Trump pardons a bunch of white-collar crooks
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President Trump on Friday granted clemency to startup founders convicted of investor fraud and three crypto exchange co-founders who had plead guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws.
Why it matters: There's never been a better time to be a white-collar crook.
1. Trevor Milton, co-founder and CEO of bankrupt electric truckmaker Nikola Motors, received a pardon.
- His most egregious act may have been sharing a video that purported to show a fully functional prototype, whereas the truck actually was rolling down a small hill. And then there was the lying about billions of dollars in orders.
- Milton was sentenced to four years in prison for both securities and wire fraud, and ordered to pay nearly $700 million in restitution. He had been free on appeal, during which time he donated bigly to Trump-related groups. Oh, and his lawyer was the brother of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
2. Carlos Watson, co-founder and CEO of defunct Ozy Media, had his prison sentence commuted.
- You may remember Ozy Media for a phone call during which Watson's co-founder, who plead guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, pretended to be a YouTube executive while on a reference call with prospective investor Goldman Sachs. Plus, lots of lying about company financials and proposed deals.
- Watson was literally on a plane to prison when the news arrived. In a statement, he reiterated his argument that the prosecution was "driven by a malicious campaign orchestrated by a jealous competitor at a rival media company" — an absurd claim based on the phone call first being reported by then-NY Times reporter Ben Smith, whose former company once held takeover talks with Ozy.
- He also claimed that Ozy "was on the brink of becoming Silicon Valley's first Black-owned publicly traded company before these wrongful actions derailed our progress." Ozy had never filed paperwork to go public, nor were there any such conversations ever reported. Instead, it was trying to raise new VC funding.
- Finally, Watson thanked Alice Marie Johnson, who was famously granted clemency by President Trump after public support from Kim Kardashian.
3. Co-founders and a former employee of BitMEX received pardons after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement AML and KYC procedures. The exchange itself also pleaded guilty to similar charges.
The bottom line: Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Charlie Javice should be sitting by the phone.
Editors note: This story has been corrected to state that President Trump commuted Carlos Watson's prison sentence (rather than pardoned him).
