Untangling the Trump Crime Family's Multi-Billion Dollar Pardon Market.
It's all out in the open. As usual.
Every piece of what follows has already been reported. The New York Times has the Mar-a-Lago dinner that preceded Paul Walczak’s pardon. ProPublica has the broader pattern of pardons flowing to people with access to Trump’s Florida club. Bloomberg has the Binance arrangement that paid the Trump family before CZ was pardoned. CBS News has the pay-to-play letters Congress sent earlier this month. Each story broke, trended for a day, and got buried by whatever Trump did the next morning. That is the problem we are trying to solve here. The press chases his day to day behavior and we rarely stop to account for the totality. So this is the totality, as of May 14, 2026, of who Donald Trump has pardoned in his second term, how he has been paid for those pardons, and how much money has likely flowed to him and his family in the process.
Let’s begin.
Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants on his first day in office. Among them were people convicted of crimes against children. Andrew Taake was pardoned with an open child-sex-solicitation charge. CREW has counted at least six other pardoned January 6 defendants subsequently arrested or sentenced for child sex offenses.
Trump pardoned Daniel Rodriguez, who drove a stun gun into Officer Michael Fanone’s neck and caused a heart attack. Trump pardoned Christopher Quaglin, who choked Officer Fanone and attacked other officers with shields and pepper spray. Trump pardoned Patrick McCaughey, who crushed Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorframe. Trump pardoned Peter Schwartz, who had thirty-eight prior convictions before he beat cops at the Capitol. Trump pardoned Edward Kelley, who was then sentenced to life in prison for a separate plot to murder the FBI agents who had investigated him. The judge ruled the pardon did not reach the murder plot.
Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a nursing-home executive who stole $10.9 million from his employees’ paychecks to fund a $2 million yacht. Trump pardoned Joseph Schwartz, who stole $38 million from his employees in a payroll-tax fraud. Trump pardoned Trevor Milton, who defrauded Nikola shareholders out of roughly $660 million.
Trump pardoned Sheriff Scott Jenkins of Culpeper County, Virginia, who took $75,000 in bribes for selling police badges to two undercover FBI agents. Trump pardoned Brian Kelsey, the former Tennessee state senator, fifteen days into his sentence. Trump pardoned Michele Fiore, the Nevada Republican who stole $70,000 raised for a slain police officer’s memorial and spent it on her daughter’s wedding and cosmetic surgery. Trump pardoned Glen Casada, the former Tennessee House Speaker. Trump pardoned John Rowland, the former Connecticut governor with two prior corruption convictions. Trump pardoned Henry Cuellar, a sitting Democratic congressman, weeks before his bribery trial.
Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was serving forty-five years for cocaine trafficking. Trump pardoned Wanda Vázquez Garced, the former governor of Puerto Rico. Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini, the Venezuelan-Italian billionaire who bribed Vázquez Garced. Trump pardoned Joseph Lewis, the British billionaire who controls Tottenham Hotspur and was convicted of insider trading. Trump pardoned Imaad Zuberi, who had been serving twelve years in part for obstructing the federal investigation into Trump’s own 2017 inaugural committee.
Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, on October 23, 2025. Trump pardoned Arthur Hayes and the BitMEX founders. Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who ran Silk Road. Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading Limited, the corporation that operated BitMEX, in the first presidential pardon of a corporation in American history.
That is the public record. Now the question is how he gets paid.
He gets paid four ways.
He gets paid in donations from pardon-seekers’ families to MAGA Inc., the super PAC he controls. The cleanest case is the Walczak pardon. In April 2025, MAGA Inc. hosted a fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago where the price of a seat was one million dollars and the buyer got face-to-face time with Trump. Paul Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, attended. FEC records show she donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. that month. Twenty days after the dinner, Trump pardoned her son and erased $4.4 million in restitution he owed the IRS. Trevor Milton and his wife donated approximately $1.8 million across the Trump 47 Committee, the RNC, and MAHA Alliance Super PAC in the weeks before the 2024 election. Five months later Milton was pardoned and roughly $660 million in shareholder restitution disappeared. Isabela Herrera, the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, donated $3.5 million to MAGA Inc. between December 2024 and July 2025. Before those donations, her only federal political contribution on record was $20 to Pete Buttigieg in 2020. Her father was pardoned in January 2026.
He gets paid in interest on government bonds bought with money that flowed to his family’s crypto company. The Trump family owns most of a company called World Liberty Financial. That company makes a digital token called USD1 that is supposed to be worth one dollar. To make a USD1 token, someone gives the company a real dollar, and the company buys a Treasury bond with it. The interest on the Treasury bond is paid to the Trump family. Binance, the crypto exchange CZ founded, wrote the software for USD1 and holds approximately ninety percent of it. In May 2025, Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff announced at a Dubai conference that an Abu Dhabi government investment fund called MGX would put two billion dollars into Binance using USD1. That means two billion real dollars went into Treasury bonds owned through the Trump family company. Estimates of the interest income range from thirty million dollars a year, which is World Liberty Financial’s own estimate, to eighty million dollars a year, the figure cited by CBS News. Five months after Eric Trump announced the deal, his father pardoned CZ. Trump told 60 Minutes he did not know who CZ was.
