The Pardon Racket – The Dispatch

On Tuesday he granted clemency to Timothy Leiweke, a real estate developer accused of rigging the bidding process to build a sports arena in Texas. Leiweke was facing up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine; his former firm, which he left earlier this year, has already paid $15 million for its own role in the scandal.

The standard excuse whenever the president issues a pardon that seems inexplicable is that, as in Cuellar’s case, he’s supposedly correcting an injustice perpetrated by the Biden “deep state.” Renegade Democratic prosecutors brought charges for improper partisan reasons, supposedly, so it’s incumbent upon Trump to right the wrong they’ve done.

The interesting wrinkle about the Leiweke case is that it wasn’t Joe Biden’s Justice Department that indicted him. It was Trump’s. The charges were brought in June. Pam Bondi appointed the U.S. attorney who oversaw the prosecution.

What’s the rational explanation for the president pardoning a defendant whom his own team saw fit to pursue?

Something similar happened last month. In April, Joseph Schwartz was sentenced to 36 months after pleading guilty to two counts in a $38 million employment tax fraud scheme related to nursing homes he operated across the country. The acting U.S. attorney at the time for the district that secured the conviction was none other than ubiquitous Trump crony Alina Habba, who celebrated the news in a DOJ press release.

Seven months later, on November 14, the president granted Schwartz a full pardon. Why?

Less than two weeks after that, he commuted the seven-year sentence of David Gentile, a former private equity executive. Gentile was indeed prosecuted by the Biden “deep state”—but convicted after an eight-week federal trial of having defrauded “thousands of investors in a capital funds scheme totaling $1.6 billion.” He served just 12 days before Trump sprang him; under the terms of the commutation, Gentile is no longer required to pay the $15.5 million in restitution he owes to the many people he scammed, some of whom lost their life savings.

Probably his most infamous pardon of the past month was the one he issued to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was sentenced last year in Manhattan to 45 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle huge amounts of cocaine into the United States. That too was a victory for the Biden administration but one enabled by Trump: It was a little-known federal prosecutor in Manhattan named Emil Bove who led the investigation into Hernández during the president’s first term.

None of the four tiers of corrupt clemency I described neatly explain any of these. Each defendant is wildly unsympathetic and has no compensating partisan valence that might cause Republicans to rally behind them. If anything, Trump stands to lose more politically than he’ll gain by setting them free. Going easy on Hernández ruins his “tough on drug smugglers” credibility, for instance, while going easy on rich scammers like Gentile spoils his populist pretensions about looking out for the common man.

For once, the answer to the question of “What’s in it for me?” isn’t obvious. Or is it?

Realistically there are only two possible explanations for the latest clemency. One is that Trump is so obsessed with discrediting American justice that he’s now pardoning rich crooks randomly, implying that the law is so broken that even the fattest of fat cats aren’t getting a fair shake from it anymore. Including when his own administration is in charge of it.

And there might be something to that. A guy who was indicted four times and may yet be indicted again someday for his manifold corruption as president has a reason to want Americans to view all prosecutions of politicians (well, almost all) as presumptively biased and illicit. Last year Semafor’s Dave Weigel dubbed Trump’s “monomyth” the belief “that the justice system he’s tangled with throughout his business and political careers is crooked, picking favorites and treating its enemies unfairly.” Maybe the recent white-collar pardons are just another means to that end.

But I think that theory proves too much. After all, Trump doesn’t need to spend political capital on figures as repulsive as Hernández and Gentile to make the point that the system is rigged. He can do that (and does do it) by occasionally granting clemency to Democratic officials like Cuellar and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who come with a built-in base of support and whose partisan “enemy” status sharpens Trump’s critique of the legal process. The message from those pardons is that if someone who hates, and is hated by, the left as much as the president nonetheless feels obliged to reprieve some of his political opponents from American justice, that justice must really be rotten.

Simply put, he can discredit “the system” without making needless political trouble for himself by pardoning fraudsters and drug smugglers.

Which brings us to the second theory: There must be money changing hands at some point in this process. We’ve reached the inevitable “selling pardons off the back of a truck” phase of the criminal syndicate that is the Trump presidency, perhaps, and rich crooks are taking full advantage.

In fact, we probably reached it some time ago. 

“Seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump has become big business for lobbying and consulting firms close to the administration, with wealthy hopefuls willing to spend millions of dollars for help getting their case in front of the right people,” NBC News reported—in May. One presidential ally told the outlet at the time that “it’s like the Wild West” in that “you can basically charge whatever you want.” Two sources claimed to have heard of one person offering a lobbying firm $5 million to get their application for mercy in front of the president.

Would it surprise you to learn that Joseph Schwartz paid nearly a million dollars to two lobbyists for the purpose of “seeking a federal pardon”? That was money well spent, it turns out.

