Transcript of The Art of the Pardon: How Trump Turned Clemency Into a Business

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily.

Americans are now more worried about government corruption than at any point in 2 decades.

In the final stretch of the midterm election campaign, poll after poll has found that voters are latching on to the perceived corruption of the Trump administration.

Fox News just asked voters what worries them most, and 88% said corruption in government.

36% of our respondents of registered voters say government corruption is the top issue.

And here's the killer number: 66% say Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, up from 56% last fall.

Today, my colleague Ken Vogel explores one major storyline feeding that perception: how those around the president have turned the pardon process into a business. It's Friday, October 30th. Ken Vogel, welcome back to The Daily. It's lovely to have you here.

Right. It's great to be with you.

So we know that corruption has become a major issue in these midterm elections. We've talked on the show a lot about how President Trump and his family have profited already on this presidency. His financial disclosure form showed he made $2.2 billion just last year, most of that from his crypto empire. But you, Ken, on your beat of covering money in politics have been focusing for the last year on a different way that large sums of cash have been flowing to people in Trump's orbit. And that is through something that you've come to call the pardon industry. So what is the pardon industry and how big is it?

Yeah, it's tough to measure, but it is an extremely lucrative niche within the broader influence industry here in Washington, D.C. And it is a network of lobbying and law firms and individual lawyers and consultants who have close ties, or at least advertise having close ties to the president, and charge quite large fees to wealthy people who are either charged with, have been convicted, or are serving time for crimes and want to get clemency, either pardons or commutations, in order to get their cases before the president.

So obviously, presidents have, for all of time, always pardoned people, right? So what is different about this?

Yeah, the way that Trump has approached clemency really stands out. He's largely disregarded this Justice Department process that has been set up in order to identify and vet worthy recipients who meet certain criteria, like in the case of pardons, having served their sentence and actually shown remorse, shown an likelihood to recidivate, paid back the victims of their crimes. Trump has completely set that by the wayside, and his pardon record makes clear that it's less important to show remorse and demonstrate that you're unlikely to reoffend, and more important to have connections to him and to appeal to his grievances about the justice system being unfair. And I think it also appeals to him because it is truly a monarchical power. I mean, it is derived from the royal prerogative of mercy that the king's or queen's ability to essentially wave away consequences for crimes. It's a unilateral power that he can use without any checks or balances of Congress or the justice system. I think he also enjoys sort of the reality TV aspect of it. It's a little like Oprah. You get a pardon. You get a pardon. You don't get a pardon.

A little bit of monarchy, a little bit of Oprah.

Right.

But my sense, Ken, is that these pardons have really ramped up in season 2 of Trump's presidency, but began in season 1. So can you take us back there and just describe the evolution of Trump's relationship to clemency, to these pardons?

Yeah, we saw a trickle of pardons and commutations in the early stages or mid-stages of the first Trump administration. And that was sort of unusual because typically these decisions are controversial, and presidents tend to wait until the end of their terms. Trump really embraced criminal justice reform as an issue during his first term. And this is something that was influenced by the people around him, including notably his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Yeah, just talk about that, where Trump's interest in this criminal justice reform actually comes from and how the Kushners figure into that.

Yeah, I mean, there had long been this sort of cross-partisan movement from libertarians on the right and liberals on the left to reform our criminal justice system. And President Obama did do a lot. He closed the disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine. He did a lot with clemency. But it would seem like he had some limits, that he couldn't push this too far, or it would sort of be pigeonholed as like, oh, he's the first Black president, and he's embracing this cause that sort of disproportionately affects Black people. So in some ways, Trump was like a perfect vehicle for this cause. There's already that sort of base of support. And then he also has this personal element where his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, of course, is married to Ivanka Trump. His own father, Charles Kushner, had pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, as well as a single count of retaliating against a federal witness, and also of lying to the Federal Election Commission, and served 2 years in prison before being released in 2006.

Right. So Jared is interested in criminal justice reform, in part because his own father was in in the criminal justice system, he's pushing for it.

Yeah, so he's pushing for it, but he is pushing for it in a way that leads to really a generational overhaul of the sentencing laws in the form of the First Step Act. And that did a number of things, including making retroactive that closing of the disparity between the crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentencing, as well as outlawing certain types of stacking of gun charges and also leading to early release for a number of people who had been in prison. And this was regarded as a real positive by the criminal justice reform community. And they also were cheered by some of his clemency grants, which at various points went to people who were nonviolent drug offenders and others who were regarded as being given unfairly harsh sentences.

