“I was just talking to the President,” Tiger Woods told officers after clipping another vehicle in April. Woods was booked for driving under the influence regardless, even though he’s dating Vanessa, the ex-wife of Donald Trump’s eldest son, and has been coaching the President’s granddaughter Kai at golf. He isn’t the only person attempting to use Trump as protection from law enforcement. Most, however, don’t have his phone number. Instead they are at the mercy of the presidential pardon process.
On Trump’s first day back in office, he pardoned around 1,500 people who took an unguided tour through the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The President was criticized for not discerning between violent and nonviolent offenders – the “hang Mike Pence” crew as opposed to the aw-shucks tourists. He justified this blanket pardon by telling Sean Hannity that doing otherwise “would be very, very cumbersome.” Other pardons followed: for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of a dark-web drug marketplace; former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich; cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley. In total, some 1,700 people have had their sentences commuted or received a pardon.
Peter Ticktin is an 80-year-old lawyer who has known Trump since they attended military academy together. He secured second-term pardons for Colorado election official Tina Peters and Stewart Rhodes’s Oath Keepers, among others. “I’ve made a number of applications and almost all of them are still under consideration, if they haven’t been granted,” Ticktin says. “The people on the government side have to make absolutely sure that whoever’s getting a pardon is not a danger to society.”
“I had one fellow who was a pedophile who was willing to pay me more than my normal fee,” Ticktin continues. “He was willing to pay me $1 million to do his pardon, but I couldn’t do it because… because he’s a pedophile.”
Requests for clemency are handled by the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, currently headed by Ed Martin. Martin was an organizer of Stop the Steal rallies who went on to become a judicial advocate for the January 6-ers. Ticktin says Martin, 56, is “a remarkable young man.” After a pardon form has been submitted to Martin, the petition is reviewed and vetted by other DoJ lawyers, before being passed to Alice Marie Johnson, Trump’s “pardon czar” and a former convict. She had her life sentence for a drug conspiracy commuted by Trump in his first term, at the urging of Kim Kardashian and Jared Kushner. She was then granted a full pardon in 2020. “I can’t help but advocate for people who are incarcerated, because I’m really one of them. I’m just a free one of them,” Johnson said in 2023. But petitioners and their representatives don’t have an obvious way of expediting the pardon process. And the pace has slowed in Trump’s second year.
Trump is far from the first president to be criticized for how he used the power of the pardon. Presidents Biden and Clinton both cleared family members of crimes on their way out of the Oval Office. But Ticktin insists Trump’s motivations are pure. “I know he wants more pardons,” he says, “it comes from his empathy. I know Donald Trump very well because we lived together when we were 17. If he has a flaw… unlike a sociopath or a psychopath that doesn’t have empathy, he’s the opposite.”
While Ticktin has successfully lobbied for Trump loyalists, he concedes it would be harder to secure a pardon for a client who’s been at odds with the President. “I don’t know if he would be quite as generous to someone who is an overt enemy to his administration and to him, because what can you expect?” he says. “But it isn’t just an ‘if you’re my friend, I’m going to pardon you’ situation at all.”
Trump is far from the first president to be criticized for how he used the power of the pardon
Some of those lobbying the administration for clemency have strong bona fides. Alan Dershowitz, the former Harvard law professor who defended President Trump at his first impeachment trial, is trying to secure clemency for the women behind “orgasmic wellness” startup OneTaste. They were convicted of forced labor conspiracy last year; a former employee told the trial OneTaste was in fact a “sex cult.” “The OneTaste prosecution endangers all controversial religions and ideologies,” Dershowitz says. “The best way to prevent this danger is for the President to serve as a check and balance through executive clemency.”
Ticktin says the biggest misconception about the Trump-era pardon process is “that you can pay to play.” Take, for example, a rapper called Boosie Badazz. He has filed a suit against Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, a pair of convicted fraudsters turned lobbyists whom Badazz paid $600,000 to secure his pardon for federal drug and firearm charges. Now he is seeking to have $300,000 returned, claiming the contract stipulated a refund of half his payment if a pardon wasn’t secured by the end of January this year. (Wohl and Burkman deny this.) “U PLAYED WITH THE WRONG ONE,” wrote Mr. Badazz on social media. “IM SUING YALL N FEDERAL COURT NOW.”
Ticktin is critical of lobbyists who take advantage of prisoners desperately seeking clemency. “If they’re guaranteeing that they can secure a pardon, they are liars,” he says. “You’ve got creepy people doing creepy things.”
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