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Julia Mueller


NextImg:Trump pardoned man 1 month after mother attended $1M per person fundraiser: Report

President Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a man who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes, one month after his mother attended a major fundraiser for the president, according to a new report from The New York Times.

The Times reports that a pardon application submitted around Trump’s inauguration cited efforts by Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, to support Trump and other Republicans — and contended that Fago’s political activity motivated Walczak’s criminal prosecution.

Fago later attended a Mar-a-Lago fundraising dinner with a $1 million cost per person, according to the Times, and Walczak was pardoned less than three weeks later.

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The new report about the timing of Trump’s pardon comes amid scrutiny over his clemency moves since returning to the Oval Office, including his controversial pardoning of nearly all Jan. 6 defendants — roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the 2021 Capitol attack — on his first day back in the White House.

Walczak had pleaded guilty back in November, shortly after Trump’s election, to not paying employment taxes and not filing his individual income tax returns, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). He’d withheld nearly $7.5 million in taxes from workers at his health care companies but did not pay those over to the IRS, the DOJ said, among other issues. 

In early April, the Floridian was sentenced to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay more than $4 million in restitution. His pardon spares him both from serving time and paying the fees.

According to the Times, Fago had helped host at least three Trump campaign fundraisers and attended events at both of Trump’s inaugurations. She was also reportedly linked in Walczak’s pardon application to a push to publicize the diary of former President Biden’s daughter during the 2020 cycle.

On top of the sweeping Jan. 6 pardons, Trump has pardoned more than three dozen other people in the first four months of his second term, compared with 80 pardons sent out by Biden across his four-year tenure.

Trump has been critical of Biden’s eleventh-hour pardons for Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley and members of the House panel that investigated Jan. 6 — moves that Biden said sought to protect the public servants from potential attacks by the Trump administration — and argued that Biden’s use of autopen invalidates them.