How Trump Could Bury Any of His Goons' Crimes

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

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4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Liz Oyer joins Joanna Coles to expose what she calls Donald Trump’s “pardon economy”—a system that has transformed presidential mercy into something transactional and lucrative. Oyer, the former pardon attorney under Joe Biden, walks through the eye-popping cases: reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley freed after serving just 18 months; crypto titan Changpeng “CZ” Zhao pardoned after brokering billions into the Trump family’s crypto venture; electric truck founder Trevor Milton absolved before paying back investors; and even former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández released despite a 45-year sentence for massive cocaine trafficking. Along the way, they examine the erased restitution—over a billion dollars owed to victims—golf-course clemency pitches, surprise NFL pardons, and the political fallout inside Trump’s own Justice Department. If pardons are, as one scholar puts it, an X-ray into a president’s soul, what does this one reveal about Trump’s second term—and who benefits next? Sign up for Joanna's new Substack here: https://beast.pub/scream Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Is it possible for Donald Trump to pardon himself and his entire cabinet, if necessary?
0:07.1	I think it is not only possible but likely that Donald Trump will very broadly grant
0:12.8	pardons to members of his administration who may have committed crimes in the course of their
0:18.4	official duties, and that certainly could include Pete Hegeseth.
0:21.6	It could include Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, Stephen Miller, who's his close advisor.
0:26.6	And it also, frankly, could include large numbers of people like the ICE agents who are
0:32.6	carrying out his immigration agenda.
0:35.6	I'm Joanna Coles.
0:38.2	This is the Daily Beast podcast.
0:39.6	And amid the crazy, the flooding the zone technique of the Donald Trump administration number two,
0:47.7	it's very easy to lose sight of some of the more sinister and ominous things going on.
0:52.6	No one has been better at tracking the growth
0:56.1	of the pardons economy than the lawyer Liz Oyer, who was the former pardons attorney for Joe Biden.
1:03.8	And she talks about how she wished that he hadn't actually pardoned Hunter Biden because
1:09.0	it's given Donald Trump all sorts of ammunition against
1:12.1	his critics. But literally what's going on right now is that people are just paying money
1:16.1	to get out of jail. All sorts of people, scamsters, you name it, drug lords. It's kind of
1:23.4	incredible and it's sort of going under the radar because there's just so much else and
1:28.4	how much can you get your head around. Anyway, we're going to start this episode with a clip
1:34.0	from Savannah Crisly, who is the daughter of Todd and Julie Crisley, who were TV reality
1:41.8	people who were totally scamming people. They went down for wire fraud and all
1:46.9	sorts of corruption and they got a seven-year federal sentence. They ended up only serving 18 months.
	...

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