A Pay-to-Play Lobbying Market Formed Around Trump's Pardon Power

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A distinct industry has grown up around President Donald Trump's use of the clemency power in his second term: lawyers and lobbyists who advertise their connections to the White House and charge convicted or indicted clients large fees to seek a pardon or commutation. Federal lobbyists disclosed receiving more than $2.1 million in 2025 from people seeking clemency—a figure reporters describe as an undercount, because much pardon work is done by lawyers who never register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The pattern was documented in detail by Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker and by a Reuters investigation, and has been corroborated by reporting in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NBC News, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as federal lobbying disclosures.

The White House rejects the premise. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that anyone spending money to lobby for a pardon is wasting it, and the administration maintains that Trump personally reviews each request and that money plays no part. Supporters frame the second-term grants as undoing what they call the prior administration's politicized prosecutions. Those defenses are weighed against the cases below.

The White House Weighed a Mass "250 Pardons for 250 Years" Grant for July 4

In June 2026, White House officials were discussing whether to mark the country's 250th anniversary over the July 4 weekend with a mass grant of clemency, an initiative described internally as "250 pardons for 250 years." The Atlantic, citing 14 people familiar with the conversations, reported that the plan would place one of the presidency's most contested powers at the center of the semiquincentennial. The Wall Street Journal had reported a month earlier that roughly 250 pardons were under consideration, and The Atlantic reported that some Trump allies had pushed for a mass-pardon announcement for more than a year—coming close in 2025 before a planned announcement was abruptly halted. The initiative was supported by "pardon czar" Alice Marie Johnson and Justice Department pardon attorney Edward R. Martin Jr.; advocates framed it as linking the July 4 theme of freedom to correcting overly punitive sentences and the "weaponization" of justice by Trump's predecessors, and as reinforcing an image one person close to the White House called "Trump the merciful." A White House official said the proposal had not been presented to the President as of late June and might never reach him, and his advisers were divided over whether a mass pardon would help him politically or backfire amid weak approval ratings and softening Republican support in Congress—Republicans had balked the prior month at a Justice Department plan to pay $1.776 billion to people claiming to have been targeted by the government, and some warned mass pardons could complicate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's contentious confirmation. Leavitt said the President takes his constitutional pardon authority seriously and that a review process involving the Justice Department and White House Counsel's Office evaluates every request before it reaches his desk.

Word of the possible announcement intensified the lobbying market. Attorneys and lobbyists said they had been inundated with pardon requests—one criminal-defense lawyer called the scramble "a three-ring circus", and a former administration official called it "batshit crazy"—and people loosely connected to the administration, some with no legal or lobbying background, said they had been told they could earn millions by using their access to move a case. The going rate to facilitate a pardon was described as $1 million to $2 million, and higher for difficult cases; one prominent white-collar defense attorney told The Atlantic, "It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon." Some established defense lawyers said they refused to keep advising clients pursuing pardons in ways a future Justice Department might view as a felony. One attorney said there had been discussions involving "very rich, well-placed individuals" from India, Greece, Turkey, and France who were told their cases were under consideration. Liz Oyer, the former pardon attorney, said the President had turned the process "into the Hunger Games." Leavitt said the President finds it detestable that anyone would try to profit from pardons. People who had spoken with the White House said that applicants sentenced by judges appointed by Barack Obama or Joe Biden were described as more favorable candidates than those sentenced by Trump-appointed judges; two administration officials said candidates charged under mandatory-minimum firearms statutes were also under consideration.

