By Ava Benny-Morrison | Bloomberg
Ryan LaLone received a pardon this month for a conviction tied to tampering with diesel emissions systems. Just as importantly, so did his company.
The twin reprieves from President Donald Trump enabled LaLone to clear his name and erase a $750,000 fine for his Michigan trucking-parts shop. They also made him the beneficiary of an unprecedented expansion of White House clemency power, a move tracing back to England’s King Charles II.
Since taking office for the second time, Trump has become the first modern US president to issue pardons for companies, from a Middle America auto supplier to a crypto platform and a media startup. The clemency grants have wiped out almost $200 million in financial penalties, some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.
The pardons underscore Trump’s broader willingness to blow past the boundaries of executive authority in a second term that has been far less constrained by political and legal norms. He has granted clemency to almost 1,700 people in the past 18 months, far outpacing his predecessors, often benefiting political supporters or people who claim to be victims of legal weaponization.
“In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole,” said Frank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law. “Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
The idea of pardoning businesses was first debated early last year, when the parent company of crypto platform BitMEX was discreetly angling for a pardon for the business and its senior executives, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. Some White House officials saw precedent in King Charles II pardoning a company more than 300 years ago, said the person, who asked not to be named discussing private talks.
A White House spokesperson said the King Charles II example had never been discussed by officials involved in the pardon process. The spokesperson said the Constitution says nothing about the pardon power applying only to people.
Trump has granted clemency to nine companies, including LaLone’s Diesel Freak LLC, since the start of his second term.
‘We recycle, we compost’
An outdoorsman and hunter who considers himself a friend of the environment, LaLone says he was flummoxed when dozens of armed federal agents showed up at his shop in November 2018 as part of a sprawling probe targeting diesel polluters.
“We recycle, we compost, my wife was driving a Tesla on the day we were raided,” he said. “We love the environment.”
Four and a half years later, LaLone and Diesel Freak were charged with conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act for deleting controls on vehicles that were meant to stem emissions. Many in his industry argue the controls are overly cumbersome and lead to costly and premature repairs for long-haul trucks, school buses and emergency vehicles. Environmental advocates say deleting emissions controls contributes to worsening air quality.
LaLone pleaded guilty, with fines of $7,500 for himself and $750,000 for his company. The penalty and reputational blowback threatened to cripple his business, he said.
LaLone had paid off about $80,000 of the fine when fellow diesel mechanic Troy Lake received a pardon from Trump for similar conduct in November of last year. Lake, who’d spent several months in prison for the tampering conviction, successfully convinced the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney’s Office that he and his business — facing more than $50,000 in fines — were one and the same. Three months later, Trump pardoned his company, Elite Diesel.
Lake became a kind of sherpa for other mechanics charged in similar emissions cases. LaLone, who was sentenced to one year probation, attended Lake’s pardon party in Wyoming that winter and eventually hired the same political strategist, Jeff Daugherty, who helped Lake and several others push for clemency.
“These are usually small businesses, usually conservative and usually Trump supporters who often lacked the financial resources to put on an adequate defense for themselves,” Daugherty said.
A day before America’s 250th birthday, Trump pardoned nine men and half a dozen auto businesses. On the Truth Social platform, he wrote that LaLone and others were persecuted by President Joe Biden’s administration for “fixing their car.”
Memecoin, Ozy
Trump isn’t the first president to entertain the idea of pardoning a corporation.
Former President Jimmy Carter mulled the possibility in 1977 before ultimately deciding against pardoning a business that conspired with the mob to buy into a Las Vegas casino. At the time, the FBI’s director and the Justice Department disagreed about whether the Constitution allowed it, according to a University of Chicago Law Review article.
Trump’s advisers in the White House revisited the question in early 2025. HDR Global Trading, the company that owned crypto platform BitMEX, was on the hook for a $100 million fine for flouting anti-money laundering laws.
Trump’s Justice Department had vowed to abandon a Biden administration crackdown on unregistered crypto exchanges, and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes quickly embraced the president’s softening stance on digital currencies.
In January 2025, the exchange quickly launched a swap listing tied to the $TRUMP memecoin — part of a business venture that earned Trump $636 million last year — for trading. Weeks later, Hayes penned an essay framing the president’s embrace of meme coins as a move toward bolstering political accountability.
On March 27, 2025, Trump signed pardons for Hayes and three other former BitMEX executives. He also pardoned the company, the same week the $100 million fine was due.
A day later, Trump commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson and his digital media start-up Ozy Media Inc. Watson was convicted of defrauding investors and lenders in 2024. As the date approached to begin his 10-year federal prison sentence, he was working the phones looking for a way out.
In pleas to people who could potentially help push his case for clemency, he repeated the phrase “Ozy and me” over and over again, according to a person familiar with the outreach, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. The message was clear: Watson needed clemency for himself and his company. He framed the decision to charge Ozy Media as an attempt by the Justice Department to crush everything he believed in. Watson’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s commutation wiped out $97 million in penalties that Watson and Ozy Media were due to pay. Unlike in previous administrations, commutations as well as pardons have cleared unpaid penalties tied to the convictions.
LaLone says that now he has escaped his financial burden, he hopes to reward the employees who stuck around throughout the diesel emissions case. While he was a Trump supporter before the pardon, he’s even more so now.
“I never gave him any money,” he said. “I sit back and think, I wish I did.”
–With assistance from Hadriana Lowenkron at Bloomberg.