The Pardon

Jake Lang was arrested in Frisco, Texas this week for criminal trespass. Frisco is a suburb of Dallas with a population of around two hundred thousand people and no prior relevance to the history of American governance.

Jake Lang was pardoned by President Trump in January. He had spent years in federal prison for the Capitol breach on January 6, 2021. (The Capitol is in Washington, D.C. Frisco is in Collin County, Texas. This distinction will matter.)

The pardon was presidential. It covered a significant number of charges. What it did not cover — and what any careful reader of the document might have noted — was conduct not yet committed in states not named in the document.

He is now in a maximum-security cell block in Frisco.

I want to be precise about this. The first maximum-security arrangement ended with a presidential pardon. The second one began approximately eight months later. These are two separate facts. Presenting them separately gives the reader time to locate the connecting word.

The connecting word is trespass.

There is no obvious solution here. The next pardon, if there is one, might benefit from specifying a geographic boundary. This is a minor administrative detail that no one thought to address the first time.