The pardon for Milton was so unexpected, and his fraud was so enormous, that reporters asked Trump about it at a news conference. Trump gave the following answer: “Highly recommended by many people, that was taken advantage of. He did a business deal, like in Utah, as I have it. I think he was exonerated, and then they brought him into New York, where he had a rough, rough road. He was exonerated. It was a big celebration. Again, I don’t know him, but they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was, he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. And when I heard about it, I said, ‘Nope — not going to happen.’ They persecuted, they destroyed five years of his life.” Trump went on, “He did nothing wrong.”
The president’s answer was factually incorrect: Milton had never been exonerated in any forum. The rote recitation by Trump that a prosecution under Biden was “unfair” or a “witch hunt” became a touchstone in later pardons. Such claims by the president, invariably offered without supporting evidence, have served to justify a range of pardons, including one for a financial fraud case against Devon Archer, a onetime business associate of Hunter Biden’s, and another for Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. As Jackson, the White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Times this year, Trump wants to “pardon victims of political prosecution or overprosecution by a weaponized Biden D.O.J.”
Trump’s pardons reflect his evolving political — and personal — agenda. When Trump ran for president again in 2024, he promised that he would become “the crypto president,” and the industry invested more than $100 million across his campaign and those of other pro-crypto candidates. Shortly after his inauguration in 2025, Trump began to prove his bona fides to his crypto supporters by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, a libertarian darling and the founder of Silk Road, a dark-web marketplace that operated with cryptocurrency.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 of a variety of charges, including money laundering, drug trafficking and computer hacking. He was sentenced to life in prison. When Trump freed him, he said that he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her that he had issued the pardon “in honor of her and the libertarian movement, which supported me so strongly.” The president called the federal prosecutors in the case “scum,” noting they were “some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me.”
In his current term, Trump hasn’t just paid back the crypto industry for its political support. The president’s sons have become major players in crypto, and Trump’s pardons have served their personal financial interests as well. Last October, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and other crimes. He had already completed his four-month sentence, but the pardon allowed him to pass regulatory hurdles in re-establishing his business. “Ross was the biggest outlaw in crypto, so we knew that the pardon of him was a nod to the crypto industry, saying that the Biden war on crypto was over,” a participant in the effort to help Zhao told me. “Our argument to the White House was: ‘You want to be the crypto president, and pardoning C.Z. is a way of establishing your legacy.’”
