How Does a Fed.Law Breaker Gets a Pardon from Trump

By Jeffrey Toobin

Jeffrey Toobin spoke with more than a dozen lawyers and lobbyists involved in the pardon process.

New York Times 

Josh Nass, a lawyer and lobbyist based in New York and South Carolina, shared a warning for those seeking clemency in Donald Trump’s Washington. “There are a lot of bad actors out there, promising prospective clients that they can get pardons,” he said in the first of a series of phone calls starting in March. “You have people who are in desperate straits, and they get taken to the cleaners by people who wind up doing nothing for them.”

 

Nass is just 34, but he has an old-school ability to talk fast, drop names and make connections. He’s known for having good contacts among both Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians. “Republican candidates come to me to introduce them to Republican Jewish donors,” he told me. Recently, though, high-profile people have sought him out for another purpose: Nass has become one of the throng of lawyers and lobbyists who are selling themselves as pardon brokers. “The upside of these pardons is so great,” he said. “People will do anything to get one.”

Late last year, Nass successfully represented Joseph Schwartz, the owner of a chain of nursing homes who was serving a three-year sentence for a $38 million tax fraud at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., in his quest for a pardon from Trump. (On a federal lobbying disclosure form, Nass reported that Schwartz paid him $100,000.) Word of Nass’s success soon spread at Otisville, a common destination for those convicted of white-collar crimes, and he was inundated with prospective clients. 

He told me that he arranged to meet a representative for one of them in the lobby of a New York hotel on a Saturday morning this year. “So I go down to the lobby, and I’m expecting to meet with this person,” he recalled, “and instead of one person, I see that there is this delegation of about 12 to 14 people from the family of this guy who is in jail. They surround me and start screaming at me — in Russian — that they need to get their guy a pardon. They were so frantic. They promised me a million dollars, up front, in cash.” Nass said he turned it down (in fluent Russian).

After Nass and I had spoken a few times, I mentioned that I would be spending the next weekend in Las Vegas. Nass said he would be there, too, and it happened that we would be staying at the same hotel. We agreed to meet, and I texted him on Friday afternoon to figure out a time. When I didn’t hear back, I wrote it off to the many temptations of a visit to the city.

As it turned out, F.B.I. agents had arrested Nass in Manhattan that day on charges of attempted extortion of the Schwartz family. According to the criminal complaint, Nass hired a Brooklyn man — who turned out to be working for the government — to demand that Schwartz’s son pay Nass an additional $500,000 for securing the pardon for their father. If the son didn’t pay, according to the complaint, Nass encouraged the man he hired to get rough, saying he did not want him to behave “like a human being” with Schwartz’s son. After spending the night of his arrest in jail, Nass was released on bail. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Schwartz pardon is one of more than 50 for white-collar offenders that Trump has doled out so far in his second term — well more than any other recent president. The quasi-royal quasi-selling of indulgences has created an extraordinary free-for-all as supplicants try to make their cases in any way they can. According to a tally by Elizabeth G. Oyer, who was the pardon attorney in the Biden administration, there are currently more than 20,000 clemency requests pending at the Justice Department, compared with about 5,000 at the end of the Biden administration. (The catchall term of clemency includes pardons, which invalidates a criminal conviction, and commutations, which free a recipient from prison but leave intact the conviction.)

In theory, the process for clemency works the same way in the Trump administration as it has in other recent presidencies. Individuals are supposed to submit written applications to a dedicated office in the Justice Department overseen by the pardon attorney, typically an apolitical appointee. That office passes its recommendations to the White House, where a group of staff members usually reviews the applications. Their views are then conveyed to the president, who makes the final decision. 

According to two people familiar with the process, the reviewers in the Trump administration include David Warrington, the White House counsel; his deputy Sean Hayes; and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff. “The president is going to take Susie’s advice over David’s every time,” a lawyer for a successful pardon applicant said, sharing his understanding of the current dynamic. “David has taken the position of trying to be no-drama. He doesn’t want to cause problems, and the knives have not come out for him because he goes about his business that way.” (This lawyer and several others involved in the pardon process spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing confidential relationships with the White House.)

In past presidencies, the Justice Department generally selected pardon applicants who had completed their sentences and acknowledged wrongdoing, and it typically sought the views of the prosecutors who brought the cases. But Trump has remade the clemency process, just as he has transformed so many other norms and customs of the presidency. Sometimes he grants pardons to people who never applied through the Justice Department; at other times, he decides on a pardon without first getting a recommendation from his committee of White House advisers. Trump has dispensed pardons in an ad hoc bazaar, where those seeking his favor struggle — and spend millions — to get their cases before him with a winning argument.

