The word of the week is “pardons,” as Donald Trump considers pardoning Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Don Jr, plus Rudy Giuliani. Those are the people who have been (nominally) “loyal” to Mob Boss Bigly, but we shouldn’t discount the idea that pardons will be issued for reasons other than loyalty and concern for his favorite children. The breaking news last night was that the Department of Justice has been investigating a web of crimes involved with a “pay-to-pardon” scheme.

The Justice Department is investigating a potential crime related to funneling money to the White House or related political committee in exchange for a presidential pardon, according to court records unsealed Tuesday in federal court.

The disclosure is in 20 pages of partially redacted documents made public by the DC District Court on Tuesday afternoon. The records show Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s review in August of a request from prosecutors to access documents obtained in a search as part of a bribery-for-pardon investigation. The filings don’t reveal a timeline of the alleged scheme, or any names of people potentially involved, except that communications between people including at least one lawyer were seized from an office that was raided sometime before the end of this summer.

No one appears to have been publicly charged with a related crime to date. A Justice Department official told CNN that “no government official was or is currently a subject or target of the investigation disclosed in this filing.”

According to the court records, at the end of this summer, a filter team, used to make sure prosecutors don’t receive tainted evidence that should have been kept from them because it was privileged, had more than 50 digital devices including iPhones, iPads, laptops, thumb drives and computer drives after investigators raided the unidentified offices.

[From CNN]

Lawyer Twitter was running through the redacted filing and there’s some evidence to suggest that the person seeking a pardon A) is already serving time or in custody and B) has a surname ending in “S”.

Gates, Hicks, Sessions, Priebus, DeVos…and Nunes.

— Greg Olear (@gregolear) December 2, 2020

Someone also floated the name Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently sitting in a detention center in Brooklyn, awaiting trial. That… makes a lot of sense. Maxwell has a lot of money and she can hire people who have access to the Trumps. Plus, we still don’t know how much incriminating evidence she’s sitting on, and just who will be implicated in the cache of Jeffrey Epstein files she has. Everyone assumes that Epstein had files on/videos with Donald Trump too.

Anyway, this is the worst/most disgusting blind item ever, but who was trying to bribe Trump for a pardon? I really can’t figure it out.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.