Trump's pardons forgive financial crimes that came with hundreds of millions in punishments

Just one year into his second term, President Donald Trump has pardoned an unusually high number of wealthy people accused of financial crimes, according to an NBC News analysis of the last four administrations.

Over half of Trump’s 88 individual pardons are for white-collar offenses, with money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud among the most frequent crimes the president has wiped clean.

Additionally, about half of the pardon recipients are either business executives or politicians. Included in the latest round of pardons, issued Thursday and Friday, were a former health care CEO, the former governor of Puerto Rico and a pair of siblings who were convicted on fraud charges — one of whom Trump previously freed for a different crime.

A few pardon recipients are billionaires, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering on his crypto platform; longtime English soccer club owner Joe Lewis, who pleaded guilty last year to insider trading charges; and Venezuelan-Italian banker Julio M. Herrera Velutini, whom Trump pardoned last week while he awaited sentencing on campaign finance violations.

These are aside from the group of roughly 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 rioters he pardoned on his first day back in office and additional symbolic pardons for those involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

While net worth statistics for other pardon recipients aren’t easily available, the amount of fines and restitution that had been imposed on them is a rough signal of their wealth. The 87 people and one corporation pardoned by Trump in the last year had been ordered to pay more than $298 million in fines and restitution — $20 million more than the total owed by all of the pardon recipients in his entire first term, and vastly more than the totals previously owed by those who received pardons during recent Democratic administrations.

“We have a very thorough review process here that moves with the Department of Justice and the White House counsel’s office,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a recent briefing, citing a team of attorneys who review every request that makes its way to Trump. She added: “And he was very clear when he came into office that he was most interested in looking at pardoning individuals who were abused and used by the Biden Department of Justice and were overprosecuted by a weaponized DOJ.”

Fines, which are owed to the government, and restitution, which is owed to victims, are intended to make up for the harm caused by crime.

While Trump in his second term has so far granted clemency to a broad range of people convicted of federal crimes, the pardons have often favored political allies or business interests. White House officials have consistently said the president is not focusing on fraud pardons but is focused, as Leavitt said, on cases where he thinks there was a political motivation for the case or an issue of overprosecution.