A 60 Minutes investigation documented a paid industry that has grown up around Trump's pardon power. In a meeting recorded for CBS News, lobbyists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pitched Ammon Covino, who served nearly two years in federal prison for illegally transporting a shark and a stingray and was working with CBS. For $300,000, they predicted, they could secure him a pardon by as early as October. “We put him in a pincer movement,” Burkman said of the president. “We literally want to put the pen in his hand and get him to sign it because he's tired of hearing about it.”
The market exists because the traditional process has been sidelined. CBS found that about 70 percent of Trump's second-term clemency actions were not routed through the Justice Department, and 92 percent when the January 6 cases are included. Brokers' fees can reach $3 million, sources told CBS. Broker Brett Tolman said he doesn't file with the department: “I just send my petitions directly to the White House.” The rapper Boosie Badazz said he paid Burkman and Wohl $600,000 up front and received no pardon; NOTUS reported he has filed the first known arbitration against a pardon lobbyist in Trump's second term. A text from Wohl's number, which Wohl has denied sending, said the brokers would enlist Laura Loomer, Speaker Mike Johnson and Erika Kirk, and that Loomer might ask White House aide Natalie Harp “to bring it in to POTUS.”
The reporting does not establish that any pardon was granted in exchange for a payment. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said anyone “spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money and the president doesn't even know who these so-called 'lobbyists' are,” and a White House official told NOTUS that Burkman and Wohl “had nothing to do” with the pardon of a client, nursing-home owner Joseph Schwartz. Ed Martin, the former pardon attorney, called the brokers “snake oil salesmen.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said, “They've basically converted the president's pardon power into a for-profit industry,” and Democrats pledged to investigate if they win the House (see House and Senate Democrats Open an Investigation Into Whether Trump's Pardon Recipients Paid Intermediaries to Reach Him; Letters Sent to More Than a Dozen Recipients and Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Whose Residents Were Found in Feces With Maggots. He Paid $1M to Lobbyists for the Pardon.).