Trump pardoned all five of them

I want to walk you through a few quick stories. A Capitol Police officer’s attacker. A truck company founder. A nursing home executive. A disgraced congressman. A Virginia sheriff.

Every one of these people was convicted of doing real harm to real people. And every one of them walked away scot-free with pardons from Donald Trump.

The cop and his attacker. Aquilino Gonell served in the Iraq War, then spent 17 years with the Capitol Police. On January 6th, a rioter named Kyle Fitzsimons — described by prosecutors as “one of the most violent and aggressive rioters” that day — was convicted of assaulting him and wrenching his shoulder so badly it took surgery and ended his career. Fitzsimons was convicted of 11 charges and sentenced to more than seven years. Then he was pardoned by Donald Trump. Sergeant Gonell had career-ending and life-altering injuries. The man who attacked him walked away free and clear. (CBS News; DOJ press release removed by Trump DOJ)

The sheriff. Scott Jenkins was the sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia. A jury convicted him of taking more than $75,000 in bribes and handing out badges in return — making businessmen, including two undercover FBI agents, sworn auxiliary deputies with no training or vetting. A judge sentenced him to 10 years and told him plainly: you sold badges to wealthy men who thought they were above the law. He was pardoned hours before he was due to report to prison. Even Virginia’s Republican Attorney General said it was wrong. (CBS News; Virginia Mercury)

The fraud. Trevor Milton ran a truck company and put out a video of his shiny new truck cruising down a highway. Except the truck didn’t work. They towed it to the top of a hill and filmed it rolling down, then sold investors on the idea it was the real thing. People put their savings into this company. Prosecutors were about to get him ordered to pay roughly $660 million back to the people he defrauded. Trump pardoned him before that happened, and before he paid a cent to those investors. (CNBC; Washington Post)

Workers paychecks. A Florida nursing home executive, Paul Walczak, was convicted of taking the taxes right out of his own employees' paychecks — more than $7 million — and instead of paying it where it was owed, he bought a $2 million yacht and shopped at Cartier. He owed $4.4 million in restitution. His pardon application had gone nowhere for weeks. Then his mother attended a $1-million-a-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Less than three weeks later, the pardon came through — about two weeks after he'd been sentenced. (Skilled Nursing News; New York Times; The Hill)

The Congressman. George Santos lied his way into Congress. He was charged with stealing his own donors’ identities and running up their credit cards — spending the money on designer clothes and personal luxuries. He plead guilty to 23 felonies and was sentenced to more than seven years, plus about $374,000 in restitution to his victims. Trump commuted his sentence after less than three months in prison. The clemency order wiped out the restitution too. Asked afterward whether he’d pay his victims back, Santos said only if the law forced him to do it. (NPR; NBC News)

Notice who’s missing from every one of these stories: the victims.

When a fraud conviction comes with a restitution order, that money is supposed to go back to the people who got hurt. Milton’s investors, some of whom lost their life savings. Santos’s donors, who were defrauded out of their money. A pardon or commutation doesn’t just spring someone from prison — it can erase the order to pay those people back. So the harm stays done, and the people who suffered it are simply told: tough luck.

One of Milton’s victims, who lost more than $100,000, put it about as plainly as anyone could: crime doesn’t pay, the saying goes, but it sure paid off for Milton. (Washington Post).

A House Judiciary Committee analysis found that Trump's pardons and commutations let recipients skip more than $1.3 billion in restitution and fines owed to their victims and to taxpayers — money their victims will never see. (CBS News)

Here’s the part that should bother everyone. There have been so many of these, coming so fast, that it’s almost impossible to keep up. That’s not an accident. When you flood the zone and do this much this quickly, the public can’t keep pace. One outrage gets buried under the next one, and the public just can’t keep up with it all.

And there’s a thread running through a lot of these cases: the people getting them tend to have the right connections. Donors. Friends of friends. Access to the White House. The New York Times editorial board has called it what it looks like — something close to a pardon industry, where proximity to power buys you a way out. (NYT Editorial)

That’s the opposite of how clemency is supposed to work. Past presidents, whatever their faults, mostly saved their most controversial pardons for the very end of their terms — partly out of shame, partly because they no longer faced accountability at the ballot box. That restraint is gone.

Whatever your politics, this part isn’t complicated. If you assault a cop, if you sell badges, if you steal someone’s savings, if you raid your workers paychecks, if you defraud your donors — there should be consequences. And the people you hurt should at least get made whole. Wiping all of that away isn’t mercy. It’s telling people with the right connections that the rules don’t apply to them.

And that’s the whole danger. Not one bad pardon — but a system where justice quietly becomes something you can buy your way out of if you know the right people. From the county courthouse to the Oval Office, the law has to mean the same thing for everybody, or it doesn’t mean anything at all.

A presidential pardon is powerful, but it has a hard limit: it only covers federal crimes. The president has no power to wipe away state crimes.

In a New York Times piece this week, law professor Tim Wu laid out the idea plainly — that the states, as their own sovereigns, can bring cases the federal government has abandoned, and that state prosecutions aren’t touched by a federal pardon. He points to a real example: Joseph Schwartz, who ran a fraudulent nursing home empire, got a federal pardon from Trump — but Arkansas’s Republican attorney general still made him serve state time and pay more than $1 million back. Wu argues that when states act together, across party lines, they can hold the line even under political pressure. (New York Times, “Tim Wu,” June 15, 2026)

I find that genuinely hopeful, because it matches something I believe down to my core: the rule of law doesn’t live in one building in Washington. It lives in every courthouse and every county, in the everyday work of treating people equally under the law — no exceptions for the powerful, no special deals for the connected.

That’s the standard I’ve set across my career as an attorney, a state senator, and a member of Congress. And it’s the standard I think every one of us should demand from everyone who serves in public office.

Did you know how bad this was? I’d like to hear from you. The comments are open.

- Wiley Nickel

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