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WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump has leveraged his pardon authority to wipe away restitution payments for thousands of convicted criminals since taking office in January, House Democrats said in a report Tuesday.
The White House’s mass clemency campaign — whose beneficiaries include white-collar criminals and people convicted in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — has so far deleted more than $1.3 billion in debts to victims and the federal government in an effort lawmakers have framed as part of the Trump administration’s “emerging gangster state.”
Since taking office, Trump has issued pardons for roughly 1,600 convicted criminals, mostly Capitol rioters. But the White House also granted clemency to a handful of others, including former Chicago Mayor Rod Blagojevich and Ross Ulbricht, operator of dark web drug market Silk Road.
And in a staff memo released Tuesday and obtained by Courthouse News, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee pointed out that the White House pardons have also walked back billions of dollars in restitutions, civil forfeitures and fines owed by these convicted criminals. That move, they argued, tramples on historical Justice Department policy for considering clemency petitions.
“President Trump’s corrupt pardon spree is a massive, undeserved giveaway to high-rolling fraudsters, crooked politicians, violent extremists and fanatical and unrepentant cop-beaters,” the committee memo read.
Democrats’ review of publicly available information from court records and the Justice Department pardon attorney revealed that the White House had erased around $3 million in restitution owed by people convicted in relation to the Capitol riot.
They pointed to one rioter, Lewis Snoots, who had been sentenced to more than five years in prison and ordered to pay roughly $99,000 in restitution to D.C. police and the Architect of the Capitol. The president’s blanket pardon for Jan. 6 defendants, issued on his first day in office, cleared Snoots of that obligation.
“President Trump guaranteed that MPD and the Architect of the Capitol would get stiffed,” the memo said.
Democrats also tallied up restitutions and other fines the White House has deleted as part of its clemency for white-collar criminals. Ulbricht, who in January was 12 years into a double life sentence for his role in running Silk Road, escaped nearly $184 million in civil forfeiture after receiving a full and unconditional pardon from Trump.
Devon Archer, a businessman sentenced to a year in prison for securities fraud, was cleared of roughly $43 million in restitution payments, according to Democrats writing Tuesday’s memo. Archer, who had also served on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma alongside Hunter Biden, was a central witness in House Republicans’ ill-fated probe into former President Joe Biden’s involvement with his son’s business dealings.
The House Democrats also pointed to around $4.4 million in restitution deleted as part of the White House’s April pardon for Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive convicted of employment tax crimes.
Walczak, who withheld payment from his employees and used the proceeds to buy a yacht and luxury goods, petitioned for a presidential pardon after his mother paid $1 million to attend a fundraising dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida, the memo said. The pardon petition argued that he had been a victim of retaliation from the government, because his mother had fundraised for then-candidate Trump.
“Thanks to his pardon from President Trump, Mr. Walczak completely escaped punishment for his crimes: not a dollar paid to his victims, nor a day served in prison for this unrepentant millionaire wage thief,” the Democrats said. “His victimized employees were stiffed more than $4 million.”
The lawmakers accused the Trump administration of undermining public safety by pardoning and releasing convicted criminals and unfairly allowing them to keep money they were obligated to pay to their victims.
And the move to wipe away those restitutions, Democrats contended, clashes with the Justice Department’s traditional standards regarding clemency. According to a 2014 edition of the U.S. attorney’s manual, which has since been archived by the agency, the Justice Department should consider pardon requests if, among other things, the petitioner has “accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to its victims.”
The link to the manual included in Democrats’ memo redirected to a “page not found” screen on the Justice Department’s website — the language in question had been moved to the agency’s archive. A note on the Justice Department site said that the broken link was last updated May 30.
“The vast majority of Americans want to live in a society where crime doesn’t pay,” House Democrats said. “But in Donald Trump’s emerging gangster state, crime pays very well indeed, at least for people who engage in political violence for MAGA against the police and the government or commit white-collar fraud against workers, consumers and taxpayers, the kinds of ‘suckers’ for whom convicted felon Donald Trump shows nothing but daily contempt.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
Since May, former acting U.S. attorney Ed Martin has been the Justice Department official in charge of evaluating pardon requests. Martin joined the agency days after Trump withdrew his nomination to become D.C’s full-time federal prosecutor amid cratering support among Senate Republicans. The current pardon attorney is also overseeing an administration effort to investigate what Trump has called the “weaponization” of the justice system under the Biden administration.
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