This has led to the creation of a shadow industry in Washington of supposed pardon whisperers — lawyers, lobbyists and at least one “yoga influencer” — who promise prospective clients that they have the juice to produce pardons, for a fee. “I heard the rate was $500,000 down, nonrefundable, with a $2 million success fee if the pardon comes through,” one lawyer, who is considering submitting a pardon request for a client, told me. “Now I’m told it can be $2 million down and $5 million for the pardon.”

With that kind of money to be made, it’s easy to see why Nass and others decided to add pardon-seeking to their menu of services — whether they can ultimately deliver results or not. In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote: “The White House has a rigorous pardon review process which includes the White House Counsel and the Department of Justice, and ultimately the President as the final decider. Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money.” Nevertheless, the pardon industry is flourishing. By now, nearly a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the rules of the game have become clear. What has emerged is a sort of common law of Trump pardons, as those who pay attention learn how to argue and to whom.

The pardon power is an anomaly in the Constitution, which is based, for the most part, on the concept of checks and balances among the branches of government. The president wields the pardon power alone, and neither Congress nor the courts can compel a pardon or overturn one. It is the presidential prerogative most directly descended from the power of the kings of Britain. Because pardons are under the sole control of presidents, they operate like X-rays into the souls of those who hold the office. Pardons reveal presidents for who they really are. 

The most famous pardon in American history was granted in 1974, when President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon. Ford sprung the news on an unsuspecting nation in a speech on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 8, just a month into his presidency. A man of high character but low political instincts, Ford said he thought the pardon would allow the nation to move on from the trauma of Watergate. Instead, it had the opposite effect. Ford’s popularity, which had been high, plummeted, and the pardon might have cost him the 1976 presidential election. The fallout led to an era of caution among his successors, leading presidents to group their more controversial acts of clemency toward the end of their terms, when they would no longer face political accountability.

Jimmy Carter promised, during the 1976 campaign, to pardon Vietnam War resisters who fled to Canada, and he kept that promise as soon as he took office, but he otherwise issued few high-profile pardons. The same went for Ronald Reagan, but not for George H.W. Bush, who pardoned officials convicted in the Iran-contra affair because he held a grudge against their prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, whom Bush believed had undermined his re-election bid in 1992. Bill Clinton led a more chaotic White House than most, especially in the last days of his presidency, and that led to a hasty and unwise pardon of Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who had fled to Switzerland rather than face racketeering charges in New York. (The pardon drew near-universal condemnation and led to a congressional investigation of Clinton.)

After that, George W. Bush mostly stayed out of the clemency business. He even poisoned his relationship with his vice president, Dick Cheney, when he agreed only to a commutation, but not a pardon, for Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby, who had been convicted of obstructing an F.B.I. investigation of a press leak. (Trump later pardoned Libby.) Bush was so offended by the lobbying for last-minute pardons as he prepared to leave office that when he accompanied his successor, Barack Obama, in the limousine ride to the Capitol for his inauguration, he offered one piece of advice: Announce a pardon policy early in your term, and stick with it.

Obama granted few pardons until his second term, when his administration started what it called the Clemency Project, in which volunteer lawyers helped federal prisoners, mostly low-level drug offenders, apply for pardons and commutations. This orderly and open process resulted in roughly 2,000 acts of clemency. Unique among recent presidents, Obama never used his pardon power to help friends or allies.

Joe Biden also granted clemency to a substantial number of low-level offenders, but he marred the final days of his term with pardons that reflected his fears of retribution from Trump’s Justice Department. He pardoned his son, Hunter, who had been convicted of a gun offense in their home state of Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax crimes in California, and on his last day in office, he issued pre-emptive pardons to five other relatives, who had not been charged with anything. 

None of these men wielded the pardon power as aggressively as Trump. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump concluded his first term by displaying all the flaws of his predecessors. Like George H.W. Bush, Trump took revenge on a prosecutor who investigated his administration, pardoning those who were charged by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Like Bill Clinton, Trump rewarded friends and allies. In those last days, paid and unpaid lobbyists for white-collar criminals leveraged their contacts at the White House to produce several dozen pardons and commutations.

