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In June 2018, the fundamental differences between pardons and commutations appear to have been lost on a meme creator who produced a graphic presenting the claim that President Obama pardoned more than 1,700 criminals during his term, and that more than 330 of those pardons were granted during his final week in office: Some versions of this meme carried a watermark for right-wing youth activist group Turning Point USA (TPUSA), but we were unable to find any instances of this particular group's sharing the meme. Although we aren't certain if TPUSA was responsible for the creation of the meme (several examples of this image, such as the one shown above, do not contain a watermark) the group's founder, Charlie Kirk, has repeated at least one of its claims on Twitter: The meme, much like Kirk, confused pardons with commutations. The U.S. Constitution grants the President of the United States the executive power of clemency in Article II, Section 2. This power can be expressed via a commutation, which reduces prison sentences but does not reverse convictions or expunge criminal records, or a pardon, which fully absolves a person of guilt for a criminal offense. The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) explained the difference between pardons and commutations thusly: For instance, when President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning on 17 January 2017, reducing a 35-year prison sentence to about seven years, that did not change Manning's status as a felon convicted by court-martial for violations of the Espionage Act. The numbers presented in the meme appear to be inaccurate as well. Clemency statistics compiled by the DOJ show that President Obama commuted 1,715 prison sentences during his time in office and also issued 212 pardons: President Obama did employ his power of clemency for 330 federal inmates during his final week in office, but again his actions produced sentence commutations, not pardons, as was reported at the time: President Barack Obama did grant more commutations than any other president in U.S. history to date. However, given that he also received a record number of clemency petitions, his clemency rate was comparatively low: Although President Obama set a record for the most commutations in history, his total of 212 pardons was well below that of many of his predecessors. Bill Clinton issued 396 pardons, Ronald Reagan 393, and the all-time record goes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who issued 2,819 pardons during his 12 years (not 16) in office. George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were the only presidents of the modern era who issued fewer pardons than Barack Obama.
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