Last week, Donald Trump issued one of his most outrageous pardons to date, rescuing Nevada’s Michele Fiore from a prison sentence, despite her conviction over flagrant corruption. The White House never even tried to justify the move, and there was no great mystery behind the motivation: Fiore has been a Trump loyalist for years — she’s been described as Nevada’s “Lady Trump” — and in this administration, it’s likely the president didn’t need any additional information.
But as it turns out, this was one of two such pardons issued around the same time. The New York Times reported:
President Trump has pardoned a Florida health care executive whose mother played a role in trying to expose the contents of Ashley Biden’s diary. The pardon of the executive, Paul Walczak, was signed privately on Wednesday and posted on the Justice Department’s website on Friday. It came less than two weeks after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution, for tax crimes that prosecutors said were used to finance a lavish lifestyle, including the purchase of a yacht.
The details of this one admittedly get a little complicated, given Walczak’s mother’s role in the bizarre story surrounding the Ashley Biden diary. But let’s not overcomplicate matters: There’s nothing to suggest Walczak was involved in the diary saga, and his criminal conviction was totally unrelated to the controversy surrounding the former president’s daughter.
Rather, what we have here is a Republican donor, from a Republican family, who was caught siphoning off tax payments for his employees — repeatedly, over the course of a decade — in order to finance an extravagant lifestyle.
Though Walczak professed his innocence, he was ultimately convicted and was poised to spend a year and a half behind bars — that is, until Trump decided to intervene in his case.
Two weeks ago, at sentencing, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra, a George W. Bush appointee, told the defendant, “Unfortunately, there’s a perception in this country that the criminal justice system only works in favor of the rich and against the poor. To just let Mr. Walczak walk away because he came up with $10 million to pay the debt reinforces that perception — the rich get away with it and the poor go to prison.”
The judge added that Walczak is not entitled to a “get out of jail free” card.
Evidently, the president came to the opposite conclusion, helping fuel a different “perception in this country” that the criminal justice system increasingly works in favor of those aligned with the man in the Oval Office.
As regular readers know, during Trump’s first term, he effectively wielded his pardon power as a corrupt weapon, rewarding loyalists, completing cover-ups, undermining federal law enforcement and doling out perverse favors to the politically connected.
As Trump prepared to leave the White House after his 2020 election defeat, the Republican issued some of the most controversial pardons in American history. After his second inaugural, he wasted no time in picking up where he left off.
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued roughly 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 Jan. 6 criminals, including violent felons who were in prison for assaulting police officers. A few days later, he kept going, pardoning 23 anti-abortion-rights activists, seemingly unconcerned with their guilt. That was soon followed by a pardon for former Gov. Rob Blagojevich, a man synonymous with corruption in Illinois politics, whom Trump saw as any ally. In early March, he pardoned a Tennessee Republican who was just two weeks into a 21-month sentence for his role in a campaign finance fraud scheme. In late March, he pardoned a prominent campaign donor. (Asked to defend the latter, the president struggled in unintentionally hilarious ways.) Taken together, Trump appears to have created an entirely new legal/political dynamic, without precedent in the American tradition, in which pardons are available to perceived political allies with whom the president sympathizes. Traditionally, presidents have issued pardons in order to right a wrong or protect those who have been falsely accused of wrongdoing. In 2025, if Trump sees a convicted criminal as an ally, that’s apparently all the president needs to know. For all the GOP hysterics in the Biden era about a “two-tiered” system of justice, it seems the White House has gone out of its way to create the very dynamic Republicans claimed to be against. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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