On his first day back in office, after winning re-election in 2024, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise to pardon nearly 1,600 people who were charged or convicted in connection with the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He then quickly turned to granting individual pardons, and it became clear that this time around he intended to use the pardon power in a transformative new way — to pay more political debts, to reward more cronies and to display a more shocking and direct level of corruption.

Trump signaled the direction he wanted to go on pardons last May, when he named a loyalist, Ed Martin, as pardon attorney. The president first nominated Martin to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, even though Martin had no prosecutorial experience and was known principally for his role as a leader in the Stop the Steal movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and as a lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants. As acting U.S. attorney, he wrote a letter to the dean of Georgetown University’s law school threatening that the Justice Department would refuse to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown because of the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

Martin’s past views and conduct were so extreme that he was unconfirmable for the permanent post, even in the Republican-controlled Senate, so Trump gave him the pardon job as a consolation prize. Last year, after Trump pardoned a longtime supporter and former Virginia sheriff named Scott Jenkins who had been convicted in 2024 of conspiracy to commit bribery, Martin explained the decision, and summed up his philosophy about pardons, with a post on X: “No MAGA left behind.”

Trump also created a White House position known as the pardon czar and appointed Alice Marie Johnson to it. In 1996, Johnson was convicted of participating, as a low-level figure, in a cocaine conspiracy in Tennessee and sentenced to life in prison. In Trump’s first term, her plight drew the attention of Kim Kardashian, who lobbied the president on Johnson’s behalf. (Kardashian has said that her husband at the time, Kanye West, had opened the door for Johnson’s clemency with his public support for Trump.) Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence after she had served 21 years, and then, after she spoke in support of him at the 2020 Republican National Convention, he pardoned her. 

Johnson has described her job in the White House as finding others who had been punished in a similarly excessive way and recommending them to the president for clemency. To date, Johnson’s influence seems limited. Since 2016, Trump has pardoned dozens of people convicted of white-collar crimes like fraud but few who were, like Johnson herself, low-level participants in narcotics conspiracies.

For pardon seekers, then, the question became which of the two — Martin or Johnson — offered the best route for success. According to people who have engaged in the process, the answer appears clear: neither.

“The safe thing to do is go through the formal application process,” the lawyer for a successful pardon applicant told me. “You file the papers with Ed Martin’s office, and you make sure Alice Johnson knows it’s there. But they don’t have the power to deliver anything. They can give you a sense of how things stand, but they are not deciders.”

ImageA photo illustration, with a background of financial ledgers and Bitcoins, of two hands shaking. Three $100 bills are being passed between the hands, and a pair of handcuffs is open and poised to clasp one of the wrists.

Credit...Photo illustration by Ryan Haskins

So who are the deciders, at least before Trump himself gives the final verdict? In any given case, the chaotic structure of the Trump White House might produce a different answer. Indeed, according to people who have been involved in the process, there is often a desperate search for ties, however tenuous, to any of the leading players. “Everyone knows Trump often listens to the last person who talked to him,” a consultant for a pardon seeker said. “So the goal is to get to as many people in the room when he’s thinking about pardons.” 

One lawyer hired one of Martin’s friends from his home state of Missouri to help with a pardon application. Still others have apparently consulted the Dhillon Law Group, the firm founded by the right-wing activist Harmeet Dhillon, who is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights; David Warrington, the White House counsel, was a partner at the firm before he joined the administration. (The firm did not reply to a request for comment.) “It’s all about getting one of them to read your application and take an interest in it,” the consultant said. “One client hired a yoga influencer who said she could get us in the door,” another told me, adding that the influencer boasted of inside access to pardon deliberations in the White House. “It didn’t help,” the lawyer said.

In 2024, Arthur Aidala, a prominent New York lawyer, signed on to represent Carlos Watson in his effort to obtain clemency. Watson, who had started a media company in California, was charged by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn with falsifying financial records to defraud investors and lenders. He was convicted and sentenced to 116 months in prison. “We were going through the process,” Aidala told me. “The message that we got was, ‘Trump wants to know what Alan thinks.’”

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School emeritus professor, occupies a rarefied place in Trump’s orbit. During Trump’s first term, he helped defend the president in his first impeachment trial in the Senate, and as Trump prepared to leave office, he represented several clients who won clemency. According to Aidala, Dershowitz addressed the White House questions about the Watson case, and Watson was granted a commutation just hours before he was supposed to report to prison on March 28, 2025. (A White House official familiar with the pardon process disputed this description of Dershowitz’s role.)

