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The Rap Sheet

Eight Years of Republican Crime — And the Pardon Pen That Erased It

This started with one story. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) — a Trump protégé running in a seat that suddenly looks competitive — is being accused by his ex-wife of things that are hard to type. So I went looking for the rest of it. Eight years, every level of the party, court records only.

What I found is worse than a list of bad apples. The list is long, yes. But the actual story is what happened after the convictions.

Ground Rules

I am going to be scrupulous about this, because the difference matters and because sloppiness here is how you get sued.

• "Charged" means charged. An indictment, an information, an arrest on a criminal complaint. Not a lawsuit. Not an ethics report. Not a rumor.
• Allegations get their own section, clearly labeled, at the bottom. Max Miller belongs there — he has not been criminally charged with anything, and he denies all of it.
• Outcomes are reported honestly, including acquittals, dismissals, and the cases that fell apart. Several did.
• People who were investigated but never charged are excluded. I checked and dropped Christian Ziegler, Neil Friske, Burt Jones, and others whose cases prosecutors declined. I also dropped several names that partisan list-makers had filed as Republicans who are, in fact, Democrats.
• And yes — Democrats get charged too. Bob Menendez got 11 years. Henry Cuellar was indicted. That's not the argument. Keep reading; the argument is at the end.

I. Congress

Eleven Republican members or former members of Congress were criminally charged between 2018 and 2026. Not one was a senator.

Read that outcome column again. Of the Republican members who actually completed a federal conviction in this window — Hunter, Collins, Hayes, Buyer, Santos — every single one had it pardoned or commuted. Fortenberry's case was thrown out by Trump's own Justice Department. David Rivera, convicted this past May on the Venezuela money, is the only one still standing convicted without rescue. His sentencing was calendared for July 22, 2026.

II. The Inner Circle

The men who ran the 2016 campaign and the Trump White House produced a remarkable number of felons.

• Paul Manafort — campaign chairman. 90 months across two federal cases (tax fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy, witness tampering). Fully pardoned December 2020.
• Roger Stone — adviser. Convicted on all seven counts: obstruction, witness tampering, five counts of lying to Congress. Commuted, then pardoned.
• Michael Flynn — National Security Adviser. Pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Pardoned.
• George Papadopoulos — adviser. Pleaded guilty to false statements. Pardoned.
• Elliott Broidy — RNC deputy finance chairman. Pleaded guilty to a foreign-lobbying conspiracy, agreed to forfeit $6.6 million. Pardoned before sentencing.
• Steve Bannon — chief strategist. Federal border-wall fraud case pardoned in 2021. Served four months for contempt of Congress. Then pleaded guilty in February 2025 to a New York state felony — scheme to defraud — which is the one conviction he still carries.
• Allen Weisselberg — Trump Organization CFO. Pleaded guilty to 15 tax felonies, then two counts of perjury. Two separate stints on Rikers Island. Both convictions stand.
• Peter Navarro — White House trade adviser. Convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress, served all four months. The D.C. Circuit unanimously upheld the conviction on July 21, 2026 — nine days ago. He currently works in the West Wing as Senior Counselor to the President.
• John Bolton — National Security Adviser. Indicted October 2025 on 18 Espionage Act counts for emailing over 1,000 pages of classified diary material to relatives. Pleaded guilty in June 2026 to a single retention count, with a $2.25 million fine. Sentencing this fall.
• Tom Barrack — inaugural committee chairman. Charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the UAE. Acquitted on all counts in November 2022 — the only full trial acquittal in this entire set, and it belongs on the record.
• Donald Trump — convicted May 30, 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the first former president ever convicted of a felony. Sentenced in January 2025 to an unconditional discharge: no jail, no fine, no probation. The federal January 6th and classified-documents cases were both dropped after he won the election. Georgia was dismissed in late November 2025. The New York conviction stands, on appeal — and because it is a state case, no pardon can reach it.

Now here is the detail that tells you what the pardons were actually for. Two men in that orbit still carry federal convictions from the Mueller era: Rick Gates and Michael Cohen. Gates was the cooperating witness. Cohen testified against Trump. Neither has ever been pardoned.

