US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has announced he may pardon another late heavyweight boxing champion — this time, Muhammad Ali.

The president told reporters he’s looking at “thousands of names” of people who could be granted clemency because they were treated unfairly or their sentences are too long.

He added he may seek recommendations from pro football players and other athletes who have protested racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem.

Mr Trump claimed that “instead of talk” he is going to ask protesting players to suggest “people that they think were unfairly treated by the justice system.”

The president said football players have “seen a lot of abuse” and “a lot of unfairness” and that he wants their input on his use of this executive power.

The conviction Ali, who died in 2016, would be pardoned for is evading the draft during the Vietnam War. The late heavyweight boxing champion refused to enter the military during the war, declaring himself a conscientious objector.

His decision resulted in him being convicted and stripped of his heavyweight boxing crown in 1967. But because the Supreme Court already overturned Ali’s conviction in 1971 — and he regained the boxing title in 1974 — some are finding Mr Trump’s announcement baffling.

Even Ali’s lawyer Ron Tweel said the pardon is “unnecessary” saying “there is no conviction from which a pardon is needed”.

Mr Trump already granted a posthumous pardon to boxing’s first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who was convicted of violating a law that made it illegal to transport white women across state lines for “immoral” purposes.

The woman Johnson transported, Belle Schreiber, worked as a prostitute and had been one of the heavyweight champion’s many lovers. Johnson was convicted in 1913 by an all-white jury.

Earlier this week, Mr Trump also commuted the life sentence of a woman whose cause was championed by Kim Kardashian West.

Alice Marie Johnson had spent more than two decades in federal prison on a first-time drug offence.

The 63-year-old was convicted in 1996 on eight criminal counts related to a Memphis-based cocaine trafficking operation involving more than a dozen people.

The 1994 indictment describes dozens of deliveries and drug transactions, many involving Johnson.

Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, rejected her appeals. Prosecutors opposed a pending reduction in her sentence, citing federal guidelines based on the large quantity of drugs involved.

She was not eligible for parole.

Ali was a coward. Plain and simple.