Melanie Smith pulled grueling hours alongside FBI agents and other prosecutors as she prepped dozens of witnesses to prove that a Virginia sheriff had accepted $75,000 in bribes from wealthy business owners and undercover agents. Just over a year ago, the jury returned a guilty verdict against former Culpeper County sheriff Scott Jenkins in an astounding 90 minutes.
V. Grady O’Malley built one of the most complicated cases of his 47-year Justice Department career to prove that a New York businessman who owned a chain of nursing homes had failed to pay more than $38 million in employment taxes, then laundered the money by bouncing it from account to account. The defendant, Joseph Schwartz, pleaded guilty.
Just months after the defendants were sentenced, President Donald Trump pardoned them as he wielded his executive power to grant clemency to a host of convicts — many of them politically connected — outside of the traditional pardon-application process.
Jenkins was pardoned the day before he was set to begin his prison sentence, his entire punishment erased and the restitution he owed taxpayers wiped out.
“The president has the authority to grant a pardon, but when you have a strong case, and it is a good case, and you are holding elected officials accountable for wrongdoing, it is frustrating,” Smith said in an interview. “You put a lot of time and energy into these cases. It was a righteous case. The fact that the pardon happened before he went to prison, it undermines one of the purposes of the criminal justice system.”
White-collar and public corruption cases are among the most resource-intensive for the Justice Department to pursue. Prosecutors, FBI agents, and other specialists often work for years to build such cases, following money trails and interviewing scores of witnesses before they even file an indictment.
More than half a dozen experienced prosecutors interviewed for this story, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said Trump’s clemency acts have eroded faith among current and former Justice Department employees that the cases they devote years to prosecuting will lead to accountability.
Calculating the amount of government resources poured into prosecuting a single case is next to impossible. But the cost can often run to millions of dollars when factoring in salaries and travel expenses, prosecutors said. On top of that, witnesses might require transportation to court and accommodation for the duration of the trial, paid for by taxpayers, the prosecutors noted.
Some complex cases can take years to investigate before charges are filed, with prosecutors interviewing dozens of witnesses before grand juries to build their cases. Years typically pass before those cases reach a trial date.
And once the trial arrives, prosecutors can spend upward of 80 hours a week preparing witnesses and getting exhibits ready. A long trial can involve more than 1,000 exhibits that need to be prepped and reviewed.
“To bring a case to trial is just an incredible effort and use of department resources,” said John Keller, the former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. “There’s an intensity of experience and effort and emotion that doesn’t come at any other stage of the case. It’s the pinnacle of the practice.”
During Trump’s two terms, multiple defendants whose cases Keller has tried and supervised have received pardons. He said the pardons sting, but prosecutors are focused on their cases and trials, and do not allow a potential presidential act of clemency to influence how they approach a case.
“There’s a feeling that, if a jury or judge has reached a verdict after hearing all the evidence, it’s even more of a slap in the face to have clemency handed down,” he said.
During the first year of his second term, Trump has pardoned some of the most high-profile public corruption and white-collar defendants prosecuted during President Joe Biden’s administration, as well as some prosecuted during his own first term and some under earlier administrations.
Among them: former Republican congressman George Santos of New York, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, former Tennessee state senator Brian Kelsey, and Trevor Milton, the former executive chairman of electric trucking company Nikola. One of the defining acts of Trump’s return to office has been his sweeping pardons of more than 1,500 people convicted in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including those who assaulted police officers.
Trump has defended his use of the pardons, saying the people to whom he granted clemency had been pursued by what he considers a corrupt and overzealous Justice Department under Biden. But the attorneys interviewed said they investigated each case scrupulously and apolitically to ensure a fair prosecution.
“It’s personally upsetting because of how much time I invested in this case — the time traveling, the late nights looking through documents and prepping for witness interviews,” said Jacob Steiner, a former Justice Department employee who prosecuted the Santos case. “Beyond and more important than the personal aspect, it’s really disheartening that someone who lied to the public and stole a lot of money just gets to walk free and not have to pay back his victims.”
In Atlanta, prosecutors and federal agents spent years investigating reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley. The couple were found guilty of bank fraud and tax evasion in 2022 after a nearly three-week jury trial. The Justice Department then defended the conviction during appeals. But after a public campaign from the Chrisleys’ daughter, who spoke at the Republican National Convention and socialized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the president granted the reality stars a pardon in May.
In New York, prosecutors and federal agents spent roughly two years investigating the online black market Silk Road before indicting its creator, Ross Ulbricht, on charges related to the sale of drugs and other illegal goods on the platform. It took another two years before the case went to trial in 2015, resulting in convictions on seven counts and a sentence of life in prison. Trump pardoned Ulbricht on his first full day in office.
“I couldn’t believe it was a complete and total pardon,” said one law enforcement official who worked on the Silk Road case.
Santos, the Chrisleys, Ulbricht, and others who received pardons from Trump have said they deserved forgiveness because they were prosecuted at the hands of a corrupt Justice Department or were innocent and wrongly convicted.
Every recent president has exercised the pardon power to benefit his allies, but legal experts say that Trump’s use of clemency has bucked every norm of a largely undefined process. Typically, Justice Department employees vet tens of thousands of applications, only recommending to the president people who have completed their sentences and showed contrition. Trump, however, has pardoned criminals without any such vetting, people familiar with the process said, sometimes granting clemency to convicts who have not started their sentences or admitted wrongdoing. Trump and his allies have pointed to Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter as an example of how Trump’s predecessors politicized the pardon.
O’Malley, who retired in 2023 and described himself as a supporter of the president, said he was flummoxed over Trump’s pardoning of Schwartz, the nursing home magnate. He said that sifting through the more than 100 accounts Schwartz set up to evade taxes had required a lot of effort, and that the prosecutors and agents assigned to the case did “yeoman’s work.”
The Washington Post reported that Schwartz paid two lobbyists, right-wing provocateurs Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, $960,000 to help secure a pardon from Trump. (Schwartz must still complete a sentence on state charges in an Arkansas prison.)
“I think the president was misled as to the reasons why [Schwartz] should be pardoned,” O’Malley said. “I can’t see anyone accepting an application and alleging that he somehow deserves to be pardoned unconditionally and completely in this case. Something had to be said to the president. Whether he was paying attention to it or not, I don’t know.”
O’Malley continued: “I was stunned and angered. The $5 million in restitution was vacated. It was a strong case. I do not indict cases on a wing and a prayer.”
In December — less than a month after Trump pardoned Schwartz — the Internal Revenue Service decided to present O’Malley with an award for his work on the Schwartz case. O’Malley said he declined to attend.