I was once told that the only way I would ever be reunited with my family would be as a corpse.

One of those was Alice Marie Johnson.

But by the grace of God, I stand before you tonight, and I assure you I'm not a ghost.

This is a woman who— she had been serving time in an Alabama prison, a life sentence plus 25 years for nonviolent drug offenses.

Alice Johnson is the woman that Kim Kardashian advocated for to get a pardon, right?

Right. She's supported by everyone from Kim Kardashian to the Koch brothers' network to Prominent Democrats.

When President Trump heard about me, about the injustice of my story, he saw me as a person and he acted.

She was freed by a commutation from Trump in 2018, and then he gave her a full pardon in 2020, and she became kind of a poster child. She was famously featured in a Trump 2020 reelection campaign ad.

This is the greatest day of my life.

My heart is just bursting with gratitude. I want to thank President Donald John Trump.

Illustrating how President Trump had actually gotten the sentencing reform done in a way that other presidents had only talked about. At least that's how the ad put it. But then as the term went on, and particularly after Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, though he didn't actually acknowledge as He started to give more and more clemency grants to people who did not fit that mold.

We have more breaking news in tonight. The President of the United States just issuing a slew of new pardons.

Judy, the list of 74 pardons and 70 commutations included many individuals—

People who were allies, people who were donors.

Elliot Brody is pleading guilty to a back-channel lobbying campaign on behalf of a foreign government.

Including a top fundraiser for his inaugural committee, Elliot Brody.

President Trump has granted clemency to Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist.

Roger Stone and ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Paul Manafort, who was caught up in the Russia investigation.

And notably, the president pardoned Charles Kushner, father of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Charles Kushner got a pardon during this time. The elder Kushner, a multimillionaire real estate developer, There were a lot of folks here during the latter part of the presidency that started drawing both raised eyebrows and criticism that this is not what clemency was intended for. Something that we do see during this period in hindsight is the development of a different sort of approach to clemency that stems from his own experiences and radicalization during this interregnum period between his terms, when he feels as if he is being being unfairly prosecuted by state prosecutors in New York and federal prosecutors in the documents case and January 6th-related case, and believes that the entire justice system is biased against him and people like him, like his supporters. And so, I think his approach towards the criminal justice system shifts to something that is a personal and sort of political weapon that needs to be like, diffused when it comes to him and his supporters, his donors, his potential business partners. Those are the folks who became the focus of Trump's new approach to clemency.

Ken, at the end of Biden's term, we also saw President Biden give out pardons to his family, his allies. How does that figure into all this?

Yeah, I mean, Biden used clemency during his term to give second chances to people who were nonviolent drug offenders and others who would sort of fall into that category of folks who are generally deemed by the criminal justice reform community to be deserving. But towards the end, he too also gave some controversial clemency grants, including to his son, Hunter, and to other family members who he thought might also come into the crosshairs of a Trump Justice Department. And you saw some conservatives who used this to sort of preemptively justify the types of pardons pardons that Trump might give in his second term to say, well, you might be in for some further expansion of this type of activity under Trump.

Interesting. All right. So Trump takes office January 2025. You've said he's kind of been telegraphing that he is open to using clemency in perhaps a more transactional way in his second term. What do you see when he actually takes office?

As soon as he takes office, he grants the blanket clemency to nearly 1,600 people who were convicted of crimes in relation to the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and also created kind of this new de facto process that was outside of the Justice Department with his own people in the White House who were intended to be the filter for clemency grants. He named Alice Johnson, the woman who he pardoned in his first term, as the pardon czar, which is a new position. And there were people outside of the White House who realized that this was developing and had connections to some of these people. And they were quite aggressive in marketing those connections to potential pardon seekers. And we saw people who were seeking clemency from him start to hire people who were close to him or to give donations to his campaign or his super PACs. And then other people have found ways to appeal to him through media that he is known to watch, going on Fox News and making the case. And often what we find is like some combination of these things. But it's always like anytime I see a pardon grant, I'm always looking for these types of breadcrumbs.

And, you know, you're usually able to find them.

What's a good example of that? Yeah.

