Quote:Financial criminals have long been the stars of the show when it comes to presidential pardons and sentence commutations. In 2021, the Rand Corporation published the results of a study funded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Researchers found that between 2001 and 2012, more than half of applications to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney were from people who committed fraud or other “white-collar crimes.” Together, they made up 59 percent of successful applications, with fraudsters succeeding in 5.8 percent of their efforts and non-fraud white-collar criminals hitting at a 6.8 percent rate. Needless to say, people convicted of drug offenses (a 3 percent success rate), firearm crimes (1.3 percent), and violent crimes (zero) did not do as well, although burglary, theft, and larceny applicants did manage a 6.7 percent success rate. Not a single money-laundering criminal made a successful appeal in this decade-plus, but maybe Zhao just had a compelling backstory.
Trump, however, has embraced fraudsters and white-collar criminals in a historic way. Right now, the president is on a run of pardoning financial crooks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Trump is to this breed of criminal right now what Jeremy Lin was to the NBA in winter 2012. Shohei Ohtani is setting new standards for a multitalented MLB player, but Ohtani is no more of a unicorn in baseball than Trump is, this very moment, in the realm of letting fraudsters and scammers off the legal hook.
Already this year, according to the DOJ’s count, Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of 16 people or companies who were guilty of fraud. Trump’s first pardons were to a bunch of Jan. 6 rioters on the day of his inauguration, but his next one was to Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder, fraudster, and money-laundering conspirator who was a crypto cause célèbre. He pardoned Rod Blagojevich, who went down on eight counts of wire fraud, among other charges. He pardoned a Republican donor who defrauded investors in his electric truck company. He commuted the prison sentence of a media criminal and bullshitter who impersonated a YouTube executive to fool Goldman Sachs into giving him money. He just commuted the sentence of George Santos, who defrauded an elderly veteran who will no longer be owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution. And now he has pardoned Zhao, paving the way for his business associate to get back to his old perch.
Why Trump Pardoned a Crypto Bro Who Helped Launder Billions
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