Op-Ed

Clemency for Sale

Trump's pardons have erased nearly $1.7 billion owed to victims and taxpayers — and the through-line, again and again, is money and loyalty.

By USANewsOne Staff Writer

Published

The pardon power is the closest thing an American president has to a king's mercy: absolute, unreviewable, answerable to conscience alone. Which is exactly why it is so telling to watch what this president does with it. Trace his pardons and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with mercy and everything to do with who paid, who lobbied, and who stayed loyal.

Start with the ledger. Salon, reviewing the second-term record, reported that Trump's clemency has forgiven nearly $1.7 billion in financial obligations owed by convicted defendants — roughly $1 billion of it restitution meant to compensate victims. For scale, the same accounting put George W. Bush's total under $1 million and Obama's at $23 million. Trump's first term came to nearly $195 million. His second-term figure is not a step up; it is a different universe. Every dollar erased is a dollar a defrauded investor or a robbed employee will never see.

Now look at who got the mercy. According to the Campaign Legal Center, Nikola founder Trevor Milton — convicted after investors lost hundreds of millions — donated nearly $2 million to pro-Trump committees before his pardon. Nursing home executive Paul Walczak was pardoned days after his mother reportedly attended a $1 million-per-plate Trump fundraiser, wiping out roughly $4 million in restitution tied to diverted payroll taxes. Financier Jason Galanis, who defrauded the Oglala Sioux Nation, had paid only $2 million of an $80 million restitution order before clemency arrived. Crypto figures whose companies enriched the Trump family's own ventures found relief too. The lobbyists working these cases, the group found, charged as much as $600,000.

Defenders call this the president's prerogative. Legally, the pardon power is nearly limitless — but that is a description of its scope, not a defense of its abuse. A power without legal check is precisely the power most governed by norms and conscience, because nothing else restrains it. When a president converts that power into a fee-for-service window — donate here, hire this lobbyist, attend that dinner, and your penalty disappears — he has not exercised a prerogative. He has monetized justice itself.

Think about what that does downstream. Restitution is not a technicality; it is the law's promise to victims that the person who robbed them will be made to pay. Every one of these pardons breaks that promise, and breaks it selectively — for those with money and access, never for the poor defendant with no super PAC to fund and no Trump-connected fixer to hire. The result is a two-track system of American justice: consequences for the powerless, a purchasable exit for the connected.

That is the corruption, and it is worse than any single deal or coin, because it strikes the rule of law directly. A government that sells absolution is no longer administering justice; it is running a marketplace and calling it mercy. The founders handed the president the pardon power trusting he would use it as a check on injustice. This president turned it into a revenue center — and left the victims, once again, holding an empty bag.

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