Yeah. One of the people who we reveal as having sort of taken advantage of the system is a woman by the name of Elizabeth Fago, who was kind of a mid-tier Republican donor in South Florida, in that Palm Beach scene. She had some connections to the Trump family. One of her sons reportedly helped Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend at the time, Kimberly Guilfoyle, buy a house in this exclusive community in Florida. Oh, wow. But her other son, a guy by the name of Paul Walzak, had pleaded guilty to tax crimes related to the nursing home empire that he ran. And she was seeking a pardon by focusing in the pardon application on her family's support for the president and donations and fundraising. And during the time when she was seeking a pardon, she received an invitation to come to this million a head fundraisers called a candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago featuring President Trump. She paid the money, she went to this dinner. Uh-huh. And these dinners are a notable lens into Trump's transactional approach to the presidency because you literally get like 20 people sitting around the table and they basically go around the room and each person talks about how great Trump is and then gets right to the chase.

Why, like what it is that they're seeking. And so Fago, basically pleads for clemency for her son. And less than 3 weeks after she attended that dinner, Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon for Paul Walczak. Whoa. And that completely spared him from ever having to either report to prison or having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution that he had been ordered to pay as part of his sentence. And we see from Instagram posts from his family that they went out and celebrated that pardon. with hats that look like the traditional red Trump hats, but they said, Make Paul Great Again.

Wow.

And this is just one example from early in Trump's second term of people who have connections to the president using those connections and using donations to try to get close to him to make their appeals directly to him for clemency. But as the term went on, we've seen this kind of metastasize into a full-blown pardon economy that caters to much wider array of people who are willing to pay enormous amounts of money to try to get their petitions in front of the president.

We'll be right back. So, Ken, you told us about the Fago case, in which she had these clear and direct ties to the Trump family, and she was able to secure a pardon for her son. But my question is, how does this flourishing pardon economy work for people who don't have those kinds of close connections to the president?

Yeah, so what we see for pardon seekers who have a bunch of money but don't necessarily have the president or his family members on speed dial is that there are a number of people, lawyers and lobbyists, who do claim to have these types of direct connections to the president or his inner circle and the ability to bring pardon petitions or clemency petitions directly to the president for the right price. And what we found is that there are a number of people who are willing to pay that price, which is often quite high.

OK, and what does that actually look like?

Well, I think a good way into this is to look at a guy by the name of Joseph Schwartz, who was sentenced to 3 years in prison for tax crimes related to this nursing home empire that he ran that had a number of problems.

Joseph Schwartz was arrested in New Jersey and faces 22 charges, most of which involve failing to pay nearly $30 million in payroll and unemployment taxes for the now-defunct Skyline Healthcare.

During the onset of this pandemic, that facility was fined for operating a makeshift morgue where 17 bodies were found His company had gotten crosswise with a number of regulators in different states, both for tax issues and also for providing insufficient care for residents. In Tennessee, for instance, he was barred from collecting Medicare reimbursements after a resident was discovered lying in feces with maggot-infested open wounds. And that resident in particular died just days later.

Whoa!

Yeah. And in 2025, he pleads guilty to tax crimes related to his failure to pay nearly $40 million in employment and payroll taxes. payroll taxes. So he ends up having to report to prison in Otisville, New York, where he's talking to other inmates about his effort to win clemency.

And what's his story? How does he go about trying to get out of jail?

So even before he goes to prison, he ends up hiring these 2 lobbyists who are well-known in right-wing circles, and they have ties to Laura Loomer, the social media provocateur who does have the ear of President Trump. Trump.

Right.

And Schwartz ends up paying these 2 lobbyists nearly $1 million. And Laura Loomer tweets about the case. Now, Loomer told me that she wasn't paid to advocate for Schwartz and that her decision to do so had nothing to do with these 2 lobbyists. And Schwartz also ends up bringing on a guy by the name of Josh Nass, who's a lobbyist who's influential in right-wing religious circles. It's not clear which of these efforts actually did the trick, but Schwartz ends up being freed from prison by a Trump pardon after just 3 weeks of his 3-year sentence.

And on what basis? Like, what were all these people arguing on his behalf?

They were arguing different things, including that he was in poor health and had paid $5 million in restitution. But a key theme of their argument was that this was a religious liberty case, suggesting that somehow his incarceration was infringing upon his religious beliefs or practice. He's an Orthodox Jew, as, by the way, are a number of people at this Otisville minimum security camp, as it's called, where he was in prison. And after he's freed, it becomes the talk of this Otisville camp. Like, how did he get this pardon? And how can we follow the blueprint that he laid out to get clemency ourselves?

