President Donald Trump’s adversaries say his sweeping pardon for dozens of alleged co-conspirators in the plot to subvert the 2020 election sent an unmistakable signal: If you do it again, I’ll protect you.

The extraordinarily broad pardon, signed Friday but revealed Sunday night, has little substantive effect for its recipients. Trump can pardon only federal crimes, and his administration had already pulled the plug on any lingering investigations stemming from the 2020 election. Some of the clemency recipients are still facing state-level criminal charges in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — though some Trump allies argue the pardons could derail those cases.

The mass pardon — the first in history to cover people accused of criminally conspiring with the president who issued it — comes as Trump continues to stoke false claims about rampant cheating by Democrats and sow doubts about the integrity of future elections. And his opponents see the pardon as a permission slip for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028.

“Trump is sending a message to his supporters that if you commit a crime in the name of Donald Trump, I’ve got your back,” said Liz Oyer, the former U.S. pardon attorney, whose successor Ed Martin announced the sweeping clemency on X and released a 15-page statement explaining the move.

Oyer said the pardon was written so broadly that it could apply to countless people who aided Trump’s effort to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election — and the vaguely worded document permits Martin and other Justice Department officials to decide for themselves who receives a pardon certificate.

“That’s just not how pardon paperwork is written,” Oyer said.

The move also appeared to be a way for Trump to test the well-settled boundaries of the pardon power itself, with allies like Martin and election attorney Cleta Mitchell suggesting it should cause the pending state cases to crumble. The pair argue that the presidential pardon could cover state-law crimes because the purported electors were engaged in activity related to a federal election, though legal scholars say that rationale is a stretch. A spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said Trump’s pardon would not influence her handling of the case there, which has remained in limbo as she fights a judge’s ruling that the grand jury process was flawed.

Mayes’ office charged 18 of Trump’s allies last spring for their efforts to subvert the 2020 election and labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Mayes brought her case last year, several months after Fulton County prosecutors in Georgia charged Trump himself with orchestrating a conspiracy to corrupt the state’s election results. State prosecutors in Nevada and Wisconsin have charged people connected to Trump’s alleged conspiracy. All of the cases remain pending, though they’ve been mired in varying degrees of dysfunction and protracted litigation.

The limitation of the president’s pardon to federal crimes comes from the Constitution, which says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”

“That’s a bright line. The executive of the federal system can only issue pardons for federal crimes and not the states,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. “I think state court judges will swat them away.”

Trump has spent the first year of his second term trying to erase the stain of his failed attempt to subvert the 2020 election. That effort included a monthslong campaign to stoke distrust in the results with false claims of fraud; a bid to pressure state and local officials to block Joe Biden’s victory; a barrage of flimsy legal filings to challenge the results; and a last-ditch maneuver to lean on then-Vice President Mike Pence to use his unique role in the transfer of power to stave off Trump’s defeat.

Pence’s resistance doomed the effort, which culminated in a violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters sought to stop Congress from completing the transfer of power to Biden. Trump pardoned participants in that riot on the first day of his term in January.

But the latest pardon was aimed at those who worked to upend the transfer of power in the courts and Congress, even after all plausible pathways had been shuttered. Among those who received clemency: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, the attorneys who helped Trump devise his legal and political strategy to overturn the election as late as Jan. 6, 2021. All four were labeled unindicted co-conspirators by special counsel Jack Smith, who criminally charged Trump for the election plot in 2023 but dropped the case after Trump won a second term.

“Mayor Giuliani never sought a pardon but is deeply grateful for President Trump’s decision,” said Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman, who also said Giuliani should have his bar license reinstated. “This action further highlights the years of unjust attacks against the mayor and so many others.”

Others identified in the pardon document include former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, longtime Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and campaign attorneys Christina Bobb, Jenna Ellis and Ray Smith.

But the language in the pardon also underscores that Trump’s clemency is not limited to people named in the document. Rather, it applies to anyone who helped devise or advocate for Trump’s strategy to use fraudulent slates of presidential electors as a prong of his strategy to remain in power, as well as others who worked to “expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities” in the 2020 election.

Asked for comment on the pardons, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said “the Trump Administration is ending the Biden-era weaponization of the justice system and won’t be distracted by the meaningless opinions of those who celebrated Biden’s crusade against his political opponents.”

Mitchell, who was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia case against Trump, suggested Monday that she didn’t believe Trump’s pardon applied to her, because “I was not indicted.” But neither were the majority of figures identified in the pardon paperwork, many of whom played far more limited roles than Mitchell, who joined Trump on his infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when the president urged state officials to “find” enough votes to give him the victory.

“The pardons seem to encourage the underlying behavior — falsely seeking to overturn federal election results — in a way that could incentivize efforts to interfere with upcoming elections,” said James Pearce, a former Justice Department prosecutor and leading litigator for Smith, who investigated Trump’s 2020 alleged scheme.

Some of Trump’s allies have attempted to move their criminal cases out of state venues and into federal court, but with little success. The legal system allows defendants to move state cases to federal court when someone claims he or she was acting in a federal capacity at the time of the alleged state crime.

Indeed, some of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia case — including Meadows — attempted to do just that. In 2023, a federal judge rejected those claims and sent the case back to state court. Meadows unsuccessfully appealed that ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court declined to take up the matter.

Meadows made a similar attempt to move the Arizona case to federal court, but also came up short.

Trump’s pardon could be seen as an attempt to reverse those judicial rulings by presidential fiat.