Three people reported to be under consideration illustrate the range of cases. Jho Low (Low Taek Jho), the Malaysian financier accused of masterminding the theft of more than $4.5 billion from the state fund 1MDB, was charged in the United States in 2018 but has never been tried, having spent roughly a decade as a fugitive; he filed a pardon application in 2026. Pras Michel, of the Fugees, was sentenced in November 2025 to 14 years after his 2023 conviction for conspiring with Low in a back-channel campaign to shut down the U.S. 1MDB investigation and for funneling foreign money into a U.S. election. Nicole Daedone, co-founder of the "orgasmic meditation" company OneTaste, was sentenced in March 2026 to nine years for a forced-labor conspiracy that prosecutors said coerced vulnerable women into unpaid and sexual labor; attorney Alan Dershowitz has said he is seeking clemency for her. After The Atlantic's report, a White House official said the three were not on the pardon team's radar, and lawyers for Michel and OneTaste said they had had no contact with the government about clemency.

In the end, the mass grant did not materialize. What arrived instead, on the eve of the holiday, was a batch of 11 pardons—described in the next section—and Trump's Truth Social claim that he was freeing people "persecuted by the Biden administration" who were imprisoned for "fixing their car." CBS News reported that clemency for further high-profile figures remained under consideration after the holiday.

The Actual July 4 Batch: Clean Air Act Violators and Donor Adam Kidan

On July 3, 2026, Trump pardoned 11 people, most of them convicted of violating the Clean Air Act. Nine—Joshua Davis, Matt Geouge, Jonathan Achtemeier, Tim Clancy, Ryan and Wade Lalone, Barry Pierce, Aaron Rudolf, and Mackenzie Spurlock—had been convicted in cases involving tampering with vehicle emissions controls or selling "defeat device" parts that bypass them, mostly on diesel trucks. Trump wrote on Truth Social that the recipients had been persecuted by the Biden administration and were in, or headed to, prison "for 'fixing their car,'" declaring, per an Associated Press account, "I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW!" Margo Oge, a former director of the EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality, told The Washington Post that the pardons "don't just forgive a paperwork violation — they reward people who ran businesses stripping pollution controls off diesel trucks for profit," and that the defeat devices released nitrogen oxides that worsen asthma and drive up heart attacks and hospitalizations. The batch appears to be the first mass clemency specifically nullifying environmental-crime convictions, and it fits a broader retreat from environmental enforcement: a month earlier, ProPublica reported that the office of Deputy Attorney General (now Acting Attorney General) Todd Blanche had ordered prosecutors to shut down a criminal Clean Water Act investigation of Southern Coal and other mining companies controlled by the family of Republican Senator Jim Justice.

The batch's most scrutinized name was Adam Kidan, a former business partner of the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Kidan pleaded guilty in 2005 to federal wire fraud and mail fraud conspiracy charges arising from his and Abramoff's fraudulent 2000 purchase of the SunCruz Casinos gambling-boat fleet; he was sentenced in 2006 to 70 months and released in 2009. SunCruz's seller, Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, was murdered by a Mafia hitman in Fort Lauderdale in February 2001, and a mob associate of Kidan's later pleaded guilty in the killing. The Florida Bulldog reported that the full pardon wipes out both Kidan's felony status and the $21.7 million in restitution, plus two decades of interest, that he still owed Boulis's sons—and that Kidan's name does not appear in the Office of the Pardon Attorney's clemency database, suggesting the request went directly to Trump rather than through the formal process. Kidan is also a major donor: The Washington Post reported he has given nearly $4 million to Republican campaigns and committees since 2017, including Trump-aligned ones; the Florida Bulldog itemized more than $1.13 million from Kidan and his wife to Trump's campaign and supporting committees in the 2024 cycle, nearly $1 million more in the 2025–26 cycle through June 30, and $48,000 to Byron Donalds's Florida gubernatorial bid. Kidan, who now runs the staffing firm Empire Workforce Solutions, is a Mar-a-Lago member—the Bulldog reported a roughly $700,000 initiation fee in 2023—and held his February 2023 wedding there, attended by Trump and Melania Trump. Former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade, commenting on the batch, said Trump "uses the pardon power to normalize fraud and corruption."

