Convicted Fraudsters and Wealthy Donors: A Look Into Trump’s Pardons

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, since the start of his second term, President Trump has pardoned more than 1,800 people. Over the weekend, Josh Nass, who’s a New York attorney and lobbyist, was charged for trying to extort more money out of his former client, Joseph Schwartz. Schwartz was a nursing home executive who had been convicted of tax crimes and reportedly paid Nass $100,000 to get him clemency. And ahead of this development, investigative reporter Kenneth Vogel spoke to Michel Martin about the emergence of what he calls a pardon industry.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Bianna. Kenneth Vogel, thanks so much for talking with us.

 

KENNETH VOGEL: Yeah, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

 

MARTIN: You know, a lot of people sort of outside of, you know, Washington, the legal affairs, et cetera, might have started thinking about pardons because one of the first things that President Trump did in his second term was, pardon all of the people who had been convicted in connection with the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. You’ve been looking at something else. You’ve been looking at something that you call kind of a growing pardon industry around this administration. How did you start looking at that and what made you think about that?

 

VOGEL: Yeah, we really started looking at this at the end of the first Trump administration, when, of course there was this struggle, including January 6th, by him and his supporters to cling to power. But at the same time, there was this sort of network of allies around him who were pushing to use this lame duck period, which they knew would be coming to an end, to position clients and allies and supporters to get clemency from Trump. Of course, it’s not uncommon for a president at the end of a term to use that period of time to pardon people in those categories because it is a controversial decision. No matter if you go through the proper channels or not, it’s gonna be controversial. And so they wait till the end of the term to do it because they think, well, I’m almost outta here. Even as Trump was protesting that he wasn’t gonna be outta there, there was this sort of machinery behind the scenes that had created a pipeline to get these pardon applications to his desk. And these were not pardon applications that had gone through the Justice Department process for the most part. They were overwhelmingly ones that were brought to his attention by allies and supporters, some of whom were getting paid to bring them to his attention.

 

MARTIN: One of the cases you highlight is that of a man named Joseph Schwartz. He’s a former nursing home executive. He paid more than a million dollars to lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, seeking a pardon. And he got one, after serving only a few weeks in prison. You report that Mr. Schwartz – you tried to reach out to him. He didn’t answer that. But tell us what this says. What does this case say about how the process is unfolding? 

 

VOGEL: Yeah. Well, his case was particularly interesting to us both because it was sort of a mystery. Like when he got pardoned, it wasn’t immediately clear as it is in some of these other cases, Oh, this person knew this person, or this person paid that person. In fact, the people who were on record, because they filed lobbying disclosure reports that revealed that they had been paid by Schwartz, were not people who we typically think of as Trump insiders. They were these right-wing operatives who were sort of conspiracists, who don’t really have the, didn’t strike us as having that kind of juice in Trump world. 

 

So we started looking around and we found that, oh, this guy went through a real trial and error process where first he pays these two sort of right wing conspiracists $960,000. It’s not working. He started paying them before he went to prison. He goes to prison, he starts paying another lobbyist who is ties to sort of pro-Israel evangelical and Jewish circles that are influential with Trump. And then that lobbyist recommends hiring two other lawyers who have ties to people inside the White House who were involved in the pardon process, including a lawyer who had represented Alice Johnson, the pardon Czar, for her clemency back in the first Trump term. And so this, it wasn’t – even after all of our reporting. It wasn’t definitively, you know, we couldn’t draw a direct line between this payment to that person, to the pardon. But it kind of offered a snapshot through which we could look at this emerging industry and the ways that different people are seeking to sort of advance clemency cases by using their connections to Trump and by crafting arguments that they think are going to resonate with Trump.

 

MARTIN: Is there something different about Trump’s first term and his second term? 

 

VOGEL: Yeah. Well, certainly it started earlier and it started with a bang, as you mentioned, with the 16 – nearly 1600 pardons of people who were convicted for charges related to January 6th. But then he very quickly pivoted and started pardoning other people who were a combination of, there were some that had sort of a celebrity link. There were some that related to causes. He pardoned these two police officers in Washington DC who had been convicted related to a chase that killed an unarmed black man. And then he, you know, moved on to pardoning anti-abortion protesters who have been convicted in relation to their activities outside of an abortion clinic. So these are sort of political cases where it’s like, okay, he’s trying to make a political point that he thinks will appeal to some element of his base.

 

But then there were others who were these two right, conservative very pro-Trump reality TV stars, Todd and Julie Chrisley. Well, that’s sort of more of the celebrity front. And then there are a host of these fraudsters, which is the most interesting one to us, because there’s not necessarily an obvious political connection. In fact, here’s an administration that is making a great political stand about cracking down on fraud. And simultaneously pardoning all of these fraudsters who were convicted. In some cases, not just of defrauding, you know customers or clients, but of defrauding the US government of Medicare fraud, of tax fraud. And he’s pardoning these people. And these tend to be the most affluent offenders who either have the connections themselves or have given money or have the resources to hire someone. So those are the ones that I’ve focused on because they’re the sort of, they play the most in my sort of specialty, my beat, which is following the money and looking at the various ways that money influences politics. And as you intimated, there is this new industry, the pardon industrial complex, that I call it that is, you know, has become in some ways a critical sort of channel for money influencing politics.