Other recipients of executive clemency have also ponied up, although in some cases they’ve bypassed the middlemen and cut a check to Trump’s operation directly. Shortly before Election Day last year, for instance, Trevor Milton made the best investment of his life by donating $1.8 million to one of the president’s campaign funds. Later, in April, a nursing home executive convicted of tax fraud named Paul Walczak was pardoned three weeks after his mother, a lavish Trump fundraiser, attended a $1 million-per-person event at Mar-a-Lago that guaranteed face time with the president. The resulting clemency wiped out more than $4 million that Walczak owed in restitution.

There’s no proof that Leiweke, Gentile, or Hernández greased any palms, but it would be surprising if they—or any other person of means—declined what appears to be an open invitation to federal convicts to purchase their freedom. (Trump crony extraordinaire Roger Stone admits to having brought Hernández’s case to the president but claims not to have been compensated for doing so.) “The pardons Trump is handing out are a huge, growing scandal that not enough people are talking about,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy asserted on Wednesday. “This is a money-making operation—for Trump, his family, his crypto pals, and the Trump-affiliated lobbyists and grifters who the pardon-seekers pay.”

It sure does smell like a money-making operation. But I’m not as confident as Murphy seems to be that the president himself is making bank off of it.

In late October, Trump granted an unconditional pardon to Changpeng Zhao. Zhao is the billionaire who founded Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange; he served four months in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. Notably, Binance “donated software to … help the Trump family venture launch a cryptocurrency” last year, enabling what may be the most brazen and lucrative self-enrichment scheme in the history of American government.

That pardon seems easy to explain. Zhao did the president a favor and the president remembered. Yet when CBS News asked Trump about Zhao’s pardon last month, he answered, “Are you ready? I don’t know who he is.”

And you know what? For once, I believe him.

I think it’s perfectly plausible that Trump is signing these fat cat pardons as favors, not to the applicants themselves but to the cronies who are acting as conduits. He might sincerely not know who Changpeng Zhao is because he has no need to know; all he would need to grant him a pardon, perhaps, is for some trusted crony—perhaps one of his sons—to bring him Zhao’s application and say, “We owe this guy and he’s making it worth my while.” Done and done.

Conceivably the president himself might get a cut of the “fee” that was paid to put that application in front of him, but we needn’t assume that. Maybe he’s just happy to let his courtiers wet their own beaks from the pardon process as a reward for their loyalty to him and an inducement to remain loyal. Think of it as a mafia don letting some of his goons make a few extra bucks by running their own little racketeering scheme on the side. 

Morally, it shouldn’t matter if Trump himself is profiting materially from the pardon racket. Either way, the man in charge of federal law enforcement would be facilitating bribery, and doing so in an exceptionally grotesque way by abusing a power that was granted to him by Article II to rectify injustices. Selling clemency to millionaire fraudsters is about as far from the Founders’ vision—and from populism—as one can get.

But legally and politically? Stare down the road a bit and you can already see what’s coming.

At some point next year, some newspaper will get the goods about convicts buying their way out of federal prison sentences. The new House Democratic majority will be reluctant to impeach, fearing that getting bogged down in another hyperpartisan tussle will slow their political momentum and divert the party from its winning message on affordability. But the facts will leave them no choice: Bribery is one of two crimes specifically named in the Constitution as an impeachable offense, and the idea of a massive bribery ring being run out of the West Wing will be so outrageous to rank-and-file Democrats and most independents that Hakeem Jeffries and his conference will be forced to proceed.

Then we’ll have a long, very stupid hair-splitting national debate over the precise degree of Trump’s culpability. He’ll claim absurdly not to have known about the payola happening all around him; Republicans will be forced to pretend to take that seriously. If evidence emerges that he did know, the defense will shift to whether there’s any hard proof that Trump himself took money for the pardons. I can already hear Ted Cruz: “The Constitution says bribery is impeachable, not that suborning bribery is.”

Senate Republicans will rely on that sophistry to acquit Trump after he’s impeached. The president can’t sell pardons off the back of a truck, we’ll be told, but if he’s merely driving the truck that his associates are selling pardons from? That doesn’t sound like a “high crime or misdemeanor” to me.

I wouldn’t fault House Democrats if they decided not to bother. As politically painful as that would be for them (“What did we elect these people for?” the plaintive Resistance libs will cry), it’s preposterous for the opposition party to try to jump-start popular moral indignation about Trump’s pardon racket through impeachment. The reason the president feels comfortable in the first place granting clemency to flagrant scumbags in broad daylight is because he’s concluded Americans don’t really care, and all available evidence bears that out.

Impeachment would be a wrenching effort to try to make them care. And to what end? We’ve been through it twice before and look where we are now, back in a sickening moral slum—by choice.
Practically everyone who’s observed Biden’s and Trump’s acts of executive clemency over the past year would agree in principle, I suspect, that the pardon power needs to be abolished or radically reformed. Yet despite that being so, there’s zero political momentum to actually make it happen, which is all anyone really needs to know about the extent of modern America’s civic decadence. Rank, rampant corruption? Why, there’s simply nothing to be done.