Cooperate with prosecutors and you keep the felony. Stay loyal and it disappears. That is not an accident; that is a policy.

And if you want the cleanest possible illustration, put Bannon next to Navarro. Identical charges — two counts of contempt of Congress. Identical outcomes — convicted, four months, served in full. The difference is what came after. Bannon's conviction is being actively dismantled with the Justice Department's help; his own government stopped defending it and moved to dismiss the indictment. Navarro's was upheld last week and stands intact while he sits in the West Wing.

III. January 6th

By DOJ's own accounting on the fourth anniversary — the last full tally before the prosecutions were ended:

• 1,583 people charged. 1,270 convicted. Only two defendants were ever fully acquitted, both at bench trials. No jury ever fully acquitted anyone.
• Roughly 600 charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police. 174 of those for using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing bodily injury. Around 140 officers were assaulted that day.
• 14 convicted of seditious conspiracy — the first successful use of that charge in decades. Enrique Tarrio got 22 years. Stewart Rhodes got 18.

On January 20, 2025, it was all erased: roughly 1,500 full pardons plus 14 commutations, covering everyone charged. The pardon was unconditional. There was no carve-out for the people who beat police officers. Tarrio walked out with a full pardon and a clean record.

And it kept going. In April 2026 the Justice Department went back to court to vacate the convictions outright — not just end the sentences, but scrub the records. On July 11, 2026, Judge Timothy Kelly vacated four Proud Boys convictions, noting he had little power to refuse the government's motion and that Trump's views on these cases "are well known."

There is also, and I want to be precise here, an active effort to pay them. A proposed $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" was floated and then scrapped around June 2026, but Trump has said the defendants "should be reimbursed," DOJ argued in a filing that some pardoned defendants should get back the restitution they paid toward repairing the Capitol, and lawyers are now filing tort claims seeking at least $1 million per person. In May 2026, police officers who defended the Capitol sued the Justice Department.

IV. The Fake Electors

Five states charged Republicans over the false certificates claiming Trump won in 2020: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia. State party chairs, RNC committeemen, sitting state senators, county clerks.

• Georgia — the Fulton County RICO case collapsed after DA Fani Willis was disqualified, and was dismissed entirely in late November 2025.
• Michigan — all charges against all 15 remaining defendants dismissed September 2025 for insufficient evidence of intent. AG Nessel declined to appeal in March 2026. Dead.
• Arizona — the 18-defendant indictment was sent back to a grand jury because prosecutors never showed jurors the Electoral Count Act, and AG Kris Mayes dismissed it in June 2026, promising to re-present. No active indictment exists.
• Nevada — dismissed on venue, then revived 6–0 by the Nevada Supreme Court in November 2025. Still active.
• Wisconsin — the state charged the three operatives who directed the scheme rather than the electors themselves. All three pleaded not guilty in June 2026. The strongest case still standing.

Here is the scoreboard after five years, five states, and dozens of defendants. Not one Republican elector has been convicted of a felony anywhere. The only elector convicted of anything at all is Arizona's Loraine Pellegrino, who pleaded to a single misdemeanor and got probation.

Georgia did produce four guilty pleas — but not from a single Georgia officeholder or elector. They came from the lawyers and one bail bondsman: Kenneth Chesebro (one felony), Jenna Ellis (one felony), Sidney Powell (six misdemeanors), and Scott Hall (five misdemeanors). Nobody served a day; all four got probation.

And every one of those pleas was entered under Georgia's First Offender Act — finish probation cleanly and the record is erased. It already worked. Chesebro, the man who wrote the memos that built the entire fake-elector scheme, had his probation ended early, his conviction discharged, and his law license restored in Florida in June 2026.

In November 2025, Trump pardoned 77 people connected to the scheme — Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman, Chesebro, Powell, Ellis, and whole slates of electors. Almost none had been federally charged. The pardons were largely symbolic, because a presidential pardon cannot touch a state case. That limitation is the only reason Wisconsin and Nevada survived at all.

