Freedom Is for Sale, and the Price List Just Leaked

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

The Trump pardon industry has a rate card and a waiting list.

Joseph Schwartz defrauded the federal government of $38 million through a nursing home empire that left employees without health insurance and residents scrounging for basic supplies. He was sentenced to three years. He served three months. Then he paid nearly a million dollars to two guys who previously ran a voter-suppression robocall scheme targeting Black neighborhoods, and he walked out a free man with a presidential pardon.

That’s the story. That’s it. Everything else is just details filling in the shape of the scam.

The lobbyists in question are Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. If those names sound familiar, it’s because they’ve spent years being professionally ridiculous – fabricating sexual assault allegations against Robert Mueller, staging a fake FBI raid that briefly duped the Washington Post, getting fined $5.1 million by the FCC for those minority-voter robocalls.

Ohio convicted them for telecommunications fraud. They were awaiting sentencing in Michigan on a similar case when Schwartz hired them in April 2025 for $960,000 to get him a pardon. Congressional lobbying filings confirm the number. By November, Schwartz was out.

Burkman told reporters Schwartz was “a wonderful human being and man of God who had been unfairly accused by the Biden DOJ.” The Biden DOJ that, worth noting, was led by Trump ally Alina Habba in New Jersey at the time of the sentencing, who publicly celebrated putting Schwartz away. Seven months later, the pardon landed anyway.

Word spread through the federal prison camp at Otisville, New York, where Schwartz had been doing his three months. Other inmates heard what he’d spent and who he’d paid. Per the NYT, Schwartz wasn’t shy about walking them through the strategy. So now the men left behind at Otisville are doing the math.

That math is very simple.

You need to reach Laura Loomer, the social media person who somehow has the president’s ear. Or a lobbyist who knows pro-Israel evangelicals. Or lawyers with personal relationships with Alice Marie Johnson – Trump’s “pardon czar” – or White House counsel David Warrington. You need some combination of those access points, tailored messaging that hits Trump’s political grievances, and enough cash to make it happen.

The Office of Pardon Attorney, which has existed in some form since 1865 and spent 160 years vetting clemency petitions against actual criteria – seriousness of the offense, acceptance of responsibility, conduct since conviction – was effectively sidelined within hours of Trump taking office.

Liz Oyer, who headed the office when Trump came in, said she started learning about pardons when they appeared in the news. She was fired in March 2025 after refusing to restore Mel Gibson’s gun rights following his domestic violence conviction. The office she ran, a staff of 45 career professionals, is now described in reporting as “totally decimated.”

What replaced it is a paid-access market.

Lobbying disclosure filings show that firms collected nearly $5.2 million last year from clients seeking clemency from Trump. That is eight times what was disclosed in 2024 for the same efforts directed at Biden. Rudy Giuliani was reportedly shopping around a $2 million price tag for his services. An associate of Bob Menendez paid $1 million to a Trump-connected lobbyist for what the disclosure form called “executive relief.”

Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder who pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering, was pardoned roughly a month after his lobbyist – a friend of Donald Trump Jr. – was hired for $450,000. It helped that Binance was also a major financial backer of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture. When asked about Zhao on CBS News, Trump said “I have no idea who he is.” When asked if he was concerned about the appearance of corruption, he said “I’d rather not have you ask the question.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom ran the numbers.

Trump’s pardons have erased nearly $2 billion in restitution and fines owed by convicted criminals – $1.3 billion of that owed directly to victims. Biden’s pardons, over his entire four-year term, forgave $688,000 in financial penalties. Trump is roughly 2,000 times more generous, if “generous” is the word for canceling a fraud conviction in exchange for access fees paid to the right operatives.

The people who actually got hurt by Joseph Schwartz aren’t getting their money back. Theresa Dante, a former nursing home worker quoted in the Times piece, said plainly: “This man hurt a lot of people.” The $5 million in restitution Schwartz paid before his pardon – the White House’s main defense of the whole thing – was part of his original sentence. His victims were still owed it regardless. The pardon just meant he didn’t have to finish his three months.

There is something we can do about this, and it’s not symbolic.

The Constitution gives the president unreviewable pardon power – that’s not changing. What can change is the lobbying. The Foreign Agents Registration Act already requires disclosure of certain lobbying contacts, and the filings that exposed the Schwartz operation came through mandatory reporting under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Strengthening and funding enforcement of those disclosure requirements is a concrete legislative ask.

Call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want hearings on the clemency lobbying industry and mandatory public disclosure of all pardon-related contacts with the White House. The Brennan Center for Justice is tracking reform proposals at brennancenter.org if you want to follow the legal arguments or support the push.

The pardon power was designed as a check on the justice system – a way to correct genuine injustice. What’s been built around it instead is a secondary market where the ability to buy freedom is the single most important factor in whether you get it.

The inmates at Otisville understood that the night Schwartz walked out. They’re not wrong.

Sources