Mastodawn

For fraudsters and tax evaders,
the past year has been a cresting wave of successes:

💥the abandonment of seeming slam-dunk prosecutions,

💥presidential pardons for even the most egregious crimes,

💥and a steady hollowing out of the agencies tasked with holding them to account.

Trump’s not wrong when he rails about a surge in crime -- But “the crime wave, is white collar”.

Trump’s preferred tool for aiding white-collar criminals is simple:
👉 the #pardon.

Where previous presidents deployed that power sparingly,
often at the end of their terms,
Trump has wielded it promiscuously
– issuing clemency even when it results in something completely anathema to his administration’s stated goals.

Take Trump’s supposed focus on combating narco-traffickers.

Trump has been explicit about wanting to control the influx of narcotics and fentanyl into the US from South America
– and is close to waging war on Venezuela despite the fact that it is not among the primary direct traffickers of cocaine to the US.

At the same time, Trump has pardoned #Juan #Orlando #Hernandez, the former Honduran president who was convicted by a US jury of an extraordinary catalogue of crimes, including conspiring to import roughly
400 tons of #cocaine into the United States

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/21/trump-white-collar-criminals?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals

Why would the Trump administration choose to set aside consequences from criminals whose actions threaten the stability of the broader American economy?

The Guardian

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Chuck Darwin

One by one,
white-collar criminals have marched to the White House, bleating their fealty to Trump
– and 🔥watched their prison sentences evaporate as a result.

🔸There was #Charles #Scott,
a Virginia businessman sentenced earlier this year for manipulating stock values and defrauding investors at a lighting company
– and who Trump later freed.

🔸A pair of reality television stars, #Julie and #Todd #Chrisley, were caught out evading taxes,
sentenced to three years in prison as a result
– before Trump decided to pardon them.

🔸#David #Gentile was a former private equity head,
convicted last year for conspiring to defraud investors
(along with his partner)
to the tune of some $1.6bn,
receiving a seven-year sentence as a result.

But just days into his prison term,
Trump announced Gentile’s sentence would be commuted, and that he could walk free.

The latter decision was remarkably galling.

💥Gentile and his colleague had defrauded a staggering
10,000 different victims:
⚠️parents and grandparents with little to their names,
some of whom saw their entire life savings wiped out.

“I’m totally disgusted, because it wasn’t only myself,”
one of Gentile’s victims said after Trump’s move.

“It was my elder mother in her nineties and my sister as well… We all got defrauded.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/21/trump-white-collar-criminals?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals

Why would the Trump administration choose to set aside consequences from criminals whose actions threaten the stability of the broader American economy?

The Guardian

Show thread

Chuck Darwin Dec 21

Nor were Trump’s pardons confined to financial crime alone.

In the political realm,
he used them to dismantle the already-fragile idea of
public accountability,
🆘 turning American public squares into carnivals of bribery and fraud.

🔥He pardoned #Alexander #Sittenfeld,
a former member of the Cincinnati city council,
convicted by a jury on both bribery and extortion charges,

🔥#John #Rowland,
a former Connecticut governor,
caught out in multiple corruption cases

🔥and #Jeremy #Hutchinson,
a former Arkansas state legislator and scion of one of Arkansas’s most prominent political families.

In 2023, Hutchinson pleaded guilty to accepting over $150,000 worth of bribes,
receiving a four-year sentence as a result
– a sentence that Trump wiped away earlier this year.

🔥Just this month Trump announced the pardon of
#Henry #Cuellar,
a Texas representative and the first member of Congress in US history formally accused of acting as a foreign agent,
allegedly overseeing multiple bribery schemes from Mexico to Azerbaijan.

Cuellar had allegedly become an Azeri mole,
working for a regime known for its kleptocratic brutality,
routinely jailing dissidents, journalists and political opposition figures.

Cuellar allegedly served as an Azeri agent
while the regime was engaged in ethnic cleansing against Armenians,
constituting, as Freedom House detailed,
“war crimes and crimes against humanity”.

💥None of that mattered.

Cuellar was pardoned anyway,
permitted to remain in Congress
and transformed into a potential political ally.

The message to lawmakers was unmistakable:

👉 loyalty to Trump now offers protection from consequences.

The message to foreign strongmen was equally clear.

❌ The United States, once again, is open for business.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/21/trump-white-collar-criminals?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals

Why would the Trump administration choose to set aside consequences from criminals whose actions threaten the stability of the broader American economy?

The Guardian

Show thread

Chuck Darwin Dec 21

Pardons are only one part of the arsenal Trump has deployed to help white-collar criminals escape justice.

Pardons are generally used only for those already convicted of crimes.
-- It’s far easier to simply ❌ drop any and all investigations into potential malfeasance,
before any convictions ever come.

Public Citizen, the nonprofit consumer rights group,
has been keeping a record of the enforcement actions
– that is, either prosecutions or investigations
– against corporate defendants that have now been paused or scuttled outright,
-- all as a direct result of Trump’s decisions.

Out of 480 corporations targeted in previous enforcement actions,
the Trump administration has already
👉thwarted approximately one third of them.

As Public Citizen summarized,
❌ “President Trump talks tough on crime,
but his administration is gutting enforcement against corporate lawbreakers.”

The examples are sprawling.

After years of deadly crashes linked to systemic negligence at #Boeing,
the Department of Justice launched a felony case,
charging the company with conspiracy to defraud the United States,
and tying its conduct to the deaths of hundreds of people.

Boeing initially agreed to plead guilty and pay nearly $700m in fines.

💥But after donating about $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund,
the agreement collapsed.

The prosecution was dropped.

Lawyers for victims’ families called the decision “unprecedented”
and “obviously wrong for the deadliest corporate crime in US history”.

A judge last month noted that the agreement
“fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public”.

🔸Unregistered brokers trading unregulated securities.

🔸Pharmaceutical price-fixing conspiracies.

🔸Corporations operating factories that presented
“imminent and substantial endangerment to public health”.

⚠️Case after case evaporated
– often following political donations or business arrangements benefiting Trump, his family or his allies.

No sector better encapsulates this dynamic than #cryptocurrency.

♦️Major crypto players like Crypto.com and Coinbase
saw investigations quietly shelved.

♦️Binance and Zhao, mentioned above, stood at the center of one of this corrupt carousel.

Months before Trump pardoned Zhao, Binance had begun helping Trump’s personal crypto firm, 🆘"World Liberty Financial",
craft its own #stablecoin
– a coin that a separate firm controlled by the
🔥United Arab Emirates (UAE) later used to bankroll a $2bn investment back into Binance.

(For good measure, the UAE then received access to high-end American computer chips
– despite all the rampant national security worries.)

All of it generated potentially tens of millions of dollars for the Trumps in the process
– and ended up resulting in Zhao walking free.

It was a single, sordid web of
🔹crypto pay-offs,
🔹presidential profiteering and
🔹white-collar convictions undone,
with rising
national security concerns thrown in for good measure.

Unsurprisingly, these crypto organizations,
and the broader crypto industry as a whole,
have become perhaps 💥Trump’s biggest corporate boosters
– and that there are now spiraling worries that this unregulated industry will be at the center of
America’s next
⛔️economic collapse

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/21/trump-white-collar-criminals?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals

Why would the Trump administration choose to set aside consequences from criminals whose actions threaten the stability of the broader American economy?

The Guardian