In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, many of the swamp leeches who’d spent four years attached to him focused on leveraging their parasitic bond to power for as much cash as possible before January 20. One such hanger-on was Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and husband to former top Trump communications aide Mercedes Schlapp. Matt Schlapp has built his influence in part by directing ACU’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference—essentially the Panama City Beach spring break for College Republicans trying to get laid, Comic-Con for people who LARP as military operators, and Coachella for Fox News fans dying to see their favorite TV acts live. It’s through CPAC that Schlapp has gotten plenty of face time with Trump. The former president spoke at the conference every year of his term, including in 2019, when he used Schlapp’s main stage in National Harbour, Maryland, to make one of his longest speeches on record.
Over the weekend, it was reported that Schlapp leveraged his connection to Trumpworld to lobby for a pardon on behalf of Parker Petit, a former Atlanta-based health care executive who served as the Georgia finance chairman of Trump’s campaign in 2016, who was convicted of securities fraud in 2020. But disclosure records filed on Thursday and reviewed by Axios revealed the massive sum Petit shelled out to Schlapp’s firm for the job: $750,000 for two weeks of work, which was reportedly billed as a “request for a pardon and other public policy issues relating to criminal justice.” In the end, Schlapp’s efforts were in vain; Petit was not on the list of people Trump pardoned around midnight on his final day in office. At present, Petit is scheduled to be sentenced in late February and is facing up to two decades in prison.
Schlapp’s unsuccessful lobbying endeavors may rankle all the more considering the final list of those pardoned seems fairly undiscerning. Trump handed out nearly 150 pardons and sentence commutations, including to rappers Kodak Black and Lil Wayne; Jeanine Pirro’s ex-husband, who was pardoned in the final hours of Trump’s term; and a Trump ally who was caught up in the Mueller probe and eventually convicted.
Though it surely stings to be excluded, particularly after shelling out so much cash, Petit may have the last laugh. Andrew Weissmann, who served as a prosecutor on Mueller’s team, pointed out that the Trump White House’s slapdash pardon process, which ignored typical orders of operation, could very well backfire on those the president sought to protect. The pardons the Trump administration meted out, he says, are “narrowly drawn,” leaving open the possibility that their recipients aren’t out of the legal woods. “If the Biden administration’s Department of Justice wants to rectify some of Trump’s abuse of the pardon power,” Weissmann writes, “there are now options at its disposal.”
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