Three Democratic lawmakers sent letters to more than a dozen recipients of presidential pardons and commutations on Thursday, demanding records of payments, donations, and communications they say could reveal whether executive clemency under President Trump has been shaped by money and political access.
California congressmen Dave Min and Raul Ruiz, along with Vermont senator Peter Welch, want contracts showing how much recipients paid lawyers, lobbyists, and social media influencers who advocated on their behalf. They also want communications with federal officials, donation records tied to Trump or groups in his orbit, and any other documents related to their clemency efforts. Responses are due by May 22.
The probe, first reported by CBS News, raises pointed questions about whether wealthy, well-connected convicts used financial contributions and intermediaries to secure relief that ordinary defendants could never hope to receive. But it also arrives with a glaring limitation: Democrats hold the minority in both chambers and lack subpoena power to compel a single document. The entire exercise depends on voluntary cooperation from the very people under scrutiny.
The letters target a roster of white-collar convicts whose pardons or commutations erased not only prison time but, in several cases, staggering restitution obligations owed to fraud victims. The dollar figures alone tell a story.
Trevor Milton, founder of the since-bankrupt electric truck company Nikola Corp., was sentenced to four years in prison in 2023 after a jury convicted him of lying to investors. Trump pardoned Milton in March 2025. That pardon relieved him of roughly $680 million in restitution owed to defrauded shareholders. Milton and his wife donated at least $3 million to Trump's 2024 campaign and affiliated political groups. A White House official said earlier this year that Milton's donations "played absolutely no role" in his pardon.
Three million dollars in donations. Six hundred eighty million dollars in erased restitution. Readers can do the math.
Former healthcare executive Lawrence Duran, convicted of Medicare fraud, received a commutation that wiped away $87 million in owed restitution. David Gentile, a former private equity executive convicted of running a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme, saw $15.5 million in restitution disappear when Trump commuted his sentence. Senate Democrats raised concerns about Gentile's case last December, writing that his commutation "represents a betrayal of more than 17,000 innocent Americans from all walks of the political spectrum that lost over $1 billion in life savings because of his crimes."
Nursing home operator Joseph Schwartz had served just three months of a three-year prison sentence outside New York City, for a $38 million payroll tax fraud scheme, when Trump pardoned him. His pardon followed payments to right-wing operatives and lawyers close to the president and Alice Marie Johnson, whom CBS News described as Trump's "pardon czar."
The pattern that lobbying campaigns for Trump pardons have become a cottage industry is not lost on the lawmakers behind this probe.
Perhaps the most politically charged case involves Changpeng Zhao, the cryptocurrency billionaire who founded the exchange Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering and received a pardon from Trump last year.
The lawmakers' letter to Zhao flags what they describe as a significant financial entanglement. It states that "public reporting also indicates that you and Binance played an important role in brokering a massive investment in the Trump family's crypto business, surging the Trump Stablecoin to a $2.1 billion valuation." That crypto company, World Liberty Financial, was founded by the Trump and Witkoff families.
Federal disclosures show that the clemency push for Zhao was led by Ches McDowell, described as a lawyer, lobbyist, and friend of Donald Trump Jr., along with attorney Teresa Goody Guillén, who has represented Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy. Guillén said there was no "quid pro quo."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied impropriety, saying anyone "spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money" and pointing to a "robust pardon review process."
Former pardon attorney Liz Oyer offered a different assessment. She previously told CBS News that the Trump administration "appears to be working around" the Department of Justice rather than working with it "to vet and review applications for pardons." Clemency, she said, has been run out of the White House "without input from the Office of the Pardon Attorney."
"This was a departure from over 100 years of practice."
The traditional process routes pardon applications through the DOJ's Office of the Pardon Attorney, which investigates each case before making a recommendation. Bypassing that office removes a layer of independent scrutiny designed to prevent exactly the kind of favoritism Democrats now allege.
That concern has surfaced in other contexts. Hunter Biden recently criticized Trump's clemency record while defending the sweeping pardon his own father granted him, a reminder that both parties have used the pardon power in ways that invite scrutiny.
Rep. Min focused his sharpest comments on the restitution question, the money convicted fraudsters were ordered to repay their victims but now no longer owe.
"The thing that rankles me even further is the deprivation of restitution, money that they were supposed to pay back to the victims of their frauds. Now the victims get hit twice, because not only are the people that defrauded them not serving their time, not paying their debt to society, they're literally not paying their debts to the people they defrauded."
The letters describe these clemency acts as "depriving victims of compensation and justice." They frame the pardon power as one meant to be exercised "as 'an act of grace' exercised for the 'public welfare'", not as a mechanism for wealthy defendants to buy their way out of accountability.
Senator Welch put it more bluntly. He called the pattern an "abuse of the presidential pardon" that "has let criminals walk free and deprived victims of hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution, with little to no explanation." That characterization is Welch's framing, not established fact. But the raw numbers, $680 million here, $87 million there, $15.5 million elsewhere, give his words weight that rhetoric alone cannot.
The fundamental weakness of this investigation is structural. Democrats in the minority cannot compel testimony or documents. They can only ask. Min acknowledged the limitation but framed it as a long game.
"If they don't respond, they run the risk of highlighting themselves, of being the subjects of future congressional investigations and creating more of a target on their backs for potential further criminal prosecutions."
The implicit threat: if Democrats retake either chamber in the midterm elections, they would gain subpoena authority over clemency records and other oversight areas. The letters sent Thursday are, in effect, a down payment on that possibility, building a paper trail and putting recipients on notice.
Whether that amounts to genuine oversight or political positioning depends on what happens next. House Democrats have a pattern of launching high-profile initiatives that generate headlines but lack the votes or authority to produce results. This probe could follow the same arc.
Other recipients named in the letters include Paul Walczak, a pardoned tax offender whose mother raised millions of dollars for Trump, and real estate developer Timothy Leiweke, who was pardoned after hiring lawyer and Trump ally Trey Gowdy following a conviction for alleged contract bid rigging.
The Cuellar case offers a different lens on Trump's use of the pardon power. Fox News reported that Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar publicly thanked Trump for granting him and his wife a full and unconditional pardon in their federal bribery case, saying he was "very thankful" and calling it "a very difficult time for my family." Cuellar said he was "absolutely" targeted by the Biden administration after criticizing its border policies. Breitbart reported that the Biden DOJ had indicted the Cuellars on bribery charges in 2024, alleging they accepted more than half a million dollars from an Azerbaijan-linked energy company. Trump framed the prosecution as politically motivated. AP News confirmed the pardon ends the criminal case but not a separate House Ethics Committee investigation.
The Cuellar pardon complicates the Democratic narrative. It is harder to cast every clemency grant as corrupt when one of them freed a sitting Democratic congressman who says the Biden DOJ went after him for opposing open borders.
The pardon power is absolute. The Constitution gives the president sole discretion, and no court can reverse the decision. That has been true under every administration. What makes the current moment different is scale, pattern, and the sheer volume of erased restitution, money that courts ordered convicted fraudsters to repay to the people they harmed.
Democrats have opened multiple fronts against Trump-aligned figures in recent months, and this clemency probe fits that broader campaign. But the facts here stand on their own. When pardons erase hundreds of millions in victim restitution, and when the recipients of those pardons have financial ties to the president or his political operation, the public deserves an accounting, regardless of which party demands it.
The letters are voluntary. The deadline is May 22. And the victims of billion-dollar fraud schemes are still waiting to be made whole, only now, nobody owes them a dime.
