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A long time ago, in what seems another age of the world, President Bill Clinton on his last day in office pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire indicted for fraud, racketeering, tax evasion, and violating the U.S. embargo against Iran. Rich was then a fugitive who had fled to Switzerland in 1983 to avoid extradition. Not only did Clinton issue the pardon without consulting the U.S. pardon attorney or the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York which had charged Rich, but it quickly emerged that Rich’s ex-wife, who led the pardon campaign, had contributed some $200,000 to the Democratic Party in 2000, $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library fund, and more than $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. Denise Rich also gave the Clintons $7,000 worth of furniture.
Republicans excoriated Clinton in the press. George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, initiated a criminal probe of the pardon. House Republicans launched their own investigation.
Democrats and the conventionally liberal press were also not fans. Rep. Barney Frank, Sens. Paul Wellstone and Pat Leahy, and even James Carville decried the Rich pardon. The New York Times editorialized that the pardon was “indefensible.”
Two other recent clemencies were also self-evident political rewards. On March 28, Trump commuted the sentence of Jason Galanis, who was doing 14 years for defrauding the Oglala Sioux Tribe of tens of millions of dollars, to time served, and also remitted some $80 million in forfeitures and restitution. Two days before, Trump pardoned Devon Archer, who was sentenced to one year for the same scheme. These two beauties did not contribute vast sums to Trump’s political campaign, but garnered Trump’s favor by giving testimony unfavorable to Hunter Biden in the House Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach Joe Biden.
A different kind of pardon abuse surfaced on March 27 when Trump pardoned the four founders and senior officers of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange, who in 2022 had pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by openly flouting money laundering rules. Trump also pardoned the corporation, which had entered a guilty plea in 2024, thus remitting its fine of $100 million.
Trump’s motives for the BitMEX pardons are a bit less obvious than either the straight-up quid pro quo exchange of political contributions for clemency that secured relief for Trevor Milton or the Galanis and Archer commutations tendered in payment for help in Trump’s anti-Biden crusade. But the BiMEX pardons appear equally self-serving and corrupt.
There is a strong argument that crypto is simply a vast Ponzi scheme, perhaps the biggest in the history of the world. It has virtually no practical legal uses, other than as an arena for largely unregulated speculation on the value of an otherwise useless intangible. But it has multiple highly practical illegal uses—among them to facilitate discrete Ponzi schemes, as an untraceable payment vehicle for extracting money from the victims of other kinds of fraudulent schemes such as ransomware attacks, and to launder criminal proceeds. BitMEX and its founders were convicted precisely because, according to court filings, the company “was in effect a money laundering platform.”
Trump and his family have recently acquired large financial stakes in crypto operations. Donald and Melania Trump launched so-called meme coins just before his current term, generating immediate profits of around $100 million. His sons are creating a “stablecoin” and have launched a Bitcoin mining venture. Trump has created by executive order a federal Bitcoin “strategic reserve,” which in practice may be little more than a federal, read taxpayer, backstop of Bitcoin investors (like himself and his family) against speculative losses.
In short, Trump now has a huge personal financial interest in an “industry” which is, at bottom, a massive scam. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the point of the BitMEX pardons is to signal to crypto operators and would-be crypto regulators in the federal government that the United States will no longer seriously enforce money laundering laws against crypto businesses, thus rendering crypto an even more inviting field for criminal enterprise and in the process boosting the Trump family’s own bottom line.
None of these cases was reviewed by the Office of the U.S. Pardon Attorney—which would have been awkward in any case because early in March Trump fired the pardon attorney herself for having the temerity to refuse to assent to restoration of Mel Gibson’s gun privileges. (On Thursday, it was reported that Gibson would be getting those rights back.) Nor was input sought from the relevant U.S. Attorneys’ Offices.
In sum, in the space of a month, Trump has issued seven pardons to impenitent swindlers and crypto scofflaws. In every case, the obvious motive was either to baldly reward political services or to lower barriers to the Trump family’s monetization of the presidency. And in every case, the odor of scandal is at least as rank as that which swirled around Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich. Yet, in our current degraded moment, no Republican has uttered so much as a sotto voce bleat of protest. And even Democrats and the mainstream press are so overwhelmed by the rest of Trump’s outrages that they have done little more than arch questioning eyebrows.
These pardons raise far larger issues than the Rich pardon ever did. Trump’s twin ambitions are to be a dictator and to become ever more fabulously wealthy. Thus, in addition to using state power to crush his perceived enemies, he wants to be able to accept or extort political favors, both monetary and intangible, that keep him in office and centralize authority in his person. Simultaneously, he wants to use his position to enrich himself and his family.
I have written before about how Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 insurrectionists undermined the rule of law by forgiving those who tried to overthrow the government and by creating an expectation that anyone who hereafter serves Trump’s interests, however violently, will be excused. These financial crimes pardons are integral to another face of Trump’s pursuit of a culture of impunity for him, his family, and his political supporters.
On the one hand, Trump is now openly deploying pardons as a reward for political favors—huge financial contributions in the case of Trevor Milton, and questionable testimony against political enemies in the cases of Jason Galanis and Devon Archer. Even more troublingly, these cases together with the BitMEX crypto pardons should be understood as merely one component of a coordinated effort to neuter both criminal and civil mechanisms for detecting, regulating, and punishing financial crime and public corruption—or at least financial crime and public corruption committed by Trump and his allies.
At the front end, Trump has destroyed the traditional independence of the Department of Justice and federal investigative agencies and used his resultant control over enforcement discretion to halt or dismiss investigations and cases against at least 89 corporations (including seven cryptocurrency corporations facing Securities and Exchange Commission investigations), a striking number of which have close ties to the Trump administration or donated to Trump’s campaign or inauguration fund. By deploying the pardon power as he has, Trump is signaling that even those who fall afoul of the now-denatured federal legal regime can secure relief if they render sufficient service to Trump, or if they pay what in a sane world would be treated as straight-up political bribes, or, as in the BitMEX case, if their crimes were of a type Trump would like to commit himself.
There are, or at least were, ample constitutional remedies for this kind of pardon abuse. Previous presidents were deterred from such conduct by at least three considerations: the certainty of bipartisan political outrage proving fatal to the reelection prospects of first-term presidents and crippling to the political authority even of those in their second term; the availability of impeachment for sufficiently egregious abuses of the pardon power; and the general understanding that pardons which were part of a quid pro quo exchange of clemency for favors could result in criminal prosecution of both the giver and the recipient.
The former potency of the first two deterrents is indicated by the fact that Bill Clinton waited until the last day of his second term to pardon Marc Rich, a point at which he no longer cared that public outcry could affect his political standing and impeachment no longer held any terrors. Trump, by contrast, has started his term with scandalous, politically motivated pardons of both insurrectionist rioters and unredeemable financial swindlers because he is utterly confident that his party will neither impeach nor even criticize him.
In addition, and crucially, Trump is now liberated to abuse pardons in a way he was not during his first term because of the Supreme Court’s 2024 holding in Trump v. United States that the pardon power is a “core power” of the chief executive for which the president enjoys “absolute immunity” against criminal prosecution. I wrote at the time of the immunity decision that it removed a “final obstacle to presidential dictatorship.” That prediction, which at the time may have seemed hyperbolic, is now becoming a tragic reality.
Update, April 9, 2025: This article has been updated to clarify what BitMEX pleaded guilty to.
