Trump pardons Rudy Giuliani and others who backed bid to overturn 2020 election

US President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a Justice Department official.

Ed Martin, the government’s pardon attorney, posted on social media a signed proclamation of the “full, complete, and unconditional” pardon, which also names conservative lawyers Sidney Powell, who promoted baseless conspiracy theories about a stolen election, and John Eastman, another lawyer who pushed a plan to keep Mr Trump in power.

The proclamation explicitly says the pardon does not apply to Mr Trump.

Presidential pardons apply only to federal crimes and none of the allies was charged in federal cases. But the move underscores Mr Trump’s efforts to continue to rewrite the history of the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

It follows the sweeping pardons of the hundreds of Trump supporters charged in the January 6 2021 riot at the US Capitol, including those convicted of attacking police officers.

The proclamation described efforts to prosecute those accused of aiding Trump’s efforts to cling to power “as a grave national injustice perpetrated on the American people” and said the pardons were designed to continue “the process of national reconciliation”.

Also pardoned were Republicans who acted as fake electors for Mr Trump in 2020 and were charged in state cases of submitting false certificates that confirmed they were legitimate electors despite Mr Biden’s victory in those states.

Mr Trump himself was indicted on felony charges accusing him of working to overturn his 2020 election defeat, but the case brought by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith was abandoned in November after Mr Trump’s victory over Democrat Kamala Harris because of the department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.

Mr Giuliani, Mr Meadows and others who were named in the proclamation had been charged by state prosecutors over the 2020 election, but the cases have hit a dead end or are proceeding slowly.

Mr Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, was one of the most vocal supporters of Mr Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of large-scale voter fraud after the 2020 election.

He has since been disbarred in Washington, DC, and New York over his advocacy of Mr Trump’s bogus election claims and lost a 148 million-dollar (£112 million) defamation case brought by two former Georgia election workers whose lives were upended by conspiracy theories he pushed.

Mr Eastman, a former dean of Chapman University Law School in Southern California, was a close adviser to Mr Trump in the wake of the 2020 election and wrote a memo laying out steps then-vice president Mike Pence could take to stop the counting of electoral votes while presiding over Congress’s joint session on January 6 to keep Mr Trump in office.

A judge in September dismissed the Michigan case against 15 Republicans accused of attempting to falsely certify Mr Trump as the winner of the election in that battleground state.

The White House did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.