How many pardons did obama grant
Executive summary
President Barack Obama granted 212 full pardons during his two terms in office, according to Department of Justice records and contemporaneous reporting compiled after he left the White House [1] [2]. Much of the public confusion stems from conflating pardons with commutations—Obama famously granted a historically large number of commutations but far fewer pardons [3] [4].
1. The official tally: 212 pardons, per DOJ and subsequent reporting
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney maintains the authoritative list of pardons and, when tallied and summarized by multiple outlets, shows that Obama issued 212 full pardons between 2009 and 2017 [1] [2]. Major retrospective accounts and compilations — including Newsweek and aggregated DOJ releases cited by secondary sources — repeat the 212 figure as the final count for pardons [2] [5].
2. Why many people think the number is much higher: commutations vs. pardons
The widespread misconception that Obama “pardoned” hundreds or even more than a thousand people flows from his unprecedented use of commutations — reductions or terminations of prison sentences — which are legally and practically distinct from pardons. Obama commuted sentences for well over 1,700 people, including a single-day burst of 330 commutations on January 19, 2017; those actions received heavy publicity and were sometimes inaccurately described as pardons [4] [3]. Fact-checkers such as Snopes explicitly note that the large last‑week grants were commutations, not pardons, and that the difference matters legally [3].
3. Conflicting official snapshots during the final weeks
The Obama White House posted interim clemency tallies as his administration wound down, and different posts reflect different moments: a December 19, 2016 announcement noted that, after that day’s actions, Obama had granted 148 pardons and 1,176 commutations to date [6]. In the final days of the presidency he issued additional clemency grants — both commutations and pardons — and later, official DOJ tallies incorporated those late actions into the 212‑pardon total [7] [8] [1]. The shifting numbers in archived White House statements contributed to public confusion when later summaries did or did not include the last‑minute grants.
4. Reading the numbers: policy emphasis and political narratives
Obama’s clemency strategy emphasized commuting long drug sentences for incarcerated persons judged nonviolent and rehabilitated, rather than issuing pardons after sentence completion; that policy choice explains the asymmetry between extremely high commutation numbers and comparatively modest pardon totals [4] [8]. Critics and advocates interpreted that emphasis differently: criminal‑justice reformers praised the large commutation program as substantive relief for overly harsh sentencing, while some media and opponents framed the relatively low number of pardons as a sign of caution or political avoidance — a partisan lens that amplified the numerical debate [9] [4].
5. Lessons for readers parsing clemency statistics
Accurate reporting requires separating distinct clemency tools—pardon, commutation, remission, reprieve—and relying on DOJ records for final tallies rather than snapshot press releases, which can change as an administration completes last‑minute acts [1] [6]. Fact checks and analytic outlets repeatedly corrected misstatements that conflated commutations with pardons, underscoring the need to check primary government lists for the definitive count [3] [4]. Based on DOJ compilations and authoritative post‑term summaries, the defensible answer to “how many pardons did Obama grant” is 212 full pardons [1] [2].