These days, at age 87, Dershowitz no longer represents applicants directly and doesn’t lobby, but he does do consulting work for lawyers seeking clemency for their clients. “On several occasions, President Trump and others in the White House have called me for my opinion about various legal issues,” Dershowitz told me, declining to specify which ones.

Lawyers like Dershowitz are not required to reveal their fees on federal disclosure forms; only lobbyists have that legal obligation. But many lawyers are also lobbyists, and the line between the two functions is less than clear. Compliance with the disclosure rules is also known to be spotty. In other words, in the current pardon gold rush, it’s likely that clients have paid millions of dollars to brokers that have never been reported to the government. 

At times, the origin of a pardon can be identified with precision. Last year, Trump’s own Justice Department charged a real estate developer named Timothy Leiweke with conspiring to steer bids to his company in connection with the construction of a $375 million basketball arena at the University of Texas. The charges could have landed him in prison for 10 years. According to The Wall Street Journal, on Nov. 16, Trump played golf in Florida with Trey Gowdy, a former congressman from South Carolina, a current Fox News contributor and an attorney for Leiweke. Trump asked Gowdy if there was anything he could do for him, and Gowdy brought up Leiweke’s case. Three weeks later, Trump pardoned Leiweke, even though he had not yet gone to trial. “I am extremely grateful that the president allowed me to raise that issue with him,” Gowdy told The Journal.

Pardon recipients’ personal politics don’t necessarily matter, as long as they have — or obtain — the right connections. P.G. Sittenfeld was a liberal Democratic member of the Cincinnati City Council who was the target of an F.B.I. sting operation involving pay-for-play campaign donations. In 2022, he was convicted of bribery and attempted extortion and sentenced to 16 months in prison. Lawyers from the powerhouse firm Jones Day, including Noel Francisco, Trump’s first-term solicitor general, and other officials from Trump’s first and second administrations, signed on to handle Sittenfeld’s appeal pro bono, according to ProPublica. One afternoon last May, Sittenfeld was at home getting ready to take his 5-year-old son for an outing when he got a call from his lawyer: He had been pardoned. Sittenfeld hadn’t submitted a written application for a pardon, but he later explained in a letter to family and friends that his case “came on the radar of the WH counsel’s office.” Nevertheless, he told me, “no one on planet earth was more surprised by my pardon than I was.”

According to lawyers and lobbyists who have interacted with the administration about pardons, there is one category of crimes that appears to be off-limits for clemency: those having anything to do with sex. This would seem to rule out pardons for the Alexander brothers, real estate brokers based in Miami and New York who were convicted this year in a series of sexual assaults on clients and colleagues.

They reached out to a Florida Jewish group that has been influential in clemency petitions in other cases, and they are said to be actively seeking pardons for themselves. A reluctance to wade into sex cases may be why Trump has apparently ruled out clemency for the musician Sean Combs, who was convicted last year of prostitution-related offenses in New York. “I was told they were not going to touch anything sexual,” Nass told me in March.

When the president issues a pardon, the responsibility for the actual pardon documentation generally falls to the White House counsel’s office. The wording of a pardon can determine its financial consequences on issues like restitution, with millions of dollars at stake. According to a computation by Oyer, the former pardon attorney, Trump in his second term has already collectively given his clemency recipients as much as $1.5 billion in relief from restitution and fines. (By contrast, Biden’s acts of clemency over four years forgave less than $700,000 in potential penalties.) 

The White House has denied that campaign contributions can buy pardons, but they certainly don’t hurt. Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing employees’ tax payments, received a pardon last April just three weeks after his mother reportedly attended a $1 million-per-person fund-raiser for a Trump super PAC at Mar-a-Lago. Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, was charged in 2022 in a bribery scheme and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. While Herrera was awaiting sentencing in 2024, his daughter donated $2.5 million to a super PAC devoted to Trump. Then, in January, Trump pardoned Herrera before he was sentenced.

Lawyers with ties to the pardon industry have developed clear ideas about how much, and how recently, supplicants for pardons need to pay to play. As one lawyer recounted: “One prospective client walked me over to a picture that was hanging on the wall of his parents’ house, and it was a very dated picture of his mother and President Trump. The guy said, ‘We were sponsors at the Miss Universe pageant when he bought it.’ I said I didn’t think that was the kind of relationship that was going to move the needle.”