He gets paid in fees to lobbyists in his immediate orbit who then deliver the pardons. Lobbying Disclosure Act filings show approximately $5.2 million in disclosed clemency-related lobbying revenue in 2025, roughly eight times the 2024 figure. Ches McDowell, a personal friend of Don Jr. and the brother of a Republican congressman, was paid approximately $450,000 by Binance in the weeks before the CZ pardon and was photographed in the Oval Office with Trump and Don Jr. shortly before the pardon was signed. Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, both previously convicted of telecommunications fraud, charged Joseph Schwartz $960,000 to seek his pardon. When Schwartz tired of them he hired another lobbyist named Josh Nass for an additional $100,000. Nass was subsequently arrested by the FBI for allegedly hiring an enforcer to extort Schwartz’s son to collect a disputed balance. He faces up to twenty years.
He gets paid in jobs given to pardon recipients and their families. Charles Kushner, pardoned in Trump’s first term, was confirmed as ambassador to France in May 2025. Elizabeth Fago was appointed to a Department of Health and Human Services healthcare advisory committee after her son’s pardon. Stanley Woodward, who represented numerous January 6 defendants, was confirmed as Associate Attorney General, the third-ranking position at the Justice Department. The Office of the Pardon Attorney is now run by Ed Martin, who personally represented multiple January 6 defendants and whose public motto is “No MAGA left behind.”
So how much has Trump personally made.
Documented donations from pardon-seekers’ immediate families to MAGA Inc. and other Trump-controlled political vehicles total approximately $6.3 million across the three named cases. The Treasury-bond interest flowing to the Trump family from the Abu Dhabi investment in Binance runs between $30 million and $100 million traceable to the period beginning with Eric Trump’s May 2025 announcement and continuing for as long as MGX’s money stays in USD1. Cumulative trading-fee revenue from the $TRUMP memecoin, which is sold by a company controlled by the Trump family, has produced approximately $400 million in fees to Trump-linked entities, including roughly $148 million from a May 2025 gala in which the top 220 token holders bought their way to dinner with the president. Disclosed lobbying fees flowing to the broker network around Trump reached $5.2 million in 2025. Restitution to crime victims erased by these pardons totals between $1.3 billion and $2 billion, depending on how forfeitures and contested obligations are counted.
The direct pardon-traceable figure flowing to Trump and his family, conservatively tallied, sits between $40 million and $110 million. The broader Trump-family crypto enrichment that runs alongside the pardon operation reached approximately $620 million through mid-2025, according to Bloomberg, and Cointelegraph reported $802 million in first-half 2025 income alone. The Treasury-bond interest from Binance is the same money that produced the CZ pardon. The trading fees from the memecoin come from the same buyers attending the same dinners. The donations to MAGA Inc. come from the same families seeking the same favors. The bottom line is that Trump has built a system in which presidential mercy is allocated to people who can pay, the prices are quoted in the millions, and the money lands in vehicles his family controls.
This is what we know. It has all been reported. The Times reported it, ProPublica reported it, Bloomberg reported it, CBS reported it, the House Judiciary Democrats laid out the $1.3 billion victim-restitution figure in a June 2025 staff memo, the California Governor’s Office has been maintaining a public tracker, and twelve House and Senate Democrats sent letters earlier this month to a dozen named pardon recipients demanding documents by May 22.
Horrified by this news? Disgusted? Just want more than anything else to see these absolute bastards face consequences for their actions?
Well here at The Existentialist Republic it’s our business to figure out how to make that all possible. But there is a necessary prerequisite to success and that prerequisite is you.
Imagine it this way. We are all atoms in this organism we call a nation, and our actions create energy, that energy accumulates into heat, that heat burns hot enough to create change in this brittle and broken nation. That heat allows for the reformation of a system into something we can be proud of rather than a shameful existential threat. We are the heat, we are the hammer, we are the anvil, and we are the iron being formed anew, and better, from the same material we started with.
You aren’t powerless, you are the only hope we have and our future depends on millions like you deciding to do something about these dangers, doing something daily, until things are better or we are wiped from the earth.
We have moved beyond “give me liberty or give me death.” In 2026, we say “Give us justice or give me death. Give us peace or give me death. Give us respect or give me death.” I’d rather risk my freedom for a chance, even if that chance is small, that we have a future where monsters like Trump and the rest of the Epstein clan pay for their crimes, rather than quietly live in a world where their escape from consequences goes quietly forgotten.
But the good news is that I know the chances are great that we will succeed and how do I know this? My certainty does not come from a vague moral leap of faith but instead from the awareness that every day millions of people across this nation, many of whom are members of The Existentialist Republic, are arming themselves psychologically and choosing to act in service of justice.
A little bit, every day.
As the old expression goes? How do we eat this elephant?
One bite at a time.
No offense to elephants, of course. Unless those elephants were also besties with Trump and Epstein, facilitating genocide, and destroying democracy worldwide.
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Can we get Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart to read this as the monologues on their shows?!
There is no limit to this grifter’s criminal activities. This should be front page news on every newspaper and feature strongly on alternative media outlets across the world, not just the US.
How in God’s name can ANYONE think this is ok? The pardoning itself is immoral but the bribery too!!
Unbelievable.