 

MARTIN: So lobbying has been a part of politics, gosh, since what, like the 1800s. Right? And the president’s pardon power is absolute. Now, I know that during the Obama administration, there was an attempt to create some sort of a system to use the pardon power to address circumstances where public opinion had changed.

But lobbying has always been a part of it. I remember there are some, during the Clinton administration, there were people who were pardoned that many people now look at that. And so what happened there? Is there something distinct, even when you think about those earlier eras?

 

VOGEL: Yes. And your question actually points to two extremes of the process. You know, Obama worked through this system, the system that was created by the Justice Department to identify and vet people who were worthy recipients of clemency, both for reasons having to do with the shifting enforcement of laws, or the shifting sort of perception of laws or shifting laws related to sentencing. The biggest group of the Obama pardons were for nonviolent drug offenses that were sort of shifting in the way that we, like, looked at the laws and enforced laws and the laws themselves shifted. 

 

And so this system was set up to kind of filter out, to identify big groups of people at the direction of the president and determine within those groups who were the ones who were sort of most worthy and least likely to recidivate. And so that’s the process. 

 

And Clinton, you know, he mostly followed the process, but he also pardoned some people who were just political supporters, or the relatives are political supporters. He even pardoned people who had paid his relatives. So it’s, that’s not too dissimilar from what we’re talking about with Trump. 

Now, the difference is that Clinton also mostly adhered to that justice department sort of funnel system that most of his clemency grants were issued through that, an overwhelming majority of Obama’s were, almost none of Trump’s are. 

 

MARTIN: So it’s a feature. It’s a feature, not a bug, is what you’re saying?

 

VOGEL: Yes. That’s a good way to put it.

 

MARTIN: So, you know, the White House has pushed back strongly on the idea that money or lobbyists are influencing these decisions. In response to your reporting, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money. And the president doesn’t even know who these so-called ‘lobbyists’ are.” And she says that “the administration has a robust pardon review process,” and that President Trump is the “final decider.” Well, we know that the president’s the final decider. That is the way the system works. As we said, the pardon power is absolute. But how do you square the rest of that, the rest of that with the patterns that you’ve uncovered?

 

VOGEL: Yeah, I mean, another difference I would say between both the traditional way that the clemency grants are sort of processed and announced versus how Trump is doing, and frankly, even different than the way that – the way that he’s doing now is different from the way he was doing his first term – was during his first term, he did announce even during this sort of spree of pardons and commutations at the end of the term, the White House would put out statements justifying almost every single one. And saying, this person was supported by these people, and here’s what they’ve done in the community and sort of making the case for it. Now, they don’t do that at all. So, you know, the White House saying that this is the result of a rigorous processes, and, you know, these people are all deserving, and the, you know, the lobbying has nothing to do with it. Well, they’re basically asking us to take their word for it. And so –

 

MARTIN: In the cases that you, some of the cases that you’ve reported on, there were victims. There were victims who were expecting restitutions. The court found that they were victims. Right. So when a pardon occurs, what happens? 

VOGEL: Yeah. It’s just, well, actually in the case of Joseph Schwartz, he did pay his restitution. One of the rare ones where he did fully upfront, but there’s certainly many others that we found where they didn’t pay their restitution. In fact, they were seeking the pardon because they were aware of the deadlines for either reporting to prison, you know, aspects of their sentence, including reporting to prison, but also the restitution that they wanted to avoid. And that restitution is wiped away. They no longer, that’s one of the elements of the sentence that is wiped away. So I’ll give an example of one that we covered early in the term. It was a guy by the name of Walczak, Paul Walczak was his name. He got a pardon, his family had been sort of moderate Republican donors in South Florida in that Trumpy scene.

 

But we learned and reported that the mother, his mother, who at one point had been in business with him, had made a $1 million donation to the Trump backed Super Pac called MAGA Inc. Which entitled her to go to an intimate dinner with around 20 donors and President Trump, where she pleaded this case and President Trump – and he had already pleaded guilty and he was waiting to report, and President Trump issued the pardon before he ever had to report. So he was spared from having pay, I think it was like $4.4 million in restitution. So, you know, that $1 million, if that was in fact what you know, got her, the audience that led to her having the successful pleading with her, that would’ve been a good investment

 

MARTIN: In this case, would you say that there’s a quid pro quo? I mean, in any of these cases, is it clear that there’s a quid pro quo or is it mainly by inference?