The case that most clearly established the template for how to get a pardon in Trump’s second term was that of Trevor Milton. In a way, Milton’s criminal case was a routine, if especially high-dollar, white-collar fraud case. “This is Trevor Milton,” the prosecutor, Nicolas Roos, told the jury when Milton was tried in Manhattan in 2022. “He committed fraud. He repeatedly lied to investors about his company, and he made a billion dollars by doing so. He started a company that was supposed to make zero-emission trucks, and he lied about all the important parts of the business.” He lied about how, and whether, the trucks worked, and most of all, “he lied to dupe innocent investors into buying his company’s stock, so the stock price would go up, all so he could profit big time.”

That’s a fair summary of the story of Milton’s Phoenix-based company known as Nikola. Like Trump, Milton had a history of dubious dealings, a relentless Twitter habit and an aversion to acknowledging bad news. Unfortunately, what Milton did not have was a zero-emission truck that worked — as became apparent from the government’s first witness, a contractor for Milton’s company. He described a promotional video that displayed a Nikola truck streaking along a beautiful Western road under a cloudless blue sky. The problem? According to the witness: “The truck was towed to the top of a long hill with a kind of shallow slope and allowed to coast down the hill under the influence of gravity, and that it was filmed with camera angles to make it look like it was traveling at a high rate of speed down level ground.”

As the story unfolded before the jury, it became clear that Nikola had thrived, for a time, thanks more to Milton’s skill at selling dreams than building trucks. (At the big media unveiling of the truck, the model was nonfunctional and plugged in with a hidden power cord so the lights on the dashboard would work.) Still, Nikola at one point in 2020 was worth upward of $30 billion, more than Ford, with Milton’s own stake in the company worth roughly $8 billion. 

But the end came swiftly after Hindenburg Research, a firm that spots targets for short-sellers, released a report that September, claiming that “Nikola is a massive fraud constructed on dozens of lies.” Milton promptly resigned, was indicted months later in the Southern District of New York and was ultimately convicted on three of four counts of fraud. In December 2023, he was sentenced to four years in prison and a $1 million fine. The prosecution also asked that Milton be forced to pay $661 million in restitution to Nikola’s duped investors.

At that point, the presidential election was less than a year away, and Milton decided to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump. He started the old-fashioned way — with cash. Milton, who was then 42, began making much larger political contributions than ever. In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, he donated nearly $1 million to political action committees supporting Trump and $750,000 to a committee for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who endorsed Trump when he ended his own campaign. Milton also gave several hundred thousand dollars to various Republican candidates and state committees around the country.

Just as important, Milton portrayed his prosecution as a vendetta against him by the Biden administration. “Biden’s Justice Department is the one who attacked me,” he told a television news reporter. In a later interview with Tucker Carlson, he made an even closer connection between his own ordeal and Trump’s: “It was the same people that came after him came after me.”

After Trump returned to the White House in 2025, his first group of pardons paid political debts. In addition to the Jan. 6 rioters, there were pardons for 23 anti-abortion protesters who had been convicted of obstructing clinics; two Washington, D.C., police officers whose case became a cause célèbre on the right after they were charged in the death of a Black suspect; and Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who had cannily become an outspoken Trump supporter.

But the pardon for Milton, on March 27, 2025, was among the first for someone without a prominent public profile. Crucially, too, the wording of the pardon was such that Milton was not only excused from serving any prison time and paying his fine, but he could also avoid paying any restitution to his victims; that potentially saved him (and cost his investors) hundreds of millions of dollars. Notably, the prosecutors in the Milton case were never asked whether they thought clemency was justified. This, too, would become a pattern. The views of prosecutors, especially if the cases took place in the Biden era, have rarely been sought, much less heeded. 

The pardon for Milton was so unexpected, and his fraud was so enormous, that reporters asked Trump about it at a news conference. Trump gave the following answer: “Highly recommended by many people, that was taken advantage of. He did a business deal, like in Utah, as I have it. I think he was exonerated, and then they brought him into New York, where he had a rough, rough road. He was exonerated. It was a big celebration. Again, I don’t know him, but they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was, he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. And when I heard about it, I said, ‘Nope — not going to happen.’ They persecuted, they destroyed five years of his life.” Trump went on, “He did nothing wrong.”

