Trump clemency orders erased 119 million dollars in crime victim restitution, CBS investigation finds
Small businesses and the IRS among the creditors wiped out by pardon paperwork
Images
Sen. Chris Coons on Trump's Ukraine policy
cbsnews.com
Status of Israel's election
cbsnews.com
Trump campaigns in Texas
cbsnews.com
Former RNC Chair on midterms
cbsnews.com
Images show Starlink disabled in Ukraine
cbsnews.com
President Trump's clemency orders have erased at least 119 million dollars in restitution owed to crime victims, a CBS News investigation has found.
The reporter Daniel Klaidman traced the effect through the machinery of presidential pardons and commutations: when a sentence is commuted or a conviction pardoned, the court-ordered restitution attached to it disappears with it. The creditors on the other side of those wiped-out debts include small businesses that were defrauded and the Internal Revenue Service itself — an agency that does not usually forgive what it is owed.
The mechanism is not new, but the scale is. Clemency is an unreviewable power, and every president uses it; the question the investigation raises is who absorbs the loss when it is used. A fraud victim who spent years in litigation to obtain a restitution order holds a piece of paper that one signature in the Oval Office can void — while the same government that voided it will pursue a missed tax filing with liens and interest.
The pattern fits a broader one in which the state's own claims are enforced with machinery that the claims of private victims never see. Federal prosecutors negotiate restitution as part of plea bargains precisely because it costs victims something to accept them; the bargain's value rests on the promise being kept. A pardon converts that promise into a courtesy.
The 119-million-dollar figure is a floor, not a total — CBS counted only the cases it could trace, and clemency paperwork is not indexed by who was owed what. The full accounting of what has been erased will fall to the victims to compile themselves, from court files, one debtor at a time.