- President Donald Trump’s final list of pardons was released Tuesday night and included more than 140 people.
- Many on the list were low-level nonviolent offenders, but Trump also offered forgiveness and clemency to some surprising figures.
- Among the list is a former candidate for the Trump administration, a snake smuggler and a former Google executive convicted of stealing company secrets.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
President Donald Trump’s final list of pardons was released on Tuesday to more than 100 people, none of whom were Joe Exotic.
Exotic and his lawyer Eric Love were waiting for a pardon – Love was supposedly waiting outside Exotic’s prison with a limousine ready (after several hours, he left). Exotic was sentenced to 22 years for more than a dozen counts of animal abuse and two counts of attempted murder.
But surprisingly, the exotic animal world was represented on the president’s last-minute list. Robert Bowker pleaded guilty to wildlife trafficking 30 years ago, after he was caught transporting 22 snakes to the Miami Serpentarium, for which he was offered 22 American crocodiles. Bowker was sentenced to parole and has spent much of the past few decades working on conservation. Trump granted him total forgiveness.
Trump also sought to forgive other politicians, including former Arizona MP Rick Renzi, who was convicted in 2013 of extortion, bribery, insurance fraud, money laundering and extortion in connection with the development of a mine outside Phoenix.
Renzi was released from prison in 2017. In a statement on Wednesday, he said: “After almost 14 years of fighting for my innocence, it took a real man of action and courage in President Trump to finally get rid of the terrible mistake of to be unfairly convicted by a Department of Justice that has been involved in tampering with witnesses, illegal wiretapping and gross misconduct by the prosecutor. “
Ken Kurson, who has already been appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities board, also received a preventive pardon in an ongoing cyber persecution case.
When the FBI started vetoing the former New York Observer editor for the role of NEH, it was revealed that he was accused of harassing and harassing two doctors on Mt. Sinai Hospital, one of whom he allegedly blamed for the dissolution of his marriage in 2015.
A criminal complaint was filed, alleging that Kurson had created false online personas to harass women, and that Kurson had contacted the women’s employer to falsely accuse them of “improper contact with a minor,” according to CNBC.
Kurson is known to be a close friend of Jared Kushner and is connected to him through his work on the Observer, the newspaper Kushner once owned.
According to The New York Times, Kurson also helped write a campaign speech for Trump in 2016 and co-authored Rudy Giuliani’s 2002 book “Leadership”. Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, was pardoned by the president in December.
The forgiveness of former Google executive Anthony Levandowski was supported by several entrepreneurial heavyweights, including venture capitalist Peter Thiel and CAA founder Michael Ovitz, and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
Levandowski founded Google’s autonomous car initiative, but later became involved in a civil suit after being accused of sharing trade secrets with Uber. In March 2020, he pleaded guilty to a charge of secret theft and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
More than a dozen pardons went to people who had been convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. In some cases, these convictions date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the names given to Trump were examined by # Cut50, a bipartisan criminal justice reform group.
Alice Johnson, who obtained Trump’s clemency in 2018 after being convicted of drug trafficking in 1996, was part of # Cut50’s efforts. (Johnson received Trump’s full pardon in 2020 after she spoke at the Republican National Convention on his behalf.)
One particularly notable commute that Johnson fought for was that of Ferrell Damon Scott, who was convicted of possession with the intention of distributing marijuana in 2007 and, under the Three Strikes Act policy, was sentenced to life in prison. The switching was supported by United States acting prosecutor Sam Sheldon, who said he “does not strongly believe that [Mr. Scott] deserves a mandatory life sentence. ”