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Fact check: Which US president issued the most pardons in a single year?
Executive Summary
Andrew Johnson is documented as granting more than 13,000 pardons overall and reportedly pardoned up to 90 percent of applicants, but the available material does not establish which U.S. president issued the most pardons in a single calendar year. Recent accounts point to large, date-specific actions—President Biden’s June 26, 2024 proclamation for former service members and President Trump’s burst of pardons in May 2025—but the assembled analyses stop short of confirming a single-year record and present competing indicators rather than a definitive ranking [1] [2] [3].
1. Why the record is murky and what each source actually claims
The materials summarize historical patterns and notable episodes without compiling a verified, year-by-year tally; this creates ambiguity about single-year records. One source emphasizes Andrew Johnson’s broad post-Civil War clemency, citing over 13,000 pardons and an acceptance rate near 90 percent, which signals massive cumulative action but does not parse those pardons by year [1]. Contemporary reporting centers on focused actions by modern presidents—Biden’s June 2024 proclamation and Trump’s May 2025 wave—yet none of the supplied analyses purports to have cross-checked archival pardon logs to identify the single busiest year [2] [3]. This gap leaves the core question unresolved in the provided corpus.
2. The Andrew Johnson data: scale without temporal breakdown
The most striking historical figure in these sources is Andrew Johnson’s total pardons exceeding 13,000, framed as a blanket clemency toward former Confederates and applicants after the Civil War. That figure supports the argument that Johnson’s administration engaged in the largest-scale pardon activity in U.S. history, but the reporting cited does not disaggregate those pardons by calendar year to confirm whether any single year surpassed modern concentrated actions [1]. The sources treat Johnson’s clemency as a historical precedent for scale, not as a precise single-year statistic, leaving an evidentiary hole if one seeks the record for a single year.
3. Modern concentrated actions: Biden’s June 26, 2024 proclamation
One analysis highlights President Biden’s June 26, 2024 proclamation granting full, unconditional pardons to individuals convicted under former Article 125 of the UCMJ, framing it as potentially the most pardons in a single year because of its broad scope [2]. That piece positions the proclamation as unusually large for modern presidents and notes historical parallels to mass clemencies, but it stops short of presenting comparative numerical evidence across presidencies. The reporting thus raises the possibility that a modern president could set a single-year record, yet the provided data do not confirm that Biden definitively did so [2] [1].
4. Trump’s May 2025 burst: notable but numerically limited in context
Coverage of President Trump’s pardon activity cites a specific month—May 2025—when he issued 19 pardons and commuted eight sentences, an unusual level of concentrated action for a single month [3]. While these month-specific figures illustrate an intense short-term use of clemency, the provided analyses do not aggregate Trump’s total annual pardons or compare them to historical totals like Johnson’s 13,000, nor do they present year-by-year federal pardon databases. Consequently, Trump’s May 2025 activity is significant politically but not demonstrably a single-year record based on these sources [3].
5. Scholarly and legal context: pardons as patterns, not raw counts
Academic commentary in the files explains that pardons have long served varied functions—mercy, political reconciliation, and individual relief—and that presidents have used them in both blanket and targeted forms [4] [5]. The sources emphasize precedent (Ford’s Nixon pardon, Washington’s Whiskey Rebellion pardons) and legal frameworks, but they focus on implications and controversies rather than producing a definitive single-year leaderboard. This framing illuminates motives and patterns but leaves the statistical question unresolved because the authors prioritize context over compiling exhaustive quantitative comparisons [4] [5].
6. Competing agendas and why sources differ in emphasis
The differences among these analyses reflect distinct agendas: historical retrospectives foreground scale and precedent [1] [4], a policy-oriented piece highlights Biden’s notable 2024 proclamation as potentially record-setting [2], and political reporting spotlights Trump’s controversial May 2025 pardons [3]. Each piece selects facts to support its narrative—historical magnitude, modern policy significance, or political controversy—without producing a harmonized, sourced dataset. The result is overlapping but non-identical emphases that complicate producing a single unequivocal answer from the provided materials.
7. What’s needed to settle the question definitively
To determine which president issued the most pardons in a single year requires systematic counting from primary pardon records or Justice Department annual summaries—data absent from the supplied analyses. The existing documents supply major episodes and totals (notably Johnson’s 13,000-plus pardons and Biden’s 2024 proclamation) but fail to present year-by-year tallies that would confirm a single-year record. Without those primary tallies or a reputable compiled dataset, the assembled sources cannot authoritatively declare a single-year winner [1] [2] [3].