V. The Statehouses

This is where the volume is. A sample of the verified cases:

Bribery and racketeering. Larry Householder, Speaker of the Ohio House — 20 years for a $60 million FirstEnergy bribery scheme, upheld when the Supreme Court denied review in April 2026. Ohio GOP chairman Matt Borges got 5 years in the same case. Lee Chatfield, Speaker of the Michigan House — 13 state felonies, trial set for September 2026. Gilbert Baker, Arkansas GOP chairman — acquitted on one count, the rest dismissed.

Tennessee ran the table. House Speaker Glen Casada convicted on 17 counts and sentenced to 3 years — then pardoned in November 2025. State Sen. Brian Kelsey pleaded guilty to campaign-finance felonies, got 21 months, and was pardoned 15 days into his sentence. Former state GOP chair Robin Smith, who cooperated, got 8 months. She's the one who's serving it.

Fraud. Florida Rep. Joe Harding — 4 months for COVID relief fraud. Kansas Rep. Michael Capps — 27 months for pandemic loan fraud. Indiana Sheriff Jamey Noel — 15 years for stealing roughly $3 million. Nevada judge Michele Fiore — convicted of raising money for a statue honoring slain police officers and spending it on plastic surgery and her daughter's wedding. Pardoned in April 2025 before she could be sentenced.

Statewide officers. Georgia Insurance Commissioner Jim Beck — convicted on all 37 counts, embezzling $2.5 million. West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Allen Loughry — 11 counts, 24 months. South Dakota AG Jason Ravnsborg — killed a pedestrian, charged only with misdemeanors, $1,000 fine, then impeached and removed. Louisiana AG Liz Murrill, indicted this month on 16 counts; Gov. Jeff Landry says he'll pardon her. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens — indicted on two separate felonies. The computer-tampering count was dropped expressly in exchange for his resignation; the invasion-of-privacy charge was dropped as trial was about to begin, and a second prosecutor then declined to refile, saying she found the accuser credible but could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Election crimes. Colorado clerk Tina Peters — convicted on 4 felonies, about 9 years, for a voting-system breach. Trump's "pardon" did nothing, because it was a state conviction. Arizona Rep. Austin Smith — pleaded guilty to forging 100+ signatures on his own nominating petition. Alabama Rep. David Cole — jail time for renting a 5-by-5-foot space to fake his residency. Florida Sen. Frank Artiles — convicted of running a "ghost candidate" in a race decided by 32 votes. South Dakota Sen. Tom Pischke — charged in June 2026 with forging candidate forms; 13 people say their signatures were faked.

VI. The Part That Should End Careers

I debated how to write this section and decided the right way is plainly, because these are convictions, not rumors.

• RJ May, South Carolina state representative and Freedom Caucus co-founder — distributed 479 files of child sexual abuse material in five days, using the screen name "joebidennnn69," while sitting in the legislature. 17.5 years.
• Ray Holmberg, North Dakota state senator for 45 years and chair of Appropriations — traveled to Prague to pay for sex with a minor, and received child pornography. 10 years.
• Aaron von Ehlinger, Idaho state representative — convicted of raping a 19-year-old legislative intern. 20 years, parole eligible after 8.
• Mike Folmer, Pennsylvania state senator — child pornography. Resigned the day after his arrest. 1–2 years and 15 years on the registry.
• Justin Eichorn, Minnesota state senator — arrested in a sting trying to buy sex from someone he believed was 17. Pleaded guilty May 2026; awaiting sentencing.
• Elliott Pritt, West Virginia delegate and assistant majority leader — arrested eight days ago, accused of enticing a 15-year-old girl through Roblox and Snapchat. He was also a middle-school teacher. Resigned July 27.
• Joel Greenberg, Seminole County tax collector — pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a child, among other counts. 11 years.
• Paul Petersen, Maricopa County assessor — ran an adoption-smuggling operation across three jurisdictions, including a Utah count for sale of a child. 6+ years federal, 5 in Arizona.
• Nick Sauer, Illinois state representative — 12 felony counts for distributing private sexual images of two women; pleaded down to a misdemeanor, 90 days.

