President Donald Trump is sending a clear message to law enforcement officers who break the law, conservative analyst Bill Kristol wrote for The Bulwark in an urgent analysis published on Tuesday — you can do whatever you like as long as you're loyal to me.
Trump has become infamous for handing out pardons to his political allies hit with federal charges, including most notoriously around 1,500 January 6 rioters. But he followed this up over the weekend by pardoning a far-right Virginia sheriff convicted in a bribes-for-badges scheme.
Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins "had accepted more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for appointing various untrained and unvetted individuals to no-show jobs as auxiliary deputy sheriffs," wrote Kristol. "The evidence was overwhelming, including video of Jenkins accepting bags of cash, the testimony of some of those involved in the scheme, and reports from two undercover FBI agents. In March 2025, Jenkins was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison."
However, Ed Martin, the recently-disgraced GOP activist who served as Trump's former D.C. prosecutor, recently became the DOJ pardon attorney and got involved in the case.
"Jenkins was a rabidly anti-immigrant, pro-Trump sheriff who’d become a minor celebrity in MAGA world. Trump himself may not have known of him, but Ed Martin did," wrote Kristol. After Martin's intervention, Trump issued the pardon and baselessly claimed Jenkins was “persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters’” at DOJ and railroaded thanks to a “Biden Judge.”
"Trump’s pardon is an affront to the oaths both he and Jenkins swore. Though the pardon is legal in the sense that it’s within Trump’s power, it is an affront to the rule of law," wrote Kristol.
The message Trump sent by doing this, he continued, is that "under Trump’s pardon regime, law enforcement officers can become Trump enforcement officers. Others who decide to engage in vigilante action — perhaps in cooperation with Trump-supporting law enforcement officers — can also expect pardons. Trump sheriffs and wannabe sheriffs will increasingly believe, thanks to Trump and Ed Martin, that they can act with immunity. MAGA vigilantism over the next four years will be super-charged."
Ultimately, Kristol concluded, the only safeguard against Trump's unchecked pardon abuses "is political and civic leaders ... who call attention to its abuses, and who seek to guard against some of the implications of those abuses. The fundamental check has to be a citizenry that upholds standards of legality and decency even when the president and his administration don’t."