The eleventh recipient was Jack Harvard, a former mayor of Plano, Texas, convicted of bank fraud in the 1990s; a White House official said Harvard had "turned his life around," raising endangered animals on his ranch and letting U.S. and NATO troops train on his land free of charge. The Post noted the wider context: legal experts said Trump's second-term clemency—more than 1,500 January 6 pardons on inauguration day, followed by grants to politically connected figures ranging from George Santos to Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández—has bypassed the traditional vetting in which the Justice Department recommends only applicants who completed their sentences and showed contrition. Trump issued 238 clemency actions in his entire first term; by mid-2026 his second-term total already ran to roughly 1,700.

An Informal Network of Influencers Has Replaced the Justice Department Review

For more than a century, pardon applications ran through the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, which applied guidelines such as a five-year waiting period after conviction and a showing of remorse. A Reuters investigation published June 11, 2026, based on a review of records for more than 1,700 second-term clemency actions, found that 96 percent of recipients did not meet those guidelines, compared with fewer than 1 percent under Biden and 14 percent during Trump's first term. Reuters identified 290 advocates who intervened 624 times on behalf of 197 successful recipients—documenting some 650 connections between recipients, their lawyers, and administration insiders—and found that 73 advocates helped secure more than one grant. Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney now in private practice, was involved in at least 12 grants; Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, in at least five. At least 110 of the advocates were known Trump allies, and 11 had themselves received clemency from Trump in his first term.

The "Bobby" of the investigation's headline is Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Reuters reported that days before pardoning Nikola founder Trevor Milton in March 2025, Trump telephoned Milton, told him the consequences he faced for defrauding investors "were unfair," cited Kennedy's support for clemency, and instructed him to "call Bobby and thank him"—an episode that captures how the deciding voices are now personal intermediaries rather than Justice Department reviewers. (Milton's donations and erased restitution are detailed below.) Reuters also reported that Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder serving a 25-year fraud sentence, has a clemency petition pending.

Advocates and consultants described a hybrid path that combines personal appeals, well-connected intermediaries, political donations, and a narrative of victimization by Biden-era prosecutors. Six people familiar with recent clemency actions told Reuters that intermediaries with proven access to the President's circle can charge as much as $2 million, though the news agency could not establish what any individual advocate charged. Sam Mangel, a Florida clemency consultant who said he had worked on 10 successful cases and was pressing about 20 more, described the task as building a story that resembles the President's own experience with prosecutors and getting it to the White House counsel; he said he typically charges tens of thousands of dollars.

Registered lobbying, the conventional route, has largely failed. Reuters found only two successful recipients who disclosed hiring registered lobbyists, at a combined $2.7 million, while another 26 people spent nearly $1.9 million on lobbyists without obtaining clemency. The White House reiterated that anyone paying to lobby for pardons is wasting money. Federal Election Commission records reviewed by Reuters showed that 10 recipients, advocates, and their companies donated more than $10 million to Trump-related political funds before and after clemency decisions; it is not a crime for a president to pardon a donor absent an explicit agreement to exchange money for clemency. Ty Cobb, a White House counsel during the first Trump administration, told Reuters that nothing but "money, praise, partisanship and relationships" now determines who receives a pardon.

Some of the most effective advocates have themselves been pardoned. Stone, pardoned in 2020 after his conviction for obstructing a congressional inquiry, has promoted recipients' cases on his conservative radio program and said he received no payment for his advocacy. Angela Stanton King, a conservative author pardoned in 2020, said her value lay in her access and relationships. Several influencers told Reuters their outreach included contact with Trump family members; a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said he had not advocated for any pardons during his father's second term.

The investigation had congressional consequences: in mid-June 2026, Democrats on congressional committees opened an inquiry into what they called "pay-to-play" pardons, pressing the administration and specific pardon recipients for records about payments and intermediaries, The Washington Post reported. As a minority-party inquiry it carries no subpoena power, and the White House has dismissed the criticism.

