In March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired after it was revealed she and her assistant, Corey Lewandowski, had been funneling multi-million dollar contracts to a political ally for self-serving TV advertisements. On Oct. 13, Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned under pressure from the administration when it was reported she had shaken down a donor for $100,000 to pay her American Express bill. This week, Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and Acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, said, “Hold my beer, ladies,” when The New York Times reported she had been given a $50 million personal contract in exchange for securing a presidential pardon. 

Habba is the perfect example of the Trump insider. A graduate of Widener University Commonwealth Law School, she practiced law at her first husband’s firm and served as general counsel for a parking garage company owned by her second husband. A New Jersey local, she caught the president’s eye when she joined his Bedminster Law Firm and soon appeared on Fox News, where she defended him in the way that pleased him. In September 2021, Trump hired her for his legal team. One of her first actions was to file a $100 million lawsuit against The New York Times and Mary Trump, the president’s niece, and take over defending Trump in a defamation case brought by a former contestant of “The Apprentice” after several veteran lawyers withdrew. The Times case was dismissed for “fail[ing] as a matter of constitutional law.” The former contestant dropped hers after Habba countersued her for trying to “stifle Donald Trump’s free speech.”

Habba was part of the team that represented Trump in the fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, where the lawyer’s main contribution appeared to be mimicking Trump’s patented mugshot glower before the cameras. She served as lead attorney in the E. Jean Carroll case, during which the judge admonished her repeatedly for her poor legal skills. The case ended up with a jury awarding Carroll $83.3 million in damages. 

But Habba’s most infamous case as the president’s personal lawyer was one brought in the Southern District of Florida in May 2022. Trump sued the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Jake Sullivan, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others for allegedly perpetrating “a calculated scheme to defraud the news media, law enforcement, and counterintelligence officials for the purpose of proliferating a false narrative of collusion between Trump and Russia.” 

U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks was not amused. Four months later, he dismissed the case, saying it was inadequate in all respects. In January 2023 he sanctioned Trump and Habba to the tune of nearly $1 million, writing, “Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Naturally, Trump appealed, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Earlier this month, the sorest loser appealed the case to the Supreme Court. 

Habba’s record as the president’s personal attorney speaks for itself. She didn’t fail up as spectacularly as U.S. Circuit Judge Emil Bove and Attorney General Todd Blanche, but Trump did bring her into the White House as counselor to the president and later nominated her to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. 

As interim U.S. attorney, Habba immediately began to cause chaos. Like Noem, she cosplayed as U.S. Marshal and announced she would pursue political prosecutions of prominent New Jersey Democrats, including the governor. A panel of judges, following the law, refused to allow Habba to serve in an interim capacity, forcing Trump to withdraw her name from consideration for the job, designating her acting U.S. attorney instead. Eventually, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that Habba was not lawfully appointed to that post as well, disqualifying her from the position.

She was then hired to a post clearly made up on the fly, pending a reversal of the opinion, in which case she would be reappointed as U.S. Attorney. That never came about, and at least according to what we learned from the explosive New York Times report, Habba had other plans anyway. 

As it happens, right around that time a Venezuelan billionaire banker named Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a pardon. He had already been given a very generous deal by Trump’s Justice Department, which had reduced felony bribery charges to a misdemeanor, but he wanted his record cleared completely. He hired Christopher Kice, another of Trump’s former personal lawyers, to help him grease the skids. To sweeten the pot, Herrera’s daughter, who holds U.S. citizenship, had contributed $3.5 million to Trump’s super PAC. But by fall 2025, nothing had happened, so the Herrera family decided to hire someone with a little more juice. They tapped Habba, who was still working at the Justice Department, and allegedly offered her $10 million a year for four years and at least $10 million in bonuses. 

They created a company, Concord Partners, which has no known business dealings, and in January 2026 Habba signed on as its general counsel. Days after she took the position, Trump granted Herrera the pardon.