VII. Allegations, Not Charges

Now Max Miller — and I am keeping this exactly inside the lines.

Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has not been criminally charged with anything. He denies all of it and calls the claims false and politically motivated in the middle of a custody dispute. What follows is what his ex-wife has alleged in civil litigation.

His ex-wife, Emily Moreno — who is the daughter of sitting Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio — alleges that Miller threw scalding water from a skillet onto her chest and stomach, held a gun to her head, pushed her against a wall and hit her head, and fractured their two-year-old daughter's collarbone and bruised her shoulder.

He is also being sued separately by Stephanie Grisham, Trump's former White House press secretary, who dated Miller in 2019–2020 and wrote in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed that the relationship "turned abusive," that he was "physical" with her, and that he had "anger issues and a violent streak."

Two women, unconnected to each other, years apart, describing the same thing. No charges. And here is the part that actually turns my stomach: his party's response has been silence. He is still the incumbent. He is still on the ballot.

Matt Gaetz

The federal sex-trafficking investigation into Matt Gaetz closed without charges in February 2023. Worth knowing how that became public: the announcement came from Gaetz's own congressional office, saying DOJ had informed his attorneys. DOJ declined to comment and has never released a declination letter.

The House Ethics Committee's December 2024 report found "substantial evidence" that from 2017 to 2020 he "regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity," that he used cocaine and ecstasy, that he obstructed the Committee's investigation — and that "In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl."

Three things have to be said in the same breath, or the account isn't honest:

• The Committee explicitly did not find sufficient evidence that he violated the federal sex-trafficking statute.
• It found no evidence that he knew the girl was a minor; she told investigators she did not tell him her age and he did not ask.
• "Substantial evidence" is an internal congressional standard, not a verdict. No sanction was ever imposed, and the Republican committee chairman filed a dissent objecting to how the majority handled it.

Gaetz denies ever having sexual contact with a minor and says he was "charged with nothing." That is true. His close associate Joel Greenberg — listed above — pleaded guilty to child sex trafficking and got 11 years.

The Resignation Loophole

There is a mechanism here worth naming, because it recurs: quit and the investigation dies. The House Ethics Committee lost jurisdiction over Trent Franks (2017), Blake Farenthold (2018), Pat Meehan (2018) and Tony Gonzales (2026) the moment each one walked out the door.

Gonzales is the ugliest of them. A House probe found "substantial reason to believe" he had sex with a staffer. That staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, died by suicide in September 2025. He resigned in April 2026, and the Committee announced it "no longer has jurisdiction." (Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat, resigned the same day over his own allegations. Same loophole, same result.)

Gaetz is the exception that proves the rule — the Committee released its findings on a former member anyway, noting it "does not do so lightly."

Two More, Currently Live

• Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) — sitting member. In May 2026 House Ethics confirmed it is "reviewing allegations" that he "may have created or fostered a hostile work environment and engaged in sexual harassment." The Committee's own caveat, which is the cleanest statement of this whole distinction: opening a review "does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred." Edwards says he welcomes it.
• Florida state Rep. Fabian Basabe — the only case in this entire dataset with an adverse adjudication and no criminal charge. This month a Leon County jury found him liable for sexual harassment, battery, and defamation, awarding $450,000 after roughly two hours of deliberation. He represented himself, at one point using ChatGPT for points of law. He had said on video that he would "resign on the spot" if the allegations were proven true. He has not resigned. To be precise: that is civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence, not a criminal conviction.

And one finding that cuts the other way, which I'll state plainly because it's true: no sitting Republican member of Congress was criminally charged with a sex offense, a child-exploitation offense, or domestic violence in these eight years. Every conviction in the section above is a state legislator or a local official.

The Actual Argument

Democrats commit crimes. Bob Menendez is doing 11 years for taking gold bars, and no Democratic president rescued him.

That is the whole point.

