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- President Donald Trump’s final pardon list was released Tuesday night and included more than 140 people.
- Many on the list were low-level, non-violent drug offenders, but Trump has also offered pardons and leniency at startling numbers.
- Among the list are a single candidate for the Trump administration, a snake smuggler and a former Google executive convicted of stealing company secrets.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump’s final pardon list was released on Tuesday with over 100 people, none of whom was Joe Exotic.
Exotic and his lawyer Eric Love were hoping for a pardon – Love was reportedly waiting outside Exotic’s prison with a waiting limo (after several hours he left). Exotic was sentenced to 22 years on more than a dozen animal abuse charges and two counts of attempted murder.
But, surprisingly, the exotic animal world was represented on the President’s Ultimate List. Robert Bowker pleaded guilty to wildlife trafficking 30 years ago, after being caught transporting 22 snakes to the Miami Serpentarium, an act for which he was offered 22 American alligators. Bowker was sentenced to probation and has spent much of the past decades working in conservation. Trump granted him a full pardon.
Trump has also sought to forgive his political colleagues, including former Arizona Representative Rick Renzi, who was convicted in 2013 of extortion, bribery, insurance fraud, money laundering and racketeering in connection with the development of a mine outside of Phoenix.
Renzi was released from prison in 2017. In a statement Wednesday, he said: “After almost 14 years of fighting for my innocence, it took a real man of action and courage for President Trump to finally relieve me of this. ‘horrible deception to have been wrongly convicted by a Ministry of Justice which engaged in the falsification of witnesses, illegal telephone tapping and serious misconduct in the matter of prosecution.
Ken Kurson, who was at one point appointed to serve on the board of directors of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has also been granted a preventive pardon in an ongoing cyberstalking case.
As the FBI began screening the former New York Observer editor for the role of NEH, it was revealed that he had been accused of harassing and stalking two doctors at Mt. Sinai Hospital, for which he was allegedly responsible for the dissolution of his marriage in 2015.
A criminal complaint has been filed that Kurson created fake online characters to harass women, and that Kurson at one point contacted the women’s employer to wrongly accuse them of “inappropriate contact with a minor,” according to CNBC.
Kurson is known to be a close friend of Jared Kushner and is linked to him through his work at 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 was a co-author of Rudy Giuliani’s 2002 book “Leadership.” Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, was pardoned by the president in December.
The pardon of former Google chief Anthony Levandowski was backed by several entrepreneurial heavyweights, including venture capitalist Peter Thiel and CAA founder Michael Ovitz, and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
Levandowski founded Google’s self-driving car initiative, but was later embroiled in a civil lawsuit 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 have been granted to people who had been convicted of non-violent drug offenses. In some cases, these convictions date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the names given to Trump were endorsed 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 obtained a full pardon from Trump in 2020 after speaking at the Republican National Convention on his behalf.)
One particularly striking switch that Johnson fought for was that of Ferrell Damon Scott, who was convicted of possession with intent to distribute marijuana in 2007 and, under the policy of the Three Strike Act, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The switch was supported by Acting US Attorney Sam Sheldon, who said he “did not strongly believe that [Mr. Scott] deserves a mandatory life sentence. ”
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