Remember how we were all against the government's "picking winners and losers" when it came to clean energy start-ups back in the Before Time? Turns out that this administration has transformed that system to the point where it is not just picking winners and losers, it is creating winners and losers. From CBS News:
It was the summer of 2017 when Thomas Franco met Carlos Watson, a journalist and political commentator who seemed to be building a media empire. Over the next five years, Franco—a partner at the New York private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice—put almost $4 million into Watson's startup Ozy Media and urged friends to invest too. But the company was largely an illusion. A federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Watson of fraud in July 2024. A judge later ordered him to repay investors almost $37 million, millions of it to Franco. Hours before Watson was due to report to prison in March of last year, President Trump commuted his nearly 10-year sentence. The clemency grant wiped away the restitution.
I confess I had no idea that presidential commutations and pardons wiped out all the assigned restitution payments to the victims of those pardoned by the president. A president who, by all accounts, is running a pardon mill as though he were an Appalachian druggist dealing out oxy by the fistful.
Franco is just one of the many crime victims who may never recover money a court ordered they be repaid. All told, Mr. Trump's clemency orders have erased at least $119 million in unpaid restitution since January 2025, a CBS News investigation has found. By contrast, clemency orders by former President Joe Biden erased $14,000 during his four years in office, Justice Department records show. The vast majority of Biden's orders were commutations that left financial penalties intact, rather than pardons.
Those who lost out on restitution range from small family food businesses to community banks, candy maker Mars Wrigley, the IRS and other agencies, actor Terry Crews and a trust in the name of baseball star Alex Rodriguez. The $119 million figure doesn't cover restitution prosecutors sought but judges hadn't yet ordered—such as the $660.8 million sought from former Nikola CEO Trevor Milton before the president granted his pardon.
Unsurprisingly, it's cronyism all the way down.
Some clemency recipients went further: They reclaimed money they had already paid out. Mr. Trump pardoned convicted nursing home executive Joseph Schwartz in November 2025, three months into a three-year prison sentence. Schwartz had paid nearly $1 million to a lobbying firm tied to right-wing operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to push for clemency, lobbying records show.His company, Skyline Healthcare, ran more than 100 nursing homes in 11 states before it collapsed in 2018. Theresa Dante, a cook at a Skyline nursing home in South Dakota, said the company took health insurance premiums out of workers' paychecks but never paid the insurers.
(Burkman and Wohl, it should be noted, are notorious ratfckers who were once issued a $5 million penalty by the FCC for a vote-suppressing robocall scam. Burkman also is notable for his lousy taste in henchmen.)
These really are the mole people.