Look at what happens on this side. Hunter, pardoned. Collins, pardoned. Hayes, pardoned. Buyer, pardoned. Santos, commuted. Fortenberry, dismissed by his own party's DOJ. Kelsey, pardoned 15 days in. Hutchinson, pardoned. Casada, pardoned. Fiore, pardoned before sentencing. Sheriff Scott Jenkins, convicted of selling badges for $75,000 in bribes, pardoned the day before he was to report — over the public objection of Virginia's own Republican attorney general. Roughly 1,500 January 6th defendants, pardoned, including the ones who assaulted police. Seventy-seven fake-elector operatives, pardoned. And then, in 2026, the Justice Department going back to court to erase the convictions from the record entirely.

This is not a party with a crime problem. Every large organization has a crime problem. This is a party that has abolished the consequence. Guilt gets established — by juries, by guilty pleas, by judges — and then it gets deleted, retroactively. The verdict becomes a suggestion.

And notice it isn't just the pardon pen. There are at least five machines running: pardons before sentencing, commutations after, dismissals by a Justice Department now run by the defendant's own appointees, vacatur motions that scrub convictions off the record entirely, and first-offender deals that quietly expunge the plea a year or two later. Chesebro architected the scheme to overturn a presidential election, pleaded guilty to a felony, and is back to practicing law with a clean record. That is the whole system in one man.

And you can watch what that does to the incentives. The cooperators — Gates, Cohen, Robin Smith — are the ones still carrying convictions. The loyal ones got clean records. That teaches every operative exactly one lesson, and it isn't "follow the law."

Which brings it back to Max Miller. Nobody has charged him. Maybe nobody will. But when a party spends eight years demonstrating that its members face no durable consequences for anything, the silence around a man accused of fracturing his toddler's collarbone stops looking like due process.

It starts looking like the system working exactly as designed.

Sources

Every case above traces to a Justice Department or state attorney general release, a court record, or mainstream reporting. Principal sources:

• U.S. Department of Justice — indictments, pleas, and sentencing releases (Hunter, Collins, Buyer, Santos, Rivera, Fortenberry, Householder, Casada, Kelsey, Harding, May, Holmberg, Eichorn, Greenberg, Fiore)
• Lawfare — The High-Water Mark of the Jan. 6 Prosecutions (DOJ statistics, Jan 2025)
• Just Security — Jan 6 Pardons and Assaults on Law Enforcement, By The Numbers
• The pardon proclamation itself, January 20, 2025
• CBS News — Judge vacates convictions of 4 Proud Boys (July 11, 2026) · NPR — DOJ moves to toss seditious conspiracy convictions
• Fake electors: NPR (Michigan) · PBS NewsHour (Arizona) · CNN (Georgia) · Wisconsin Watch · Democracy Docket (Nevada)
• Gaetz Ethics report: H. Rept. 118-943, In the Matter of Allegations Relating to Representative Matt Gaetz (official PDF) · Gaetz office announces DOJ closed the probe (Feb 2023)
• Max Miller: Ohio Capital Journal · Rolling Stone · Newsweek
• Pardons: CBS (Fiore) · CNBC (Kelsey) · NBC (Casada) · CBS (Jenkins) · NPR (Santos) · CNN (77 fake-elector pardons)
• Trump orbit: Manhattan DA (Trump, 34 counts) · CNN (Navarro conviction upheld, July 2026) · NPR (Bolton guilty plea) · SCOTUSblog (Bannon) · Law.com (Chesebro reinstated to the Florida Bar) · Proclamation 10989 (the 77-name pardon, official text)
• State cases: Michigan AG (Chatfield) · West Virginia Watch (Pritt) · South Dakota Searchlight (Pischke) · Idaho Capital Sun (von Ehlinger)

A note on method: this list is deliberately about one party, which is not a claim that only one party produces criminals. Cases where prosecutors investigated but declined to charge were excluded. Several names circulating on partisan lists were dropped because the officials turned out to be Democrats, or were never charged at all. Where a disposition could not be confirmed — David Rivera's sentence, whether Arizona has re-indicted, the current posture of the Nevada trial — this post says so rather than guessing.