Going Deeper: Trump’s Corrupt Pardons, Cash, and Favors
Corruption as repayments to friends and allies
Video discussion for paid subscribers follows article (including some thoughts on yesterday’s speech). Also, today’s “Live” for paid subscribers will now be 3:45 East, 2:45 Central
This is part 3 of a 3 part series on Donald Trump’s corruption. See Part 1. See Part 2.
Did you notice that the Justice Department recently paid Michael Flynn $1.25 million? Flynn, a foaming-at-the-mouth Trump loyalist, had been convicted of lying to federal agents who were investigating the President’s 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia. Not satisfied with a mere pardon, he sued for wrongful prosecution. Last week, the DOJ announced it had paid him to correct an “historic injustice.”
In fact, the Flynn settlement was a cash-for-loyalty payoff; only the latest example of business-as-usual corruption in Donald Trump’s Washington. Under his reign, Presidential pardons, pay-offs, powerful jobs, and favors are bought and sold with either cash or abject fealty. It’s a game played by friends and allies that becomes visible if you follow the money. It’s brazen enough to make Tony Soprano blush.
In Flynn’s case, the money flowed to him from the U.S. Treasury as a reward for his many years of fanatical service to Trump’s political cause. It all goes back to 2016 when he became the top security advisor and hyperactive surrogate to then-candidate Trump. He became famous when he led an anti-Hillary Clinton chant of “lock her up” from the podium of the National Republican Convention and eventually became a proponent of the paranoid, pro-Trump Q-Anon movement. He is now a prominent election denier who insists the presidency was stolen from Trump in 2020 and advocated that the President somehow use the military to conduct a new election. Today, he’s pushing Trump to declare a national emergency to justify taking over the midterms.
While Flynn got money as a reward for his loyal service, others have paid dearly for a job, a pardon, or the opportunity to get close to power. The first place to look for these players in the game is in Trump’s cabinet, the wealthiest in history, where you’ll find a billionaire named Linda McMahon.
Cabinet Costs
Linda McMahon got very rich running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) alongside her husband Vince. In 2023-24 she poured $20.2 million into Trump’s Make America Great Again Super PAC. After the election, she contributed $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund.
What did she get in exchange? She was named Secretary of Education. What were her qualifications? Well, she has a bachelor’s degree in education but never taught. And she served for two years on the Connecticut state school board. In other words, McMahon is living proof that money talks.
As the country’s top education official, McMahon has devoted herself to dismantling her department so that she would be the “final” secretary. She has slashed the department’s staff by half, canceled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of grants, and offloaded programs to other departments. Though barred from eliminating the department entirely (it would take an act of Congress to do that), she’s shrunk it to the point where it doesn’t need its headquarters building, which is being taken over by the Department of Energy. The chaos inside the department resembles a WWE free-for-all.
Though McMahon paid the most, by far, according to the well-respected Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), at least nineteen other cabinet members and high-ranking officials were donors to Trump campaign PACs. The list includes Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Kelly Loeffler of the Small Business Administration, and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Among the big fish was Howard Lutnick, who personally gave $10 million and was named Secretary of Commerce. Lutnick is a political animal. A lifelong Democrat, he fundraised for Hillary Clinton in 2016. He became a Republican/Trump fundraiser in 2020. In 2024 he raised $15 million for Trump at just one party in the Hamptons.
As secretary, Lutnick has done Trump’s bidding on tariffs and tried to keep a low profile. He managed this until he popped up in the Jeffrey Epstein files, which were released by the DOJ. (In case you’ve somehow missed it: Epstein was a convicted sex offender who victimized women and girls, Epstein was long a close friend of Trump’s. He committed suicide after being arrested on federal charges in 2019.) Lutnick lied to the press about the extent of his association with Epstein but has avoided consequences.
While Lutnik poured $25 million into the Trump campaign, this amount is a mere pittance compared with Elon Musk’s ante. The richest man on the planet spent more than $280 million to support Trump and other Republicans in 2024. In exchange, the President put him in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which launched a sweeping campaign of “budget-cutting” across the government. The damage done by DOGE includes gutting the Centers for Disease Control, slashing the Department of Health and Human Services, cancelling countless grants for medical and scientific research, and firing thousands of mission critical workers – doctors, nurses, therapists – at Veterans Administration hospitals. Oh and they saved no money.
Along the way Musk and his band of young marauders accessed sensitive data including Social Security files, and got a first-class education in how the federal bureaucracy works. Given that Musk’s companies, Tesla and Space X , do billions in work for the government this insider knowledge is invaluable.
Corporate Cash
Whether it’s funding his lavish inauguration, post-presidency library, or contributing to the construction of a new East Wing of the White House, big corporations are playing the money game for keeps. Some want federal contracts. Others would like federal regulators to look the other way. Here’s a list of big-time federal contractors and what they have paid:
Palantir -- $1 million for the inauguration: $10 million for the East Wing construction.
Lockheed Martin -- $1 million for the inauguration: A reported $10 million for the East Wing.
Boeing -- $1 million for the inauguration.
Amazon -- $1 million for the inauguration (Undisclosed amount for the East Wing)
Google -- Reportedly $5 million for the East Wing
Meta -- $1 million to inauguration
Others who have made East Wing contributions of undisclosed amounts include Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, T-Mobile, Booz Allen Hamilton, the Union Pacific Railroad, HP, Micron Technologies, and Comcast.
Every donor company does business with the administration. The big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have their eyes on a $185 billion anti-missile defense system called Golden Dome. Others, like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, want to expand their existing business of providing tech services.
