court-ordered path to recovery can close. The pardon power contains no carve-out requiring victims to be made whole first, which means the only protection for defrauded investors is the president’s own restraint.
The honest other side: Clemency for excessive sentences and for nonviolent offenders is a legitimate, genuinely bipartisan cause, and presidents of both parties have issued pardons their critics considered indefensible. The pardon power is constitutionally unlimited, and using it is not itself a violation. The concern here is narrower and pattern-based: clemency concentrated among wealthy financial criminals, sometimes following organized lobbying, that also extinguishes what those criminals owed the people they defrauded.
Sources cited:BibleTorahConstitutionFederalist Papers