Wait, does the idea that this was somehow connected to religious persecution, does that hold water?

So I don't really see any evidence of that. And to be clear, the Trump administration says that lobbying had nothing to do with this result. They generally say that about all these cases, that payments lobbyists have nothing to do with Trump's decisions to pardon someone. But in some cases, including this Joseph Schwartz one, it's tough to find another explanation for why this person was selected to receive this very rare, coveted presidential grant of mercy.

Right. And in any case, it seems that all of his efforts to kind of contact this this sprawling network of people. It worked out for him pretty well.

Uh, it worked out for him. He ended up walking free after having paid restitution amounting to only a fraction of the taxes that he had failed to pay. And in the month after he got the pardon from President Trump, he attended the White House Hanukkah party where he met Laura Loomer and thanked her for her support. But it didn't work out for everyone. The families and workers who were devastated by the collapse of his nursing homes, were left trying to pick up the pieces. And Josh Nass, the lobbyist we talked about, ran into his own trouble related to the case. The Schwartz family had paid him $100,000, but he believed he was owed another $500,000. And he was subsequently arrested by FBI agents in Manhattan. What? And accused of trying to violently extort the remaining $500,000 from the family by allegedly hiring someone to force Schwartz's son into a car with masked men to try to scare the family into paying the rest.

To get the money from Joseph Schwartz, that's what he was willing to do? That's the accusation?

That is what the prosecutors have accused him of. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Yeah, so this example shows how shady and kind of shadowy this whole underworld has really become. You have these questionable people really trading on what are tenuous connections to the president.

Yeah, I think the pardon industry has definitely attracted more than its fair share of scammers and people who are exaggerating their influence and effectiveness. But people seeking pardons have been able to enlist some true Trump insiders, including Alina Habba.

Yeah, let's, let's go there. Alina Habba being Trump's former personal lawyer. She also advised the attorney general.

Right.

Here was the absolute stunner of a headline in The New York Times tonight. A billionaire wanted a Trump pardon. His family gave Alina Habba a $50 million deal. And I'm just—

My colleague Tyler Pager recently broke a story about her work for a very wealthy Venezuelan-Italian billionaire, a guy by the name of Julio Herrera Velatini, that attracted a lot of attention.

Just walk us through the allegations that came out recently.

Yeah, it was actually during her time that she was working as a special government employee advising the Attorney General that she agreed to this contract that guaranteed her more than $50 million over 4 years from a company that was connected to the family of Herrera-Velatini, who had pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation in relation to a bribery scandal in Puerto Rico that had to do with a bank that he owned that operated there.

Can we just pause and agree that $50 million is a huge amount of money?

Absolutely. I mean, this is a person who is, at the time, working as a special government employee, which does allow her to have outside income. But $50 million is a lot of outside income. especially when it comes from someone who is interacting with or has a vested interest in the outcome of a matter that was overseen by the agency for which Alina Habba was a special government employee.

And is there evidence that this was a quid pro quo, like that it was money in exchange for this pardon?

No. And in fact, in all of these cases, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to find a smoking gun. But you do see these similar fact patterns. So in this case, Julio Herrera-Velasquez Velatini and his company hired lawyers and lobbyists who were close to Trump's inner circle. And his daughter, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to the Trump-backed super PAC. And according to The Washington Post, the family also donated to Trump's White House Ballroom Project. Wow. Then you have the hiring of Alina Habba, and a few weeks later, the pardon comes. So, right, while there's no smoking gun, there is certainly this fact pattern that leads to at least the appearance that Julio Herrera Velatini and his family have successfully spent a of money to court the Trump inner circle. Now, to be clear, the White House and Habba, who has since gotten married and taken her husband's name, have denied that she had anything to do with the pardon. The White House says that the clemency followed its standard review process, but the timing here is notable.

Right. So, no smoking gun. But if this contract wasn't about securing a pardon, what was Alina Habba supposed to be doing for $50 million?

Well, yeah, that's sort of a puzzling question, isn't it? The official explanation was that she was brought on as general counsel for this Herrera family company, but that company was only formed days before she finalized the contract. There's almost no public footprint, no track record of actual operations, and very little to document what legal services could possibly justify a sum anywhere near this amount.

Right.

And stepping back from these specific cases that we're talking about here today, Schwartz, Fogel, and her son and Herrera-Velatini, we see similar circumstances with similar outcomes. This is a phenomenon that's a lot bigger than just these cases that we're discussing.