The ultimate goal? No-bid contracts of the type Palantir has been given in the past year or so. They include:
A $30 million deal with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
A contract worth between $75 million and $300 million with the Department of Agriculture
An agreement with the Army worth as much as $10 billion
No-bid contracts are the holy grail for companies that do business with the feds. Palantir, which relies on the government for half its revenue, would be especially interested in this easy money. Do the math, and you can see how a few million invested in Trump’s vanity -- the lavish inauguration and huge East Wing project -- has really paid off.
Apple CEO Tim Cook protected his company’s products from the worst of the tariff war by getting special treatment from the administration. How did he pull this off? First, he promised that Apple would invest $600 billion in the U.S. Then, he gave Trump a gold plaque commemorating the agreement. (Trump loves plaques, medals, and trophies.) The chipmaker Nvidia pulled off a similar tariff exemption by promising to cut the government in on profits from its trade with China.
Get out of Jail (Not) Free
While corporations chase dollars, others pursue pardons and clemency for convicted felons. Example 1A is the case of Paul Fago Walczak, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud. Though his mother had been a 2020 Trump fundraiser and operative, Walczak’s pardon petition got no traction until she attended a $1 million-per-person fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. Less than three weeks after the dinner, Woczak was given an unconditional pardon which wiped his record clean. (The pardon allowed him to keep the $4.4 million in restitution he had been ordered to pay.)
In other cases, wealthy convicted federal felons have themselves paid Trump-related lobbyists and found their petitions for pardon granted. Trump campaign donor Trevor Milton, founder of the Nikkola electric vehicle company paid $1.8 million to lobbyists. With his pardon he was spared paying $660 million in restitution to investors he had defrauded. Nursing home executive Joseph Schwartz, who was convicted of Medicaid and tax fraud, paid $1 million to lobbyists and MAGA (Make America Great Again) activists who secured his pardon.
The biggest get-out-of-jail pardon scandal came on the first day of his presidency when Trump issued a blanket clemency order for more than 1,500 people who had participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Among those pardoned were more than 600 who had been convicted or pleaded guilty to felony crimes. (Federal authorities had documented more than 140 attacks on police officers and about $3 million in damages to the Capitol.) Of those freed by the pardon were some who used weapons including baseball bats and bear spray, a man who stomped on an officer’s head, and one who used a taser on officer Michael Fanone, causing him to have a heart attack. Many had previous criminal records and more than 30 have been subsequently arrested for new crimes. One has already been tried and sentenced to life in prison for child sexual abuse. Another was arrested for threatening the life of minority leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.
In his pardon proclamation Trump declared the January 6 prosecutions a “grave national injustice” and said the pardons would begin “a process of national reconciliation.” He has blamed the Biden administration for conducting politically motivated prosecutions. Trump had repeatedly made a campaign promise to release the prisoners. According to the website Axios he made the decision to fulfill this promise days before he was inaugurated saying, “Fuck it: Release ‘em all.” )
Political Favors
As a man who pursues life as a matter of quid pro quo, Trump has remembered his political friends and rewarded 20 of them with pardons. They include:
Former Congressman George Santos -- Wire fraud
Rob Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois -- Convicted of trying to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate
Former Congressman Randall Cunningham, -- Conspiring to accept bribes
Former Virginia Sheriff Scott Jenkins -- Bribery
Former Congressman Chris Collins -- Insider trading
Former Tennessee State Senator Brian Kelsey -- Campaign finance violations
Former Nevada State Senator Michele Fiore -- Charity fraud
In a pre-emptive move, the President pardoned former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyer Sydney Powell for charges they might have faced for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.
Why he does it
If you include the January 6 rioters, Trump has pardoned more than 1,800 people in roughly fourteen months. This number far exceeds his own first-term, four-year record of 144 pardons. But it’s not just the quantity that makes Trump 2.0 different but the quality. In many cases, he has bypassed the DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which normally screens applicants. He has also tended to include forgiveness of restitution in his pardon orders. So far, nearly $2 billion has been forgiven.
Set aside the mass pardon of January 6 rioters, and you’ll see that Trump’s mercy is focused mainly on political allies, and people who committed white-collar crimes like fraud and tax evasion. The political pardons send a signal to those who would commit crimes on Trump’s behalf in the future. “Go ahead,” he’s telling them. “I’ll bail you out in the end.” I would argue that those who have committed financial crimes are, given Trump’s record, kindred spirits who occupy a warm place in his heart.
As you remember, in May of 2024 Trump was, himself, convicted of 34 white-collar felonies in a trial in New York state court. Ever ready to play the victim, he said the trial was a “disgrace” and that he was a “very innocent” man. (Trump has also lost two prominent civil cases filed by writer E. Jean Carroll who accused him of sexually abusing her and then defaming her. The result? More than $88 million in damages.)
To put it bluntly, the courts have not been kind to Donald Trump, and he empathizes with others, especially rich men, who have been investigated, subjected to trial, and lost. With his pardon power, which the Constitution does not limit, he’s creating a separate system of justice for friends, supporters, and fellow travelers. Former friends who have crossed him, like Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, need not apply. (Noting Combs opposed him politically, Trump said, “…when I ran for office, he was very hostile. I’m being honest—it makes it more difficult to do.”)
As with everything he does, Trump’s pardons, favors, and payments are personal. They are tawdry, corrupt, transactional exercises in raw power. He does it because he can, and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it.
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