As Sam Bankman-Fried watched Donald Trump issue scores of pardons to fraudsters and other white-collar criminals this year, the former cryptocurrency tycoon wanted to know how to join their ranks.
His representatives approached Bryan Lanza, a partner at Washington lobbying group Mercury who worked for Trump in 2016 and advertises his record of working with the White House, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bankman-Fried, a former Democrat donor who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, was following an increasingly well-thumbed playbook for petitioning a US president who has pardoned dozens of people, including donors and political allies, posting online about “the rot” in the Biden-era department of justice.
Mercury, which was once co-chaired by Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, declined to comment on the approach by representatives of Bankman-Fried. Lanza did not respond to requests for comment. Bankman-Fried remains in prison.
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Lobbyists have occasionally been hired to seek pardons under previous administrations. But the efforts were less widespread than during Trump’s second term, and some – such as Bill Clinton’s pardon for sanctions-busting oil trader Marc Rich in 2001 – attracted fierce criticism.
Seeking a pardon under Trump had become “a rational thing” for convicted criminals and those fighting charges, one defence lawyer said.
“It happens all the time ... It’s a separate process outside the criminal justice system for potentially getting your case to go away.”
Rather than relying exclusively on lawyers, some of those seeking pardons or clemency have turned to intermediaries – who in some cases charge as much as $1 million – to make their case to the White House.
“We are seeing an industrial-scale pardon business,” said one lawyer with knowledge of the process.
Convictions sometimes lead to criminals being ordered to pay large sums to the government and to compensate their victims. A pardon can end those requirements, and some convicted criminals are offering intermediaries a percentage of any money they save. This could amount to millions of dollars, the person added.
Trump has appointed his ally Ed Martin as pardon attorney, a previously low-profile role that tended to be held by department of justice staff and kept at a distance from the White House. The president also appointed former prisoner Alice Marie Johnson as the first pardon “tsar”.
But what matters most, say people involved in petitioning for Trump pardons, is getting to the president’s inner circle.
Roger Stone, pardoned by Trump in 2020 after being convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian election interference, acted as an intermediary between former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández and the US president.
Hernández, who was convicted of helping to flood American streets with 400 tonnes of cocaine, was pardoned by the president earlier this month.
Trump has said he knew “very little about” Hernández, but Honduras had “weaponised their government” against him.
Stone said he was not paid to help Hernandez.
Earlier this year, Ches McDowell, a lobbyist and hunting companion of Donald Trump jnr who advertises his “strong relationships with the Trump administration”, was hired by cryptocurrency exchange Binance for what lobbying records refer to as “executive relief”, among other issues.
The disclosure offers no further detail on what “executive relief” might entail.
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to a charge of failure to protect against money laundering, was pardoned by Trump in October. McDowell declined to comment.
Trump told CBS News last month that he did not know who Zhao, known as CZ, was but had “heard it [his prosecution] was a Biden witch-hunt”.
Joseph Schwartz, a former nursing-home owner sentenced in April, was pardoned in November after paying Trump-supporting lobbyists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl $960,000 to make his case.
Burkman told the Financial Times that Schwartz was “a wonderful man of God and we are grateful that President Trump in his wisdom granted clemency”.
A White House official told the Financial Times that “no one from White House Counsel ever met the Schwartz lobbyists”.
“Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting funds,” the official said. They pointed to the fact that many who have hired lobbyists had not been pardoned by Trump.
Other convicts, including a former healthcare executive convicted of fraud and crypto executives who have pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges, have hired lesser-known Trump-aligned lobbyists.
The White House says “a whole team of qualified lawyers” reviews each pardon. A White House spokesperson said Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority to issue pardons” while former president Joe Biden had “commuted sentences of violent criminals including child killers and mass murderers” as well as pardoning family members.
A department of justice spokesperson said pardon decisions “were made through proper channels without input from the attorney general”.
Beyond hiring someone with links to the administration, convincing the president that you have common enemies, and that the justice system has been weaponised against you, is considered a particularly effective tactic for obtaining a pardon, say people with knowledge of the process.
Trump has repeatedly said he was the target of a political witch-hunt by federal and other prosecutors during the Biden years.
“We’ve tried to make the argument that [the] weaponised process, if it can be directed against president Trump, then [it] can certainly be directed against any citizen,” Robert Ray, a partner at law firm Sterlington, who is attempting to secure a pardon for his long-time client Selim Zherka, said.
Zherka, a strip-club and real estate owner who in 2015 pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud charges in New York and has already served his sentence, has said the department of justice targeted him because he was an organiser of the conservative Tea Party movement.
“Would I be doing the same thing if it were a president Biden or a president Obama? The answer is largely no ... because it has a special appeal before this president,” Ray said.
This year, Bankman-Fried, who was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars in funds from FTX customers to make risky bets, has appeared from prison in an interview with conservative media figure Tucker Carlson. Echoing Trump, he says he was a victim of the “politicisation” of the department of justice.
Trump “knows how deeply the rot infested Biden’s DoJ”, Bankman-Fried wrote on X last week.
A groundswell of support can be important for securing clemency. One person familiar with the pardons process pointed to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the dark web marketplace Silk Road, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for operating a platform used to buy and sell drugs and other illegal items.
He was pardoned at the start of Trump’s second term. Ulbricht’s supporters included young, largely male conservatives and libertarians who have become an important political bloc for Trump.
Some of those pardoned have financial links with Trump’s world. Trevor Milton, the founder of electric-truck maker Nikola, who was convicted of lying to investors in 2022 and received a pardon in March, donated almost $1 million to a group supporting Trump’s 2024 presidential run.
Milton told the Financial Times that his lawyers applied for a pardon through the normal channels, which was “processed in due course based upon facts that reflected my innocence”. He added that his pardon and donations were in the public record and “in no way are the two things connected”.
Brad Bondi, a lawyer at the firm Paul Hastings who had represented Milton during his criminal case which was charged in 2021, is the brother of Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general. In a television interview after the pardon, Milton was asked about Brad Bondi’s role. “He had to recuse himself, and so did she,” Milton said.
This week, a group of congressional Democrats told the department of justice they had “serious concerns” about a “troubling pattern” of interventions in cases involving Brad Bondi “that consistently favour his clients”, including the Milton case. Bondi’s spokesperson said he would be travelling for several days and could not be reached for comment.
Some high-profile convicted criminals remain unpardoned despite adopting positions that align with those of the administration. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of blood-testing company Theranos who is serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors, has posted on X about her support for the “Make America Healthy Again” movement championed by Trump and Robert F Kennedy jnr, his health secretary.
Bob Menendez, the former New Jersey Democratic US senator who was convicted on bribery charges after accepting gold bars in exchange for influence, has publicly said he hoped Trump “cleans up the cesspool” that led to his conviction. He has painted himself as a fellow victim of a rigged justice system but remains in prison.
His co-defendant Fred Daibes hired lobbyist Keith Schiller, a former Trump bodyguard and White House official, for $1 million, seeking “executive relief”. A lawyer for Daibes told the Financial Times his client was no longer working with Schiller.
Others are, at least so far, distancing themselves from talk of pardons. Lawyers for Do Kwon, the South Korean cryptocurrency founder sentenced to 15 years in prison this month after the collapse of his crypto venture, made a point of telling judge Paul Engelmayer at his sentencing hearing that, unlike in other “high-profile crypto cases”, there had been “no political outreach in this case”. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