Rod Blagojevich, Pardoned by Trump, Was Paid to Lobby Trump for Anne Pramaggiore's Pardon

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was convicted in a corruption case that included an attempt to profit from filling Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat. He had his 14-year sentence commuted by Trump in 2020, following a yearslong campaign for his release, and received a full pardon in February 2025. He then set up a lobbying practice—and in December 2025 filed paperwork with Congress to lobby Trump on behalf of another convicted figure, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne Pramaggiore. To accept the work, federal lobbying records show, Blagojevich had to disclose his own legal status, noting that the president had pardoned him for all convicted offenses.

Pramaggiore was one of the so-called "ComEd Four," convicted in 2023 of conspiracy and falsifying records in a scheme to win favorable legislation by funneling payments to allies of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. She was sentenced in July 2025 to two years and reported to a federal prison in Marianna, Florida, in January 2026. Seeking to avoid that term, she also turned to lobbyists. The New Yorker reported that she paid nearly $500,000 in lobbying fees, including roughly $230,000 to Blagojevich; earlier filings reviewed by other outlets showed at least $130,000 to Blagojevich and $170,000 to the firm Crossroads Strategies. Blagojevich insisted to reporters that Pramaggiore is innocent and a victim of prosecutorial overreach.

Her case is also the strongest argument against treating every pardon bid as corrupt. On April 14, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ordered Pramaggiore and co-defendant Michael McClain released and granted them new trials, after the Supreme Court narrowed the federal bribery statute. She won relief on the legal merits, through the courts, not the White House. The appellate panel was careful, however, in a 16-page opinion released in June 2026, to say it was not declaring the defendants innocent, only that their convictions were flawed; whether to retry the pair was left to the U.S. Attorney.

Lobbyist Ches McDowell Won a Pardon for Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao

Ches McDowell is a North Carolina lobbyist and a close friend and hunting companion of Donald Trump Jr. His firm, Checkmate Government Relations, reported roughly $22 million in lobbying revenue in 2025—up from $70,000 the year before—with a client list spanning corporations such as Eli Lilly and Philip Morris alongside the detention-center operator GEO Group and the Sports Betting Alliance. A Bloomberg Government analysis found the firm's federal revenue jumped more than 31,000 percent, the steepest rise on K Street.

McDowell's signature clemency win was a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao had pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program—lapses that, prosecutors said, allowed illicit funds to move through the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance paid $4.3 billion in penalties, one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history; Zhao paid a $50 million fine and served four months. Binance brought Checkmate on in late September 2025, and the firm disclosed being paid $450,000 for roughly four weeks of work it described as lobbying on "executive relief" and crypto policy. Rather than route the request through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, McDowell raised Zhao's case directly with Trump in the Oval Office in October, after Donald Trump Jr. walked him in following a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony for Charlie Kirk; the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump agreed to sign the pardon that afternoon and formally did so a week later. McDowell told the Journal that Trump Jr. had left the room when he brought up Zhao, that he was not paid a success fee, and that he and Trump Jr. were simply leaving that day for a hunting trip. Trump himself said he did not know who Zhao was and that he understood Zhao to be a victim of a Biden prosecution.

The pardon drew scrutiny because of the Trump family's own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and a reported $2 billion investment in Binance that used the family firm's stablecoin. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the pardon an example of corruption; Leavitt said it reflected Trump ending the prior administration's "war on cryptocurrency." World Liberty Financial said it had no role in the clemency process, and Zhao has said no deal existed and that he never spoke directly with Trump.

Lobbyists Like Adam Katz Cold-Call the Convicted, Charging $1 Million Up Front and $1 Million on Success

Some lawyers and lobbyists reach out, unsolicited, to people who have been indicted or convicted and have money, promising to make their legal problems disappear. One prominent defense lawyer told The New Yorker that essentially all of his clients have been approached by such operators; another described a standard pitch built on naming White House contacts and asking for a million dollars up front and another million on success. Lobbyists have separately told the Wall Street Journal that million-dollar fees have become standard, with some would-be recipients offering success fees as high as $6 million.

