Fraudster-In-Chief On A Pardon Spree Of His Fellow White-Collar Criminals
HuffPost
Perpetrators of investor fraud, electric truck fraud and crypto fraud join the violent pro-Trump cop beaters on the list of those the president has pardoned.
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump was convicted of falsifying business records and found civilly liable for a half billion dollars in fraud last year, and now, as president, has in recent days been on a spree of pardoning fellow fraudsters.
On Thursday, Trump pardoned Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed, who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating an anti-money-laundering component of the Banking Secrecy Act with their BitMEX cryptocurrency exchange.
On Friday, he pardoned Ozy Media CEO Carlos Watson, who was literally en route to prison following a financial conspiracy conviction, as well as electric truck CEO Trevor Milton, who was free on bail pending his appeal but facing four years in prison and hundreds in millions of dollars in restitution for defrauding his shareholders.
“They went after him. They went after his family, they went after his businesses,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Friday. “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president.”
It is unclear what Trump meant by “support.” A HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission records found that while Milton has donated just under $2 million to Trump’s campaign and related committees since he first ran in 2016, all but $3,500 of those donations came after Milton started facing legal trouble. What’s more, Milton’s first donation to Trump came at the end of July 2016 ― months after Trump had locked down the Republican nomination.
Welcome to the shakedown.
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