Most experts believe Trump will come into office on Jan. 20, 2025, replacing retiring Democratic President Joe Biden, with a sack of immediate pardons ready for issuance and distribution. There’s an ample lineup of convicted felons banged up on federal charges stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol who eagerly await Trump’s inauguration. But they aren’t the only candidates looking forward to what could be one of the busiest pardoning sprees ever seen early in a presidency.

In addition to the 900-plus people convicted of federal crimes related to the insurrection attempt, multiple advisers and officials from Trump’s first administration, from 2017-21, were charged on a range of matters and, in some cases, convicted.

Most prominent was Peter Navarro, the 75-year-old first Trump term trade adviser. Navarro spent four months in federal prison for a contempt of Congress conviction for stonewalling the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot.

“Previous presidents have pardoned some top administration officials,” said Graham G. Dodds, a professor with the Department of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal.

“George W. Bush commuted the sentence of Dick Cheney’s aide, Scooter Libby,” said Dodds, a specialist in American politics and an expert on presidential amnesty. “Bill Clinton pardoned former CIA Director John Deutch. George H. W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, national security adviser Robert McFarlane, and several others for the Iran-Contra scandal.”

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, served time for federal cases involving campaign finance fraud and lying to Congress. While he was released in 2020, Cohen is unlikely to see his record expunged by the returning president in his second, nonconsecutive term because the former attorney testified against Trump in the former and incoming president’s New York state hush money trial.

With such a deep bench of options for Trump to choose from on and after Inauguration Day, it’s tricky to predict who will be pardoned or granted clemency and when such acts might become official. Especially when the possibilities stretch across party lines to the Biden family itself.

Litigator and veteran ABC News legal correspondent Royal Oakes reminds pardon prognosticators that Trump is always sensitive to the political impact of his actions and statements. He cited Trump backing off an effort to ban abortion nationally when the then-presidential candidate became convinced it would threaten his election chances and those of his friends.

“Now, (Trump) has no more campaigns to wage,” said Oakes, a longtime Los Angeles-based attorney and legal commentator in Southern California and nationally.

“Even though he wants to make sure Republicans win big in the midterm elections in 2026 to make sure he can continue to implement his programs with congressional help through the end of his four-year term, he may feel that because he personally does not have to face voters on the ballot again, he is free to take steps that might be unpopular, including mass pardons,” Oakes said.

One pardon target could be advocates of Trump’s false claims that his 2020 loss to Biden was a stolen election.

“Trump might also pardon other people for interfering with the 2020 election, like former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted of several felonies and recently sentenced to nine years in prison,” Oakes said. “Dozens of Republican fake electors are facing criminal charges related to election interference in 2020, so one might think that they could benefit from that proactive pardon that would spare them from both trial and punishment, but my understanding is they are facing state-level charges which would be beyond the reach of a presidential pardon or clemency.”

Wasting no time in offering get-out-of-jail-free cards

The most famous case of a White House pardon coming down early in a presidency is Gerald Ford’s Sept. 8, 1974 issuance of one to resigned President Richard Nixon. Ford’s predecessor and fellow Republican had resigned on Aug. 9 that year, ahead of near-certain impeachment by the House and a Senate trial that would likely have convicted him over Watergate-related charges and evicted him from the presidency.

“Ford wanted to ‘end the long national nightmare’ that was the Watergate scandal,” Oakes explained. “Conventional wisdom among political scientists holds that the fact the pardon turned out to be unpopular with voters is what caused Ford to lose to [Democratic nominee Jimmy] Carter in 1976. Speculation has swirled for decades about whether there was a deal in place by which Nixon would quit if assured Ford would pardon him.”

While Ford’s forgiveness of Nixon is an example of a president damaging his standing among voters via issuing a pardon, Dodds added the 1977 example of President Carter’s first day in office, when the new commander in chief offered mass amnesty to more than 200,000 Vietnam War resisters and draft evaders. More than a century earlier in 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a mass pardon six weeks after taking office after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Johnson, hailing from Tennessee, pardoned former Confederate rebels if they took an oath to support the United States and the Union. Neither decision sat well with swaths of voters.

Oakes believes the most interesting pardon question lurking on the political horizon, beyond the question of whether Trump has the authority to pardon himself once inaugurated, should the need arise, is the possibility of a double pardon agreement.

After all, Trump comes into his next White House term after facing federal criminal cases brought against him by independent special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, D.C., and Florida. Smith has indicated in court filings that he will wind down the former case, focused on Trump’s efforts to stay in office after losing in 2020. The Florida case centers on charges against the former president that he mishandled classified and top-secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July, and Smith was in the process of appealing when Trump won the election.

Smith has indicated he’ll try to wrap up the cases and then plans to resign before Trump’s looming inauguration. But there could still be legal loose ends in the pair of cases. That’s where presidential pardon power would arise.

“Some have speculated that Biden and Trump would cut a deal for Biden to pardon Trump in the spirit of national unity, and for Trump to pardon Biden’s son Hunter,” Oakes explained, alluding to the presidential kin’s scheduled Dec. 13 sentencing in Delaware after being convicted for lying on a federal gun application. Three days later, Hunter Biden faces sentencing in California after pleading guilty to federal tax evasion charges.

However, Oakes added, “There’s no solid evidence such an arrangement is a realistic possibility.”

Then again, Oakes added, it’s not worth exhausting too much analysis on what Trump might do once back in Washington.

“Where Trump is concerned, I’m really reluctant to make predictions about pardons or anything else because he is simply so different from other presidents,” Oakes added. “The old bits of conventional wisdom seem not to apply. He is so mercurial that his intentions seem to change from one moment to the next.”

John Scott Lewinski, MFA, is a writer based in Milwaukee.