Will Anybody Besides Michael Flynn Get Mercy from Lame Duck Trump?

President Donald Trump gave Michael Flynn a reason to be thankful over the holidays, announcing late Wednesday he was pardoning his former national security adviser. As Trump’s administration wraps, will anybody else—especially anybody not directly connected to the president—get similar mercy?

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about conversations with a Russian ambassador after Trump was elected but before Trump took office. Given the government’s failure to directly tie Trump’s administration to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, Flynn’s prosecution feel like a last-ditch effort to collect somebody‘s scalp over all of what happened. It’s extremely unlikely, after all, that the U.S. will ever actually get their hands on the Russians who allegedly did attempt to meddle with the election.

The FBI’s treatment of Flynn is typical of how the bureau tries to salvage prosecutions when it can’t prove underlying crimes. Flynn is no hero, and he has a troubling history of working for corrupt governments like Turkey’s, but it’s not justice to toss him in federal prison for failing to pin any other actual crimes on him. It’s easy to reconcile the belief that Trump has some corrupt cronies with the idea that the government failed to make a good case that Flynn belongs in jail.

But will there be any additional acts of mercy from Trump that aren’t heavily driven by politics or direct connections to the president?

Trump has made a big deal of having commuted the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, then pardoning her, for her federal conviction back in the 1990s for involvement i