And what do we know about how Trump feels about all of this, about what it's become? Does the president feel like he has control over it?

I mean, he is hypersensitive to the perception that people around him are making money by essentially selling access to him, whether it's for pardons or for any other sort of lobbying. And people around the White House, every time that we write a story like this, they'll come out and say that people who are spending money trying to influence the president's clemency decisions are wasting their money, and that the lobbying has no effect on Trump's approach to clemency.

I just want to step back, Ken, and ask you about how you think about the change that this pardon industry represents in the landscape of influence and money in politics. Obviously, the idea that people can buy certain outcomes in terms of policy is not new in Washington, however off-putting that may be to regular people. But what we've been talking about here is a similar process with a kind of different goal, like, a goal that is often about literally subverting justice Undoing prosecutions without saying that those prosecutions were wrong.

Yeah, that's right. It is a symptom of the transactionalism of the Trump administration that has created this entire economy around it. And the goal of the economy is to essentially negate results of the justice system. And so the result of this is essentially wiping away away consequences for the defendants or the inmates in some cases, and also wiping away payments that would've been penalties to them that would've been used to make their victims whole. It's also notable that some of the people who have gotten pardons or clemency grants have gone out and reoffended and been charged again.

Wow.

Then another thing that Trump has shown is that the clemency power can be used to make political points or to demonstrate, like, we think that this particular area of the law on criminal prosecutions that was prioritized by a past administration is not the way to go, and we are going to work to undo what their Justice Department did. So it's not difficult to imagine a future president seeking to undo what the Trump Justice Department did with its prosecutions.

Ken, you've been covering all of this, you know, really since Trump's first term. And it has seemed, I think, to a lot of people as though these stories about money-making around the president, by the president, his allies, his family members, that they've really only started to break through in polls relatively recently as a top issue. And I'm wondering why. What about this moment is making all this resonate more?

Yeah, I mean, part of it definitely is the calendar as we approach the midterms and with a historically unpopular president. But part of it is also that these news stories are just piling up, these revelations about these eye-popping sums of money. I mean, more than $1 billion that the president himself has made just from his crypto ventures and people in his inner circle signing these huge contracts, $50 million. That's huge figure with people and entities that are trying to win special favors from the government that aren't available to regular people who are just worried about filling up their gas tanks to get to work and putting dinner on the table for their families. It's quite a contrast.

And if Democrats do take the House, maybe the Senate, if there are investigations launched into some of this, Where does Pardon Inc. fit into all that?

Oh yeah, it'll definitely be a big focus for Democrats. We already see some Democratic members of Congress who have written letters and have demanded information. But, you know, there's only so much information that you could get when you don't have subpoena power, which comes from having a majority in one or both chambers. I mean, I think we can expect the pardon economy and the pardon industry to be right up there with some of these other issues that Democrats are going to be looking at if they take one or both chambers in the next Congress.

Well, Ken, thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, Republican officials called for an investigation into Democrats' secret effort to confuse voters in Alaska by recruiting a candidate with the same name, Dan Sullivan, as the Republican Senate who's up for election on Tuesday. That effort, which was designed to help the Democratic Senate campaign of Mary Peltola, prompted Alaska's governor and a top Republican in Congress to call for official inquiries into what happened. But Democrats were quick to point out that stacking a ballot is both common in American politics and, in their telling, entirely legal. And a Times investigation has found that a Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with the CEO of the tech giant Nvidia, Jensen Huang, was found to be passing intelligence to the Chinese government. President Trump, who's a close ally of Huang's, was briefed about the situation and about the risks it posed, but chose not to do anything with that information. Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Lexi Diao, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Liz O'Balen and Paige Cowitt, contains music by Brad Fisher, Elisheba Ittoop, Marian Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Wonderly. Special thanks to Tyler Pager and Maggie The Daily's studio support team is Maddie Maciello, Nick Pittman, Kyle Grandillo, Effyem Shapiro, and Samantha Winter. Our radio team is Jodi Becker, Rowan Nimistow, Diane Wong, and Catherine Anderson. Alexandra Lee Young is our deputy executive producer. Michael Benoit is our deputy editor. Paige Cowitt is the editor of The Daily Show. And I'm Alex Blumberg. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick and to the founding editor of the show, Lisa Tobin. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroweff. See you on Sunday.