This is the most egregious case involving the sale of pardons under Trump that we’ve heard about. According to various reports, procuring presidential pardons has apparently become a cottage industry among many MAGA insiders, who are becoming wealthy trading on their access to Trump. For his part, the president appears to be handing them out to Republicans like Hershey bars on Halloween. The grift has become so blatant that the public has finally started to notice — and they don’t like what they see.

Habba apparently hasn’t yet collected her fee, and this revelation may just end up depriving her of most of it. But she needn’t worry. She just married a much younger Turkish billionaire named Turhan Mildon in a reported $10 million wedding attended by fellow Trump officials including Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and civil rights division head Harmeet Dhillon. Habba has no financial worries, and there will almost certainly be no legal ramifications for this flagrant conflict of interest and pay-to-play scheme. 

But she is embroiled in yet another convoluted scandal involving her new husband, in which he supposedly sent $17 million to Richard Grenell, Trump’s former adviser to Venezuela who currently serves as director of the embattled John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This donation, later determined to have actually been sent from the Republic of Congo, where Mildon has many business dealings, went to a Texas defense contractor. Habba is alleging that the portion meant for the Kennedy Center — an obvious sop to Trump after he took it over — never made it. 

The full contours of this dispute are not yet clear, and Grenell has denied any knowledge of the matter. But never fear: The White House is on it. Trump assigned Will Scharf, the White House counsel, to look into the matter, and no doubt Habba was pleased. After all, Scharf was one of the honored guests at her wedding. It’s nice to keep it all in the family.

The post Alina Habba’s $50 million scandal exposes MAGA pardon racket appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump loves a good pardon. His generosity is so well known, in fact, that an industry of lobbyists, lawyers and other insiders has reportedly sprung up to facilitate clemency for wealthy criminals. Clemency, meaning mercy or leniency, lets the president reduce the punishment for, or even forgive, federal crimes.

The post Other presidents have let white‑collar criminals dodge financial penalties – but not like Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

President Donald Trump loves a good pardon. His generosity is so well known, in fact, that an industry of lobbyists, lawyers and other insiders has reportedly sprung up to facilitate clemency for wealthy criminals. Clemency, meaning mercy or leniency, lets the president reduce the punishment for, or even forgive, federal crimes.

For defendants hoping to avoid jail and walk away from millions of dollars in financial sanctions, paying, say, $600,000 to a lobbying firm to influence the president may seem like a good investment.

House Democrats recently reported that Trump’s second-term clemency – which includes both pardons, which wipe away every part of a conviction, and commutations, which typically leave convictions intact but shorten a person’s sentence – has saved convicted defendants nearly $1.7 billion in forgiven financial obligations.

Some of that amount – about $700 million – had not yet been officially imposed by courts because the clemency came through so quickly. Much of the remaining $1 billion had been ordered as restitution, meant to repay victims’ losses.

As a legal scholar researching the evolution of modern presidential clemency, I have reviewed every individual pardon and commutation granted by U.S. presidents since 1989, spanning seven administrations, from George H.W. Bush to Trump’s second term. I have found that while other presidents have canceled tens of millions of dollars’ worth of restitution and fines, none of them have come anywhere near the billion-dollar mark – until now.

What is restitution?

The main financial penalties faced by federal defendants are fines, forfeiture – where a defendant has to give up, say, the Ferrari they bought with the profits from their drug business – and restitution.

Restitution is an order to pay back the criminal’s gains to the victims of the crime. For example, if the CEO of a company tricks people into investing $600 million into a hydrogen-powered truck that was never operational, the court may order that, if convicted, he pay back the people he defrauded.

Restitution is rarely able to return all of someone’s lost money, but it is supposed to prevent the fraudster from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

Getting away with it

Since January 2025, Trump has granted clemency to a lengthy list of big-ticket fraudsters, including a cryptocurrency billionaire whose exchange pleaded guilty to anti–money laundering violations and CEOs convicted of payroll tax fraud.