The president’s answer was factually incorrect: Milton had never been exonerated in any forum. The rote recitation by Trump that a prosecution under Biden was “unfair” or a “witch hunt” became a touchstone in later pardons. Such claims by the president, invariably offered without supporting evidence, have served to justify a range of pardons, including one for a financial fraud case against Devon Archer, a onetime business associate of Hunter Biden’s, and another for Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. As Jackson, the White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Times this year, Trump wants to “pardon victims of political prosecution or overprosecution by a weaponized Biden D.O.J.”

Trump’s pardons reflect his evolving political — and personal — agenda. When Trump ran for president again in 2024, he promised that he would become “the crypto president,” and the industry invested more than $100 million across his campaign and those of other pro-crypto candidates. Shortly after his inauguration in 2025, Trump began to prove his bona fides to his crypto supporters by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, a libertarian darling and the founder of Silk Road, a dark-web marketplace that operated with cryptocurrency.

Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 of a variety of charges, including money laundering, drug trafficking and computer hacking. He was sentenced to life in prison. When Trump freed him, he said that he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her that he had issued the pardon “in honor of her and the libertarian movement, which supported me so strongly.” The president called the federal prosecutors in the case “scum,” noting they were “some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me.”

In his current term, Trump hasn’t just paid back the crypto industry for its political support. The president’s sons have become major players in crypto, and Trump’s pardons have served their personal financial interests as well. Last October, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and other crimes. He had already completed his four-month sentence, but the pardon allowed him to pass regulatory hurdles in re-establishing his business. “Ross was the biggest outlaw in crypto, so we knew that the pardon of him was a nod to the crypto industry, saying that the Biden war on crypto was over,” a participant in the effort to help Zhao told me. “Our argument to the White House was: ‘You want to be the crypto president, and pardoning C.Z. is a way of establishing your legacy.’”

Asked on “60 Minutes” about the pardon, Trump said, “I don’t know the man at all.” He described the case against Zhao as “a Biden witch hunt” — again asserting without proof that the prosecution was unfair. But if the justification for the Zhao pardon was opaque, the benefit to Trump has been clear. Since being pardoned, Zhao has re-entered the crypto industry, formed an alliance with the Trump family’s business interests and even spoken at Mar-a-Lago.

The nation’s most famous crypto criminal — Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX — has been campaigning for a pardon after being convicted of fraud in 2023 and handed a 25-year sentence. Posting from prison through proxies on social media, Bankman-Fried has become a vocal Trump supporter, but his high profile may be working against him. Indeed, his campaign for a pardon seems to have created a rare moment of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, as both Democrats and Republicans have denounced the idea. In an interview with The Times in January, Trump said he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried.

Trump’s dozens of pardons are just one of several moves by the administration indicating a newly permissive environment for white-collar crime. For starters, fewer federal prosecutors are bringing fewer cases against fewer white-collar defendants. At the Justice Department, more than 3,000 of its nearly 13,000 lawyers have quit or been fired since the beginning of 2025. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the Justice Department has closed thousands of white-collar and other investigations and ordered its prosecutors to focus instead on immigration violations.

In mid-May, The Times reported that the Trump administration plans to dismiss a major bribery prosecution, brought in the final days of the Biden presidency, against Gautam Adani, a billionaire businessman from India. Of course, the president who has overseen this change in priorities was himself convicted of a series of white-collar crimes in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case in Manhattan in 2024.

And many of the white-collar criminals who’ve received clemency, like Trevor Milton, took the gift from the president as a chance to pick up where they left off. After receiving his pardon, Milton made the rounds of MAGA-friendly interviewers, including Tucker Carlson, recounting his tale of how Biden’s prosecutors corruptly pursued him and destroyed Nikola. He even produced a Hollywood-style documentary about his ordeal, called “Conviction or Conspiracy: The Trevor Milton Saga,” which has more than 28 million views on YouTube. (The film does not mention his campaign contributions to Trump.) 

Putting to work some of the millions of dollars he did not have to pay in restitution to his victims, Milton and his partners have bought a company called SyberJet, a previously dormant private jet company that he promised to revive with “superadvanced technologies.” In a video posted on X, Milton said, “The guys that were really good and honest, I was able to bring those guys over from Nikola.” The new model of Milton’s plane is supposed to be available in five or six years.

With the old team reunited, Milton is promising investors that his new business will be run just like his last one. “I get to transform the aviation industry,” he said, “like I got to do for the transportation industry.”