 

VOGEL: That’s a good question. I’m glad you brought it up. Because I don’t mean to suggest that in that case, there was a smoking gun where we had the clear causal connection between the donation and the lobbying and the pardon. It’s almost never, I mean, I have not found a case where I could definitively prove that. You know, there’s always sort of some plausible deniability and some alternate, you know, we always you know, go out of our way to capture the explanation from the White House that pushes back on that. And you know, part of the reason why we can’t definitively answer those questions about what led to it is it really is still, or like kind of a black box. It’s an opaque thing. The president is the ultimate decider as Karoline Leavitt put in the quote to us. And – there’s not like a whole lot of accountability despite Congressional efforts to try to bring it. It is really an unfettered power and one of the most sweeping ones of the president that really no one can check him on it.

 

MARTIN: It’s interesting because remember at the end of the Biden administration, the president pardoned, you know, members of his immediate family. He pardoned his son who had been convicted on gun and gun charges. His sister, for some reason. I think – he pardoned people who he said, or it was said on his behalf, he thought would be targets.

You know, what’s the sort of the discourse around pardons now, given what has transpired and just these first, this first year of this second Trump term? You said that Congress has thought about maybe trying to intervene in this, there really doesn’t seem to be any avenue for them to do so. Right. I mean, it’s a constitutional right that the president has specific to that office. And I just wondered like, what are people saying about this?

 

VOGEL: I mean, there is, there’s bipartisan legislation actually, although I point out that the Republican who spots this in the house is representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who’s sort of emerged as a bit of a thorn in Trump’s side. And willing to take him on, on an array of issues. But nonetheless, like this is regarded, I think by, you know, serious people who study this issue across the political spectrum as problematic and maybe like an increasing trend. And so that was, I think, the genesis of the objections that you saw from sort of pardon experts to the Biden pardons. I mean, I’ll separate the two and say like, you know, Hunter Biden, this is, you know, a violation of promise that president, former President Biden made to not pardon his son. And he turned around and did it anyway. And you know, the son, Hunter Biden, had committed crimes. He had pleaded guilty to crimes, tax crimes, gun crimes and –

 

MARTIN: As had some of the people President Trump pardoned.

 

VOGEL: Yes, yes. Yeah, a hundred percent. Although they were not well, I was about to say they were not directly related to – he did, pardon his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, albeit for a crime that was some time in the past. But you know, I say this, but I was saying there was sort of separate categories and there were, you know, I think a more sweeping set of objections by experts to the Hunter Biden pardon Then to the preemptive pardons of other people, you know, political allies, Anthony Fauci and others who, you know, I think it was probably fair to assume that like Trump might come after these people and that a pardon would, you know, would prevent their prosecution. And there were some people who objected. There were some experts who I talked to who said, this is an improper use of the pardon, it should be used for people who’ve actually been convicted and have served time and have shown remorse and the like, not preempt or proactively. 

 

MARTIN: Before we let you go, is there one of these cases in particular that really stands out to you?

 

VOGEL: Yeah, I mean, the woman who got two clemency grants for two different crimes is, is one. But you know, there’s certainly others where people have gone back. There was a guy, Eliyahu Weinstein, who, you know, perpetrated this great fraud and that affected a lot of people. And, you know, he went to jail and he got a commutation by Trump. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, if you read the court filings by prosecutors, they allege that he was back at another fraud using a different name. And he’s back in jail. And so the reoffenders are the ones that I think really put this in the starkest relief and show why the system and these attempts – I mean, it’s, again, it’s an unfettered, it’s an unchecked power by the president, but there was a system that was set up to try to make it easier and make it more meritorious and it’s being ignored. And I think when you see the reoffenders that really brings that home.

 

MARTIN: Needless to say, as the diligent reporter you are, you reached out to many of the people who were directly involved in these cases. The principals in some of these cases, the lawyers in some of these cases, some declined a comment, others said they didn’t benefit from the administration’s actions. In some cases there was no response at all. I know we heard from the administration what they had to say, but what about some of these people that you, who were involved in these cases?

 

VOGEL: Yeah, in a lot of cases we’ll get their allies or supporters or their lawyers saying, oh no, this was justified because, you know, this was an over sentencing or there was sort of prosecutorial misconduct or, you know, all the different ways in which the justice system can be unfair. And I don’t dismiss any of those explanations. I think that’s probably right. 

And by the way – it is probably right in a lot of cases – but it’s also probably right in a huge swath of cases of people who don’t have money, don’t have connections, and are waiting in line sometimes filing the pardon petition with the Justice Department through the normal process and never hear back at all or get rejected out of hand. And so it’s just the disparity in ability to access this, you know, presidential perk, for lack of a better word, that I think is notable and is not always sort of taken into account when you hear these explanations of why an individual did warrant clemency.

 

MARTIN: Kenneth Vogel, thanks so much for talking with us.

 

VOGEL: Thank you for having me.