President Trump pardoned five former NFL players Thursday, wiping federal convictions that ranged from drug trafficking to perjury to counterfeiting. The recipients include a Jets Hall of Famer, three Super Bowl champions, and a Heisman Trophy winner who received his clemency posthumously.
White House pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson announced the clemencies on X:
"As football reminds us, excellence is built on grit, grace, and the courage to rise again. So is our nation."
The pardons continue a second-term pattern of Trump exercising his clemency powers through Johnson, who is paid $145,000 as a White House employee to identify cases of apparent injustice — bypassing the historically slow pardon pipeline at the Justice Department. Trump also installed pardon attorney Ed Martin last year to supplement Johnson's efforts.
According to the New York Post, the cases span decades and carry wildly different weights, but each involved a man whose public life on the field eventually collided with a federal conviction off it.
Joe Klecko, 72, the Jets defensive tackle who spent 11 of his 12 pro seasons in New York, was pardoned for perjury in an insurance fraud case. He served three months in prison after his 1993 sentencing.
Nate Newton, 64, the Dallas Cowboys offensive guard who won three Super Bowls in the 1990s across 13 seasons with the team, received clemency for his drug trafficking conviction. Newton was busted with nearly 400 pounds of marijuana in two separate traffic stops in 2001. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones personally delivered the news of the pardon to Newton.
Jamal Lewis, the former Baltimore Ravens running back and Super Bowl champion, was pardoned after pleading guilty in 2004 to using a cell phone to facilitate a cocaine deal.
Travis Henry, 47, who played for the Buffalo Bills, Tennessee Titans, and Denver Broncos, was pardoned of his cocaine-trafficking conviction.
Billy Cannon, the late Heisman Trophy winner at LSU who went on to play for the Houston Oilers, Oakland Raiders, and Kansas City Chiefs, received posthumous clemency. Cannon served two-and-a-half years in jail for printing $6 million in phony $100 bills in the 1980s.
Johnson herself knows what a pardon means. Trump freed her from prison during his first term and subsequently pardoned her drug charges at the recommendation of Kim Kardashian. She now runs the operation from the other side, thanking the president for his "continued commitment to second chances."
That phrase — second chances — captures the governing philosophy at work here. The traditional pardon process routes petitions through the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, a bureaucratic crawl that can take years and frequently ends in silence. Trump has chosen to route around it, using Johnson and Martin to surface cases directly.
The result is a pardon apparatus that moves at the speed of executive decision rather than institutional inertia. Whether that makes critics uncomfortable says more about their comfort with bureaucracy than their commitment to justice.
These aren't men who escaped consequences. Klecko served his time. Newton was convicted. Lewis pleaded guilty. Henry carried a federal trafficking conviction. Cannon spent two-and-a-half years behind bars and died with it still on his record.
The pardons don't erase what happened. They acknowledge that a conviction doesn't have to be the final word on a life, especially when the sentence has been served, the years have passed, and the person in question has moved beyond the worst thing they did.
That's not a soft-on-crime position. It's a recognition that the clemency power exists for a reason, and a president willing to use it is doing something the framers intended, not something they feared.
Five men. Five federal convictions. Five pardons. And a White House that treats clemency as an active tool rather than a dusty formality reserved for the final hours of a presidency.