Among the better-connected practitioners is Adam Katz, whose Trump-world ties run through friendships with Andrew Giuliani and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, and who has represented Rudy Giuliani and done work touching Trump's own litigation. NBC News has identified Katz, alongside former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman, as among the figures who have secured clemency for clients; Reuters counted Tolman's involvement in at least 12 grants, more than any other advocate it identified. Working with Stefan Passantino, a former deputy White House counsel, Katz has pursued pardons by casting clients' prosecutions as politically motivated—an argument tailored to Trump's stated grievances rather than to the facts of a case. In these arrangements the formal review process is treated as beside the point; what is being sold is proximity to the president.

Fred Daibes Paid $1 Million for a Pardon and Never Got One

Fred Daibes, the New Jersey developer convicted of bribing former Senator Bob Menendez with cash and gold bars, paid $1 million to Javelin Advisors—the firm of Keith Schiller, Trump's longtime bodyguard and former director of Oval Office operations—and registered the lobbying issue as "executive relief." Daibes began serving a seven-year sentence in 2025, and no clemency has followed. An attorney working on his behalf said Daibes had stopped working with Schiller and Javelin by mid-2025. As an NBC legal analyst noted, in this market "executive relief" is Washington-speak for a pardon or a shortened sentence.

Pardon Lobbyist Joshua Nass Was Charged With Trying to Violently Extort His Own Client

Joshua Nass had been paid $100,000 to lobby for clemency for Joseph Schwartz, who had built the Skyline Healthcare chain to roughly 95 nursing homes across 11 states before it collapsed in 2018, leaving residents in crisis. Schwartz had pleaded guilty to a $38 million employment-tax fraud scheme—diverting payroll taxes withheld from his workers rather than remitting them to the IRS—and was sentenced in April 2025 to three years in prison, a $100,000 fine, and $5 million in restitution. Trump pardoned him in November 2025, erasing the federal prison sentence and, ProPublica reported, likely the government's ability to recover the rest of the unpaid taxes; the pardon did not reach a separate Arkansas state conviction for Medicaid fraud. In March 2026, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York arrested and charged Nass with attempted extortion, alleging that he recruited an "enforcer" to threaten and physically harm a former client and the client's son to collect a $500,000 balance he claimed he was owed. According to the FBI affidavit, Nass agreed to pay the informant to assault the son and told him not to behave like "a human being" toward the target. Nass, who faces up to 20 years if convicted, was released on a $5 million bond; ProPublica reported that the unnamed victim's circumstances match those of Schwartz.

Trump Pardoned Tim Leiweke Three Weeks After a Golf Round With His Lawyer, Trey Gowdy

Former Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, now a Fox News host, played golf with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on November 16, 2025 and raised the case of his client, entertainment executive Tim Leiweke. Leiweke had been charged by Trump's own Justice Department with rigging the bid for a $375 million University of Texas basketball arena—a case a senior antitrust official had called "airtight." Gowdy sought a nonprosecution deal; about three weeks after the golf round, and before Leiweke stood trial, Trump granted him a full pardon. Gowdy told the Wall Street Journal he never asked for a pardon and was grateful Trump let him raise the matter.

Trump Sidelined the Justice Department Process and Routed Pardons Through the White House

The official clemency machinery has been reconfigured. Trump created a new "pardon czar" position in February 2025 and named Alice Marie Johnson to it—herself a clemency recipient, freed in Trump's first term from a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense after Kim Kardashian lobbied on her behalf. Ed Martin became pardon attorney after his nomination to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia stalled in the Senate; reporting indicates he has limited criminal-law background and was sidelined within the process, though both Martin and Johnson backed the "250 for 250" mass-pardon push. According to people familiar with the operation, the real gatekeeping runs through the White House counsel's office—deputy counsel Sean Hayes and counsel David Warrington—and ultimately chief of staff Susie Wiles. Reuters reported that Hayes has personally called recipients' attorneys to discuss pardons, sometimes before a formal application was filed. A tally by former pardon attorney Liz Oyer found more than 20,000 clemency requests pending, far above the level at the end of the Biden term. Three people told Reuters that some senior aides, including Wiles, have pressed for a pause in clemency before the 2026 midterm elections out of concern that further criticism could hurt Republicans; a White House official disputed that Wiles sought a slowdown. The public flow of pardons slowed in early 2026 before the July 3 batch.

Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer Was Fired After Refusing to Restore Mel Gibson's Gun Rights

The dispute that cost the career pardon attorney her job involved not a pardon but the restoration of gun rights. Oyer, appointed under Biden in 2022, was placed on a working group assembling a vetted list of people whose firearm rights might be restored. After she submitted the list, she was asked to add the actor Mel Gibson, a Trump friend who had lost his gun rights after a 2011 no-contest plea to a domestic-violence misdemeanor and who, unlike the others, had not been individually vetted. According to a Senate Judiciary Committee account, an official in the Deputy Attorney General's office told Oyer that Gibson's personal relationship with Trump should be a sufficient basis for the recommendation and that she would be wise to make it.

Oyer declined, citing the risks of returning firearms to people with histories of domestic violence. She was fired in March 2025—by the New Yorker's account, the same day she submitted a memo that did not recommend Gibson. The Justice Department subsequently restored Gibson's gun rights under Attorney General Pam Bondi, and sent armed marshals to Oyer's home with a letter warning her against testifying to Congress, which she did anyway. A senior Justice Department official has denied that Oyer was pressured to recommend Gibson or fired over the matter.

Oyer has since become one of the most prominent critics of the system she once administered. On her Substack she maintains a running tally of the financial penalties erased by Trump's clemency grants, calculating that in his first year they wiped out roughly $1.5 billion in fines, restitution, and forfeitures. PolitiFact, examining an earlier version of the figure, found the arithmetic plausible while cautioning that the single largest component—roughly $676 million sought from Trevor Milton, the Nikola founder convicted of defrauding investors with false claims about his hydrogen- and electric-truck company—was a prosecution request a judge had not yet finalized. Milton was sentenced in 2023 to four years but never served a day, remaining free on appeal until Trump pardoned him in March 2025, months after Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to a pro-Trump committee; the pardon erased the restitution owed to his defrauded shareholders, and it was Milton whom Trump, by Reuters' account, personally called to credit "Bobby" Kennedy for the clemency. By comparison, Oyer calculated, the recipients pardoned by Biden across four years owed about $688,000 in total. The July 3, 2026, pardon of Adam Kidan added another $21.7 million in erased restitution—money owed not to the government but to the sons of a murdered fraud victim.

Assessment

The competing frames each have support. The administration's position is that the President exercises a constitutional power at his discretion, that no money buys a pardon, and that many grants correct genuine prosecutorial excess; Pramaggiore's court-ordered new trial is a reminder that at least some clemency seekers had legitimate legal grievances, and the White House can note that the feared mass "250 for 250" grant did not in fact occur. Against that stands the record assembled in lobbying disclosures, a Reuters review of more than 1,700 clemency actions, and other corroborated reporting: seven-figure facilitation fees, "executive relief" as a registered lobbying issue, a pardoned ex-governor selling access, a $1 million fee that produced no pardon for Daibes, a broker charged with extorting his client, a career pardon attorney dismissed after refusing a favor for a presidential friend, and now a July 4-eve batch in which a roughly $4 million Republican donor—who apparently never filed with the pardon office—walked away from a $21.7 million restitution debt to a murder victim's family. As NYU law professor Rachel Barkow described it, the President has used clemency as a carrot-and-stick tool that rewards loyalty and punishes perceived enemies; commentators across the spectrum have gone further, with Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast devoting a June 2026 episode to ranking the administration's corruption scandals—the pardon market among them—and calling this "the most corrupt administration in American history," a characterization Thompson noted some conservative commentators have echoed (that is commentary, not a finding). Congressional Democrats' pay-to-play inquiry will test how much of the market can be documented under oath. A presidential pardon is not subject to court review and, once granted, cannot be revoked.