If only someone had warned Boosie Badazz. The U.S. rapper is seeking a refund from Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after the wannabe lobbyist goofballs failed to secure Boosie a pardon from President Trump. Wohl and Burkman built a reputation — and a rap sheet of their own — during the first Trump administration for absurd schemes to smear the president’s foes and for trying to suppress the Black vote. NOTUS reported this week that Boosie is now pursuing an arbitration against the two men, trying to claw back half of the $600,000 he paid them to advance his push for a pardon for charges of possessing a firearm as a felon.
You can’t blame Boosie for trying. Under the second Trump administration, the “pardon economy” is booming. Beginning with the blanket pardon of some 1,600 individuals involved with the January 6 riot on his first day in office, Trump has been handing pardons out like candy to people convicted of federal crimes who he claims were victims of retaliation by the Biden administration; who are donors to or allies of his own administration; or whose lobbyists or lawyers really do have the access to the president that Burkman and Wohl pretended to possess. Trump installed his all-purpose lout Ed Martin as U.S. pardon attorney and largely abandoned the traditional pardon process, which requires the filing of official petitions, demonstration of good conduct and remorse, and other key guardrails.
As my colleague Derick Dirmaier put it, “Anytime you introduce a new genre and economy type, that’s something.”
Below, we run through some of the most absurd pardons of Trump II.
Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras
If there’s one thing the Trump administration claims to hate, it’s drug trafficking. The U.S. military has even engaged in a lawless campaign against “narco terrorists” in the Caribbean, killing more than 200 people so far via unauthorized boat strikes. Yet Trump in November granted a “full and complete pardon” to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, springing him from a 45-year sentence.
The U.S. government had convicted Hernández on drugs and weapons charges for being a co-conspirator in a drug operation that brought 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S., per the BBC.
Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City
In the mold of the January 6 pardons, Trump in October pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows, and other Big Lie promoters including attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman. Notably, presidents only have the power to pardon federal crimes, and this band of misfits had not received federal charges for their involvement in 2020 election schemes. Still, Martin insisted that the quartet had received a “full, complete, and unconditional” pardon, per PBS. As PBS noted, Giuliani and Meadows were charged by prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere over their 2020 election interference, but those cases are no longer being actively pursued.
Giuliani has taken the biggest personal hit of the four as a result of his efforts to assert that the 2020 election was stolen. He was disbarred in Washington, D.C. and New York, and had to pay $148 million for defaming two Georgia election workers with his conspiracy theories.
Chanpeng Zhao, co-founder and former CEO of Binance
Trump will often paint the individuals whose charges he’s clearing as, like him, victims of Democratic persecution. Such was the case with former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.
In October 2025, Trump pardoned Zhao, who was sentenced to four months in prison after reaching a plea agreement acknowledging that he enabled money laundering at his crypto exchange. Under Zhao’s watch, Binance was used to conduct virtual trades involving child sex abuse, drug trafficking, and terrorism. At the time, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Zhao “was prosecuted by the Biden administration in their war on cryptocurrency,” per NBC.
In what is surely a completely unrelated move, Binance facilitated a $2 billion purchase of the Trump sons’ World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency in March 2025, months before Zhao’s pardon. Trump told 60 Minutes of Zhao, “I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.”
Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois
After commuting his sentence during his first term in office, Trump pardoned his former Celebrity Apprentice co-star Rod Blagojevich in February 2025. Blagojevich was infamously convicted of corruption in 2011 for a bevy of crimes including trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he was elected president.
The former Democratic governor, who served from 2003 til he was ousted and impeached in 2009, rebranded himself as a “Trump-ocrat” after his commutation. In a bid for Trump’s attention, he even wrote a piece for Newsmax from prison arguing that modern Democrats would have impeached Abraham Lincoln. In announcing the full pardon, Trump called Blagojevich’s sentence a “terrible injustice” for a nice man, per NPR.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
Guess you can’t bat 1,000 when you’re trying to curry favor via sweeping pardons. Trump has admitted he regrets pardoning Rep. Henry Cuellar in December after the congressman decided to run for reelection as a Democrat rather than switching parties.
“Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like. Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!” Trump posted on Truth Social at the time. He has continued to lash out at Cuellar and make it clear this was not the outcome he expected. “Never assumed he would be running for office again, and certainly not as a Democrat,” Trump truthed in July after meeting with top congressional Republicans to talk midterms strategy, per Fox’s San Antonio affiliate.
Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were indicted on 12 counts of bribery, conspiracy and money laundering in 2024 after the congressman allegedly accepted some $600,000 in bribes from the government of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank, according to the Texas Tribune.
Scott Jenkins, former sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia
Martin really said the quiet part loud with this one. Scott Jenkins was a former Virginia sheriff convicted for bribery and sentenced to 10 years in prison for accepting $75,000 to hand out badges to untrained businessmen, making them auxiliary deputy sheriffs in his department.
But Jenkins is also a diehard Trump fan and Second Amendment advocate, and Trump went ahead and pardoned him last May, blaming his conviction on a “Corrupt and Weaponized Justice Department.” “No MAGA left behind,” Martin wrote on X at the time.
Michele Fiore, former judge of Pahrump, Nevada
Fiore, a classic TPM character, was pardoned last April while awaiting sentencing for ripping off funds she’d ostensibly raised to build a statue honoring a police officer killed in the line of duty. Per the Associated Press, Fiore had raised more than $70,000 for the statue, and spent some of that money “on cosmetic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.” Classy.
The White House issued no comment after Trump pardoned her in April 2025, though she was facing decades in prison after being found guilty of six counts of federal wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Fiore is a diehard Trump supporter whose name might ring bells for longtime TPM readers. The former Las Vegas city councilwoman, state assemblywoman, judge and perennial candidate inserted herself into the Bundy ranch standoff in 2016, spreading conspiracy theories about the killing of a militia member by law enforcement at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge during that months-long incident. Fiore also drew attention for volunteering to travel abroad to “put a piece of brass” in the “ocular cavity” of Syrian refugees back in 2015. She ran unsuccessful campaigns for state treasurer and governor, and was appointed as a judge in the deep-red town of Pahrump, Nevada, though she does not have a law degree, per the AP. Fiore, who the Pahrump Valley Times reports ran to hold on to her seat “despite being suspended from the bench and facing disciplinary charges,” recently lost that race.
