President Donald Trump sprung a fellow convicted fraudster from prison this week after the man had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme.
David Gentile first reported to prison on Nov. 14 following his sentencing in May for using funds controlled by his company GPB Capital to scam around 10,000 investors over a period of several years, the New York Times reports.
He was freed Wednesday, after just 12 days behind bars.
In securing Gentile’s conviction last August, prosecutors had cited victim statements from more than 1,000 “hardworking, everyday people”—among them veterans, farmers, teachers and nurses—who’d lost money as a result of his crimes.
“I lost my whole life savings,” one person claimed, adding they’d now found themselves “living from check to check.”
Trump’s move on Gentile’s case only commutes the former businessman’s sentence, meaning the conviction will remain on his record.
It is unclear why the president chose to commute Gentile’s sentence, or why the latter fraudster’s co-defendant in the case, Jeffry Schneider, remains behind bars.
Alice Marie Johnson, the MAGA administration’s “pardon czar,” said in a Thanksgiving X post she’s “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”
But Adam Gana, an attorney pursuing civil claims against Gentile’s firm on behalf of former investors,
“The stories that we’ve heard are just heartbreaking, and it’s just unbelievable that somebody like that would receive a commutation,” he told the NYT. “This is not a case that should be political. This guy belongs in jail.”
Trump himself is no stranger to the courts. A New York jury found him guilty in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records concerning $130,000 in hush money payments to a pornstar with whom he’d engaged in an extramarital affair.
Nor is he a stranger to controversially lenient treatment of inmates convicted of similar crimes. Only last week, he issued a pardon for Joseph Schwartz, a former nursing home tycoon convicted last year of a $38 million employment tax fraud scheme.
Schwartz’s pardon is reported to have followed after he paid two lobbyists, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, just under a million dollars to pursue one on his behalf.
Both Burkman and Wohl have previously been convicted of fraud over a telecoms scheme to discourage Black and minority voters from participating in the 2020 presidential elections.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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