WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s pardons for more than 1,500 criminal offenders could save the group more than $1 billion in fines and restitution payments they’d been sentenced to pay.
Democratic staff led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on the House Judiciary Committee tallied up what the pardon recipients still owed the government and their victims. The biggest sums were owed by Trump campaign donors convicted of financial crimes.
Advertisement
“Not only has President Trump issued an unprecedented number of pardons in his second term, he has used his clemency powers to take an estimated $1.3 billion away from victims and survivors of crime, allowing perpetrators to keep profiting from their crimes – a sharp break with established practice,” the Democrats wrote in a memo Tuesday.
The shocking $1 billion figure was first reported last month by Liz Oyer, a former Justice Department pardon attorney fired by the Trump administration, in Oyer’s telling because she wouldn’t sign off on restoring gun rights for movie star Mel Gibson. The Democrats essentially confirmed Oyer’s calculation, showing their math in a five-page table.
On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters who’d been sentenced for crimes connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, part of Trump’s own conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Those offenders owed $3 million in restitution for their attacks on police.
Advertisement
Trump has since issued a series of pardons to white-collar criminals who also happen to be his political supporters and campaign donors.
The most valuable pardon is likely the one for Trevor Milton, who prosecutors said should pay nearly $676 million in restitution to investors in Milton’s sham electric truck company. Milton had been sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison; a judge hadn’t signed off on the restitution amount at the time of Trump’s pardon in March, though restitution in such cases is usually based on the amount stolen.
Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to Trump’s presidential campaign last year, and Milton was represented in his criminal case by an attorney who has also represented the Trump Organization, as well as Brad Bondi, the brother of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Trump claimed Milton had done nothing wrong.
Advertisement
Normally, people who ask the president for clemency are supposed to have paid restitution.
“The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to its victims are important considerations,” the Justice Department’s standards manual says in its section on pardons. “A petitioner should be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication.”
The expectation that pardon-seekers ask forgiveness and pay restitution is just another standard of governance Trump has thrown out the window.
“President Trump’s corrupt pardon spree is a massive, undeserved giveaway to high-rolling fraudsters, crooked politicians, violent extremists, and fanatical and unrepentant cop beaters,” the Democrats wrote in their memo.
Advertisement