Many of these pardons and commutations have coincided with the use of lobbying firms or generous donations to causes close to Trump’s heart: his inaugural committee, his reelection campaign or MAGA Inc. One successful pardon-seeker’s mother attended a $1 million fundraising dinner.

Clemency seekers use a variety of ways to catch the president’s attention. The end result is that victims of crime – and taxpayers, who have to pay for these huge white-collar investigations and trials – are often left with nothing.

Unfettered power

The U.S. Constitution grants the president nearly unbounded power to pardon whomever he likes, whenever he likes and for whatever reason he likes. This is why, since 1894, the Office of the Pardon Attorney has tried to impose some guidelines on the process and decide which cases should be eligible for clemency at all.

These guidelines generally require that a clemency seeker have been released from prison for five years before they are eligible to request a pardon. If they never went to prison, the five years is calculated from the date of sentencing. Many presidents adhere to this norm: My study shows that between 94% and 100% of people pardoned by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Barack Obama met this criteria. Because he gave so many preemptive pardons, Joe Biden’s percentage was lower, at around 68%, but still well over half.

In contrast, out of the 216 individual pardons granted by Trump in his second term so far, only 34 – about 15% – have gone to people who waited that long.

The money ladder

A look back at recent past administrations shows an erratic but increasing amount of financial obligations canceled. While some presidents have been frugal with their financial forgiveness – George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush remained under the million-dollar mark, while Joe Biden was just over it – others have been less so.

Bill Clinton erased nearly $10 million in fines and restitution through pardons, most notoriously pardoning Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose ex-wife contributed more than a million dollars to various Democratic causes and the Clinton Presidential Library.

Obama more than doubled Clinton’s record, forgiving $23 million in financial sanctions.

But Trump surpassed them both in his first term, canceling nearly $195 million in financial obligations. The amount of money saved by convicted defendants during his second term is exponentially higher. One could even say that, as Trump likes to put it, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

A new role for commutations

Since the main function of commutations is to let people out of prison sooner, commutations usually leave financial obligations in place. During his first term, Trump primarily granted commutations that left “intact and in effect” all conditions of a person’s sentence except for imprisonment. This let numerous defendants out of jail but kept them on the hook for nearly $3 billion in fines and restitution.

That has changed during Trump’s second term. Today, his commutations routinely cancel a recipient’s prison sentence “with no further fines, restitution, probation or other conditions.”

This is how, through commutations alone, Trump has canceled more than $300 million in penalties and restitution since he returned to office.

A word of caution

One figure that is unavailable in public records is whether any given defendant has started to pay, or has fully paid off, their financial obligations. So these figures for every administration represent a ceiling: the full amount of fines, restitution or forfeiture that a judge imposed on a convicted defendant. How much was actually paid down can usually only be estimated, though there are exceptions.

For example, Jason Galanis, who pled guilty to defrauding the Oglala Sioux Nation, had paid just over $2 million of his $80 million restitution before his sentence was commuted and the restitution erased in 2025. But we only know that because he unsuccessfully asked the court to return the money.

One useful indicator of how much someone may have already paid is the speed at which they got clemency. The faster they receive clemency, the less time they have to pay off their penalties. The median delay between sentencing and receiving a pardon during Biden, Obama and George H.W. Bush’s administrations was over 20 years.

During Trump’s second term, in contrast, things are moving faster. Trump has pardoned or given commutations to at least 44 recipients within a year of their sentences who together account for over $270 million in financial obligations.

This includes a nursing home executive who pled guilty to withholding his employees’ payroll taxes – which prosecutors said he spent on a yacht – and was pardoned 12 days after being sentenced, ensuring that he could avoid some $4 million in restitution. A crypto company was pardoned hours before it was due to pay a $100 million fine for violating anti–money laundering laws. A digital media founder was ordered to repay defrauded investors $36 million. His sentence was commuted, and his restitution canceled within four months of sentencing.

In these cases, clemency was issued before most of the money was able to reach the government or the victims it was owed to. The faster clemency is granted, the more likely it is that fraudsters get to walk away without paying their victims anything.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.