In one of the most famous scenes of The Godfather, Don Corleone rejects a lucrative business opportunity because it involved narcotics. “Drugs,” the Don explained, “are a dirty business.”
That quote came to mind when news broke about President Donald Trump‘s recent pardon of Paul Walczak. When I learned about Walczak—and the circumstances surrounding the president’s exercise of his constitutional authority to liberate him—I instantly thought, “Pardons are a dirty business.”
According to the Justice Department, Walczak pled guilty in November 2024 to cheating on his taxes for years, amounting to nearly $11 million in stolen taxes. Beyond the large amount that he stole, the details of Walczak’s fraud are even more sordid.
Walczak has been an inveterate tax scofflaw since at least 2011. In short, he ran a web of health care companies, withheld $7.5 million of his employees’ wages, and kept the money. He also pocketed $3.8 million of Social Security and Medicare taxes. He did all of this from 2016-2019, after he had already been penalized by the IRS for doing the exact same thing. To add insult to injury, Walczak also failed to pay his personal taxes for 2019 and 2020, even though he received a salary of $360,000 and transfers of nearly half a million dollars.
To make matters worse, Walczak used those ill-gotten millions to spend lavishly on himself, including private flights and a yacht that cost over $2 million. “While Walczak was withholding taxes from the pay of his employees under the pretext of paying these funds to the IRS,” the Justice Department stated in a press release, “he used over $1 million from his businesses’ bank accounts to purchase a yacht, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal bank accounts, and used the business accounts for personal purchases at retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier, and Saks.”
Notably, the prosecutor reportedly told the court that Walczak did not act out of desperation—he was already rich. Rather, he took $10 million in taxes from the government “simply because he wasn’t getting rich enough.”
Why would President Trump decide to use his special constitutional authority to liberate Walczak before he paid any penalty whatsoever?
Now we know, thanks to reporting from The New York Times. Walczak’s mother is reportedly a longtime Republican donor and Trump supporter, who just happened to attend a $1 million-per-person Trump fundraiser that “promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.” Less than three weeks later, and shortly before Walczak was due to go to prison for his 18-month sentence, the president pardoned him. Despite his years-long abuse of the tax system, which he admitted, Walczak will get off scot-free.
This should go down as another disgraceful star in the Constellation of Dirty Presidential Pardons, which features Barack Obama‘s pardon of Chelsea Manning, Bill Clinton‘s pardon of his half-brother Roger Clinton, and of course Joe Biden‘s unconscionable pardon of his son Hunter.
The most analogous member of the Dirty Pardon Hall of Shame is Clinton’s waiver of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Rich was indicted in 1983 for evading more than $48 million in taxes and charged with 51 counts of tax fraud, mail fraud, racketeering, as well as running illegal oil deals with Iran during a trade embargo. After his indictment, he fled the United States and remained a fugitive until Clinton pardoned him just hours before the president left the White House in 2001. The Rich pardon prompted a huge backlash because Rich’s ex-wife had donated more than $1.3 million to Democratic party, including $70,000 to Hillary Clinton‘s Senate campaign, along with $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library. Within days, Republicans on Capitol Hill opened an investigation. Even Democratic stalwarts like Pat Leahy, Paul Wellstone, and Barney Frank roundly criticized President Clinton for the Rich pardon.
The Walczak pardon, with its financial quid-pro-quo overtones, is on par with the Rich debacle. This is the stuff of banana republics, not great ones. Alexander Hamilton defended the president’s broad pardon authority in the Constitution, writing in Federalist No. 74: “Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” The key words there are “unfortunate guilt,” which implies some sort of miscarriage of justice.
But neither the Rich nor Walczak cases feature “unfortunate guilt.” To the contrary, they reflect the sleazy reality of modern-day politics, one befitting a mob boss, not U.S presidents.
Pardons are a dirty business.
Mark Lee Greenblatt is an expert on government ethics and compliance, an attorney, and author. Most recently, he served as inspector general for the U.S. Department of the Interior. From 2019 to 2025, Mr. Greenblatt led a team of nearly 300 investigators, auditors, and attorneys responsible for oversight of more than 70,000 agency employees.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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