Literary Corner: My Favorite Crimes

Want a federal pardon? Choose one of these

Something I started noticing in January 2021: an awful lot of those crimes he was pardoning on his way out the door were crimes he might easily have committed himself—that had what you might call a Trumpy resonance. Leading to a pretty good Rodgers & Hammerstein song parody:

Bribing, extortion, insurance and bank fraud,
Jobs for your family down to your Aunt Maud,
Skim from your charity, multiple times,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Scheming with foreigners for your election,
Paying off chicks who have seen your erection,
Propping your business on taxpayers' dimes,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Bribe for pardon!
Wrecked Rose Garden!
When he's feeling low,
Trump pardons some crook
Who reminds him of him,
And then he is gooooood to go!

Cheating at golf and delinquent in taxes,
Fooling the people with alternate factses,
Pelting your betters with slanderous slimes,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Claiming a right to whatever he pleases,
Caging up kids and ignoring diseases,
Pumping his shares as the stock market climbs,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Constant lying!
People dying!
When it gets him down,
Trump pardons some crook
Who reminds him of him,
And then he gets ouuuuuuuut of town!

---

In Trump 2.0, as the Represident started issuing pardons straight out of the gate, this insight started hardening, to my surprise, into prophecy: the crimes he pardoned began looking like crimes he’d actually in person committed, from the D.C. cops Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky committing conspiracy obstruction of justice when they covered up the 2020 killing of Karon Hylton-Brown in an unauthorized police chase (you’ll remember Trump’s criminal obstruction of justice from the Mueller Report) to the rioters and amateur militiamen who tried to install him as dictator in the 2021 attempted autogolpe in which the Secret Service had to forcibly stop him from physically participating.

Then there was former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who got 14 years for, among other things, trying to sell a Senate seat after Barack Obama stepped down from it to become president; pardoned in early February by Trump, who himself passes out high positions to people who have helped him out in the past like Pam Bondi (dropped Florida participation in litigation over his Trump University fraud, possibly in return for a $25,000 to her Florida attorney general campaign) and Linda McMahon (the $5 million she “donated” to his fraudulent Trump Foundation was actually a way for him to avoid taxes on pay for a WWE gig he did in 2007) and campaign donors from Howard Lutnick ($6 million) to Elon Musk ($260 million), not to mention “special Middle East envoy” Steve Witkoff, co-founder with his son Zachary of Eric and Junior’s World Liberty Financial crypto firm and arranger of the UAE funding for the Trump family’s $2 billion stake in the much larger crypto firm Binance.

In March came a pardon for Hunter Biden’s old business partner Devon Archer, who had been convicted with associates of ripping off the Oglala Nation with most of the proceeds of a $60 million bond sale they’d arranged for the tribe—Trump must have done that partly in recognition of Archer’s four hours of testimony before the Republican House Oversight Committee’s effort to nail Hunter and possibly Joe Biden for corruption over the former’s dealings in Ukraine and China, which failed, because Hunter hadn’t actually broken any laws in those activities, but maybe Trump also liked that Archer’s crime had cheated Native Americans, who he has himself hated since he was failing in the casino industry.

In April it was Paul Walczak of Palm Beach, who had embezzled more than $10 million that should have gone to the federal government as payroll tax for the employees, doctors and nurses, of his and his mother’s nursing home business—he also failed to pay the employer’s half—”to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high-end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier, prosecutors said.” That’s a quote from the Times and I think there’s something deliciously Times-y about it, like he owes Bergdorf’s an apology for involving them in his squalid behavior by shopping there. Anyway, he was convicted, given an 18-month sentence, and ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution (apparently they’d paid off much of the theft already).

Meanwhile, Paul’s mom, Elizabeth Fago, is quite the Trumpy activist, having raised millions for the president’s and other Republican campaigns and attended many functions, and also personally involved in the theft of Ashley Biden’s addiction diary—the thieves thought she would know how to use it to benefit Trump and brought it over to her Jupiter home, where they displayed it to guests at a fundraiser there attended by Donald Junior and Kimberley Guilfoyle, but when they were advised to turn it over to the FBI, they gave it instead to James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas”, which is clearly not Mrs. Fago’s fault.

So after the inauguration she felt entitled to ask Trump to pardon him, especially as ”They all agreed, according to the application, that the only reason Mr. Walczak was prosecuted criminally was that he was the son of a prominent Trump supporter.” As usual in these cases, she doesn’t offer any kind of factual defense, like trying to suggest her boy (actually, he’s 55) is innocent. These people don’t regard that as an important issue; they don’t accept that there’s a causal connection between doing crimes and getting caught. But Trump didn’t respond for several weeks, though he did invite her to one of those million-dollar-a-plate dinners at the Mar-a-Lago. She went, and that was apparently the bribe he was waiting for, because he issued the pardon three weeks later.

And finally (so far!) Todd and Julie Chrisley, the Tea Party Kardashians, so to speak, whose show Chrisley Knows Best, portraying the high life as lived by real estate tycoons in Atlanta and Nashville ran on the USA Network from 2014 to 2023: busted and convicted for lying to banks about their assets in order to raise something over $36 million in loans they weren’t qualified for, and paying no taxes from 2013 to 2016, they were sentenced to 12 and 7 years respectively (but according to their daughter Savannah, addressing the Republican National Convention last July, it was their political views, not their crimes, that the jury decided to punish them, though, same as Walczak, she doesn’t bother to claim they didn’t commit the crimes). Trump, who owes New York State well over half a billion dollars in a civil action for more or less the same kind of bank fraud ($364 million for the original judgment plus interest accumulating through his appeal), announced he would pardon them today.

He’d have pardoned Charlie Kushner (illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering), too, except he’d already done that, so he nominated him as ambassador to France instead.