Disgraced Pols And Crypto Moguls Vie For Trump Pardons: ‘the Level Of Interest Is Unheard Of’

President Donald Trump’s moves to expand the use of pardons have white-collar defendants jolting to attention — and many are responding with creative maneuvers designed to appeal less to judges or juries than to the ultimate arbiter in the Oval Office.

High-profile convicts including Sam Bankman-Fried and Bob Menendez are among those reportedly seeking relief while framing their case in a way Trump could relate to: by casting themselves as victims of a crooked justice system.

Meanwhile, a Democratic District of Columbia Council member facing federal bribery charges has lavished public praise on Trump’s pick to lead the FBI; a Bitcoin entrepreneur fighting extradition from Spain on tax charges has sat down with Tucker Carlson to plead his case; and, in an interview with POLITICO, a Turkish businessman under federal indictment has offered to share details of a meeting with former President Joe Biden’s brother with investigators — but he wants the case against him dropped.

Trump’s late-February appointment of a White House “pardon czar,” Alice Johnson, and the Friday announcement by the Justice Department lawyer who oversaw pardons during Biden’s term that she has been fired, signal that Trump is not done exercising his clemency powers.

Potential petitioners have taken notice. “Everybody that is in prison now is keenly aware of the environment, and it’s become a very hot topic within the low- and minimum-security inmate communities,” said Sam Mangel, a consultant to white-collar convicts who has advised Steve Bannon, Bankman-Fried and George Santos on the criminal justice process.

Their maneuvers offer a glimpse of a legal landscape shifting in real time to a chief executive undeterred by the informal constraints that previously limited presidential interventions in the criminal justice system. Increasingly, defendants and convicts are acting accordingly.

But Mangel, citing conversations with “people intimately familiar with the current parameters,” said there are limits on who will be considered eligible for Trump’s clemency: Undocumented immigrants and people convicted of sexual, drug-related or violent crimes, he said, need not apply. A White House spokesperson, Elizabeth Huston, declined to comment.

That still leaves plenty of candidates.

In the three years before Trump was elected, Mangel said he received a total of two inquiries from convicts seeking presidential clemency. Now, Mangel said, he is receiving two to four inquiries a day and has had to hire extra paralegals to handle the surge.

“The level of interest,” he said, “is unheard of.”

Crypto defendants "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT" for clemency

Trump’s week-one pardon of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of an illicit online marketplace enabled by Bitcoin transactions, has lifted the hopes of one class of defendant in particular: Crypto entrepreneurs.

One of them is Bitcoin miner Joby Weeks. In 2020, Weeks pleaded guilty to tax evasion and an unregistered securities offering related to his crypto activities, and he has been awaiting sentencing ever since, as the Justice Department continues to pursue a broader conspiracy case against other defendants.

As Trump entered office earlier this year, Weeks revamped his legal strategy and dropped Washington super lawyer David Boies from his legal team. Soon after, Weeks filed a self-authored motion to dismiss his case that cites an unusual authority.

“President Trump said to ‘FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!’ And so, I am,” Weeks wrote in his unorthodox motion, which he prefaced, “From the Desk of: Jobadiah from the House of Weeks.”

The motion is unlikely to ingratiate Weeks, who is due for sentencing later this month, with the judge or prosecutors. It accuses them, as well as FBI agents and others, of colluding in a litany of misdeeds, including torture, human trafficking, and treason.

Trump, who himself has a history of attacking judges and the FBI, is less likely to be offended. Weeks’ filing indicates that copies have been mailed to both the president and his attorney general, Pam Bondi.

“It would be great to have Trump step in,” Weeks, 43, said by phone from Denver, where he is living with his parents under house arrest, “and say, ‘Enough is enough.’”

Weeks' fellow Bitcoin evangelist, Roger Ver, is pursuing a slightly more conventional bid for clemency as he fights tax charges.

Along with Weeks, Ver was among a cohort of libertarians who became early Bitcoin adopters and profited massively.

And like many defendants courting Trump’s intervention, Ver has portrayed himself as a victim of persecution. “To be honest I think they're not really angry about taxes at all,” he said during a December sit-down with Tucker Carlson in which he pleaded his case. “I think they’re just angry about my lack of obedience and lack of kissing their ring.”

In 2014, after amassing a fortune in the cryptocurrency and earning the nickname “Bitcoin Jesus,” Ver renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a national of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.

A decade later, in April 2024, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment that accused Ver of evading $50 million worth of taxes. He was arrested in Spain, where he remains, fighting extradition to the U.S.

Following Trump’s promise last summer to pardon Ulbricht, Ver and his supporters have imitated the public-facing campaign that made Ulbricht a cause celebre among libertarians.

In November, a Free Roger Ver account was registered on X and began promoting a FREEROGER crypto memecoin, minted to raise awareness of the pardon campaign.

A website hosting a “Free Roger” petition prominently displays messages of support from Trump allies like Alex Jones and Roger Stone, who posted on social media, “What they did to me. What they did to ⁦General Mike Flynn. What they tried to do to Donald Trump. They are now trying to do it to Roger Ver.”

