Trump. Hit enter. Boom — 237 pardons and commutations staring back at me, from Steve Bannon to Lil Wayne, all neatly listed on Pardonned.com.
No more squinting at DOJ’s endless PDFs or fumbling through their half-baked search. This indie project just scraped every U.S. presidential pardon since… well, forever, and turned it into a database you can actually use. And yeah, it’s open source. GitHub link and everything.
Why Pardonned.com Feels Like a Middle Finger to Bureaucracy
Look, I’ve covered enough government tech fails over 20 years to spot one. The Department of Justice’s pardon page? It’s a joke — static lists, buried links, PDFs from the Bush era that load like molasses. Want to verify some YouTuber’s hot take on Biden’s clemency spree? Good luck.
That’s where Pardonned.com steps in. Built by some dev inspired by Liz Oyer’s videos — you know, the ones calling out pardon irregularities — it’s a simple searchable database pulling from official DOJ data.
Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily.
Short. Sweet. Honest. No VC fluff.
Tech stack’s straightforward too: Playwright for scraping (smart choice, DOJ’s site fights bots like it’s Fort Knox), SQLite for the local DB (lightweight, no cloud bloat), Astro 6 to spit out a static site. All code on GitHub, MIT license probably. Run it yourself if you’re paranoid.
But here’s my unique spin, something the Show HN doesn’t touch: this reeks of the early 2000s civic hacking vibe, like when bloggers scraped FEC donor lists to expose soft money scams pre-McCain-Feingold. Back then, it forced real transparency. Pardonned.com? It’ll do the same for the pardon racket — journalists cross-checking claims, researchers spotting patterns in who gets a pass (hint: donors gonna donate).
Why Build a US Pardons Database Now?
Timing’s everything. Biden’s dropping pardons like confetti — Hunter, January 6 folks maybe? Trump 2.0 looming with promises of mass clemencies. Liz Oyer’s videos went viral questioning the math: why do numbers not add up between White House announcements and DOJ lists?
Pardonned.com fixes that. Search by president, year, offense. Filter commutations from full pardons. It’s not fancy — no AI summaries or heat maps — but damn if it isn’t useful. And free. Zero ads, no paywall.
Skeptical me wonders: who’s making money here? Nobody, that’s who. It’s pure dev itch-scratching, the kind Silicon Valley forgot amid SaaS grinds. Refreshing. Or a sign indie tools are the only ones we can trust anymore.
One nitpick — the scrape’s not real-time. DOJ updates sporadically, so Pardonned lags a bit. But hey, better than nothing.
Is Scraping DOJ Pardons Legal?
Short answer: yes, for now. Public data, no auth walls, fair use scraping. Playwright handles the anti-bot nonsense without hammering servers.
But governments hate this. Remember 2017 when LinkedIn sued scrapers? Or HiQ v. LinkedIn, where courts said public data’s fair game? DOJ could CFAA-throw if they wanted, but why bother? Pardons aren’t state secrets.
Still, props to the builder for open-sourcing. Fork it, improve it, host your mirror. That’s the web winning.
I’ve seen PR spin on “transparency tools” from Big Tech — Oracle’s lobbying databases, anyone? All gated behind logins, sold to consultants. Pardonned.com? Raw, free, no strings. Rare these days.
The Money Question: Follow the Non-Profits
Who benefits? Reporters fact-checking viral claims. Academics mapping pardon politics — did Reagan favor tax cheats? (Spoiler: yes.) Activists pushing reform.
Bold prediction: if Trump wins, this site’s traffic explodes. Imagine searching “January 6 pardons” mid-trial. Or Biden’s pre-election mercy parade. It’ll be the go-to, forcing DOJ to step up their game.
Cynical take — politicians love pardons because they’re quiet power. No votes lost, favors called in. Tools like this shine light, make ‘em squirm. Good.
Downsides? Data’s only as good as DOJ’s. Misses state pardons, military ones. But for federal prez stuff, it’s gold.
And that GitHub repo — clean code, Docker-ready. I cloned it in five minutes. Run npm run scrape, watch it pull thousands of entries. Beautiful simplicity.
What Could Pardonned.com Become?
Dream big: add visualizations. Pardon trends by administration. Offense breakdowns — drugs vs. white-collar. API for devs.
Or it stays niche, which is fine. Not everything needs to scale to unicorn.
Either way, in a world of walled gardens, this open database reminds us: data wants to be free. Even the embarrassing bits.
🧬 Related Insights
- Read more: I Saved $1,463 Monthly by Making Claude Code My Server Admin – Full Blueprint
- Read more: Hegseth Boots Army Chief Over DEI Promotion Fight
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Pardonned.com? A free, searchable database of all U.S. presidential pardons and commutations, scraped from DOJ and hosted statically.
How was Pardonned.com built? Playwright for scraping, SQLite DB, Astro 6 static site. Full open source on GitHub.
Is Pardonned.com updated regularly? It scrapes on build; check GitHub for latest runs. Not real-time, but covers historical data fully.
