The Clemency Cash Register

In April 2025, a woman named Elizabeth Fago sat down to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The ticket was $1 million a plate. The President was the speaker. Her son, Paul Walczak, had just been sentenced to 18 months for stealing $10.9 million in payroll taxes from the nurses and aides at his nursing homes and spending it on a $2 million yacht.

Weeks later, Walczak had a full pardon. No prison. The $4.4 million he owed in restitution, gone. His own clemency application, per The New York Times, pointed out that his mother "has raised millions of dollars for Trump and other Republicans." That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the pitch he made.

You know how this feels because you've paid a parking ticket. You paid it because you had to. The people in this newsletter did not have to, because they knew someone, and that someone had a price.

Start with Milton. He was convicted in 2022 of securities and wire fraud for lying to investors about trucks that did not work. Four-year sentence. In September and October 2024, while free on appeal, he wrote checks: $750,000 to the MAHA Alliance, $920,000 to the Trump 47 Committee, another $284,500 to the RNC across three transfers on the same day. I pulled those from the FEC's own database. They are not disputed.

On March 27, 2025, he got a pardon. Two weeks earlier, prosecutors had asked the court for $680 million in restitution to the shareholders he lied to, plus $15.2 million to one man he defrauded directly. The pardon made the request moot. Nobody has to prove the check bought the pardon. You just have to look at the sequence and ask whether a trucker in Ohio who lost his 401(k) on Nikola stock would have gotten the same call returned.

Then Changpeng Zhao. The Binance founder pleaded guilty in a $4 billion money-laundering case. The company paid, per the Judiciary report, $260,000 to lobby the White House on "executive relief." Meanwhile Binance was building the infrastructure for World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture, and an Emirati fund bought a $2 billion stake in Binance using that venture's stablecoin. Pardon: October 2025. The Wall Street Journal reported the Trump family has cleared at least $1.2 billion from the crypto business. What is proven: the plea, the lobbying filing, the pardon. What BTP is arguing: that a president whose family gets rich from a company should not be the one deciding whether its founder is forgiven.

The thing that turns "weird" into "system" is that the market got organized. The Judiciary Democrats' August 21 staff report, built on lobbying disclosures and court records, describes intermediaries charging "as much as $2 million per engagement," lobbying firms fielding offers up to $5 million, and one $30 million proposal to spring a crypto defendant. Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney, is tied to at least a dozen second-term pardons. Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, two men you may remember from staging fake sexual-assault accusations against Robert Mueller, reported $3.2 million in lobbying revenue.

None of that is illegal on its face. Hiring a lobbyist is legal. Donating is legal. The pardon power is nearly absolute. That is exactly why it works. Every individual step is clean and the sum is a cash register.

The White House's answer, from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on May 7: anyone spending money to lobby for a pardon is "foolishly wasting their money," because the review process is "robust." Look at the review process. The career pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, was fired. Her replacement, Ed Martin, announced a philosophy of "No MAGA left behind" and, by the report's account, left nearly 14,000 ordinary applications sitting. Martin left the job on August 21, the same day the report dropped. Trump said he's going "outside to fight Legal Battles" for the midterms. The people with lobbyists never needed that office. The people without them had nowhere else to go.

Joseph Schwartz owned more than 90 nursing homes through a company called Skyline. He pleaded guilty in April 2025 to withholding $39 million in payroll taxes, got three years, and served three months before a November 2025 pardon. He had paid more than $1 million to lobbyists from prison, per ProPublica and The Washington Post. One of his hired hands, Joshua Nass, has since been charged with extortion.

Here is the deeper line. In Arkansas, the family of Doris Coulson, who died of aspiration pneumonia in a Skyline home in 2016, won an $18.9 million judgment in 2020. The family of Zelma Grissom, who died of sepsis and bedsores, won $15.7 million in 2023. Amount collected on both: zero. More than a thousand Skyline employees had over $2 million in health insurance premiums taken from their paychecks and never forwarded. One of them ended up with $50,000 in medical debt. The pardon did not erase those debts. It erased his.

I spent twenty years inside campaigns watching who got a call returned and who got a form letter, and the difference was never the merits. CLC reports that defense lawyers now can't get wealthy clients to take reasonable offers, because the clients think a donation is the better bet. They are not wrong. That is the insight into why Trump does this: it is not that he believes these men are innocent. It is that forgiveness is the one thing only he can sell, and he has never met an asset he wouldn't monetize.

What is alleged, and should stay labeled that way: that Herrera Velutini's daughter was a conduit for foreign money, which is a pending FEC complaint, not a finding. What is reported by multiple outlets and undisputed: the dinner, the donations, the lobbying contracts, the dates. What is proven in court: every one of these men's crimes.

If you paid your taxes this year, you funded the restitution these men will never pay.

Forward this to one person who thinks the pardon power is about mercy, and ask them which of these men they'd have forgiven.

Burn Notice: A pardon used to be the last mercy the state could offer; in this administration it is the last thing the state has left to sell, and the invoice goes to the victims.

— Michael

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