In January, four days after Ulbricht’s pardon, Ver appealed directly to Trump in a video posted to X. "If there's anybody that knows what it's like to be the victim of lawfare for spreading American ideals, it's Donald Trump," he said.

Even supporters of Sam Bankman-Fried, the Democratic megadonor and crypto entrepreneur serving 25 years in prison on a fraud conviction, are holding out hope for clemency.

Bloomberg reported in January that Bankman-Fried’s parents have been exploring the potential for a clemency deal. Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, and a lawyer who has represented him, Marc Mukasey, did not respond to requests for comment.

But from a prison in Brooklyn, Bankman-Fried himself has reemerged into the public arena, including with a Carlson sit-down of his own.

And last month, Bankman-Fried gave an interview to the New York Sun in which he dumped on Lewis Kaplan, the Southern District of New York judge who presided over his criminal trial. Kaplan earned Trump’s ire while presiding over E. Jean Carroll’s civil sexual assault and defamation case against the president.

“I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan,” Bankman-Fried told the Sun. “I certainly did as well.”

‘I’ll settle for a pardon’

As Trump has returned to power, a forgotten figure of the foreign influence cases that marked his first term has reemerged with a story about the Biden family.

In 2016, Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin struck up a working relationship with Mike Flynn, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was then advising Trump’s presidential campaign.

In December 2018, federal prosecutors in Virginia charged Alptekin over the collaboration, alleging that he lied to the FBI about it and was acting as an unregistered agent of Turkey’s government.

Since then, Alptekin has remained outside the U.S. and avoided facing trial.

Then in January, on the fourth day of Trump’s term, Alptekin appeared on a Spaces audio broadcast on X. The broadcast was hosted by Hans Mahncke, a critic of the Mueller probe and related investigations that scrutinized the foreign ties of Trump and his allies, including Flynn.

In the course of recounting his version of the events surrounding his indictment, Alptekin described an early 2019 visit he allegedly received from Jim Biden and his wife, Sara Biden, in Turkey.

Alptekin said that Jim and Sara Biden contacted him through his lawyer shortly after his indictment and came to stay with him in Turkey. While hosting them, Alptekin said, his guests proposed that he hire former Attorney General Eric Holder as his defense counsel for $3 million.

Alptekin said he understood their proposal to require him to implicate Flynn in misconduct. Alptekin discussed the alleged approach only briefly. “I don't want to talk too much about it,” he said, “because I think at some point that I might be formally asked to testify.”

Representatives for Covington & Burling, where Holder is a partner, and for Jim and Sara Biden did not respond to requests for comment.

In a follow-up interview with POLITICO, Alptekin suggested that, in addition to making money by brokering the representation, Jim and Sara Biden were running a political errand.

“They visited someone who was under criminal indictment, who was technically a fugitive in the U.S., on the eve of his brother announcing his candidacy,” Alptekin said, arguing that the approach made sense only if it was designed to get him to implicate Flynn — who briefly served as White House national security adviser in 2017 — in behavior that would discredit Trump.

”Me changing my statement would give them ammunition,” he said.

Alptekin said he was willing to share documentation of the alleged approach with investigators, but that he wants his criminal case to come to an end. “I would prefer the case to be dismissed,” he said. “I’ll settle for a pardon for the sake of my family.”

"FBI set me up"

Politicians facing corruption charges are also angling to be among the next beneficiaries of Trump’s legal interventions.

The president's pardon last month of former Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his Justice Department’s move to end the ongoing case against New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, have only bolstered the hopes of other elected officials seeking leniency.

Among those pointing the finger back at the justice system are former Washington D.C. Council Member Trayon White.

White was indicted on corruption charges last summer after the Justice Department said he accepted cash payments from an FBI source in exchange for help securing municipal contracts. White, who was expelled from the council in February, is set to face trial next year.

Last month, as White unsuccessfully fought expulsion from the city council, a truck sat outside the Council’s headquarters covered with a picture of White and the message, “FBI set me up.”

White also made a surprise appearance on Capitol Hill last month at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to consider Kash Patel’s nomination to head the FBI.

White, a Democrat, went on to praise Patel’s performance. “I’m glad to hear the potential director say he will be fair and just,” White wrote in an Instagram post. “This is what America wants.”

Neither White, nor his lawyer, Fred Cooke, responded to requests for comment.

Former Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez, reportedly among those angling for a Trump pardon, has also taken to slamming the justice system.

“President Trump is right,” Menendez, convicted last year on corruption charges, said outside the Manhattan courthouse where he was sentenced to 11 years in prison last month, “This process is political and it’s corrupted to the core.” When posting the remarks on X, Menendez, a Democrat, concluded by tagging @RealDonaldTrump.

A lawyer for Menendez, Bob Luskin, did not respond to requests for comment.

It seems that about the only high-profile defendant not publicly courting Trump’s mercy is former New York Republican Rep. George Santos.

Asked about a pardon last month, Santos, who is awaiting sentencing in April on fraud and identity theft charges, told a podcast host that he would welcome a pardon but that he has not sought one.

Reached via text message, Santos declined to comment further. “I’m the worst advocate for myself, so I have no words for your article,” he wrote. “I’m sorry.”