Before the 2024 election, Milton had contributed relatively small sums to political candidates. He gave fifteen hundred dollars to Trump during the 2016 campaign cycle, a thousand in the 2020 cycle, and ten thousand in 2022. In the fall of 2024, while Milton was appealing the conviction, he and his wife, Chelsey, contributed more than $3.6 million to Trump and other Republican candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission records. The Miltons also gave nearly a million dollars to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., after he endorsed Trump. Milton—who had been represented for years by Brad Bondi, the brother of the former Attorney General Pam Bondi—received a pardon from Trump in March, 2025. (A spokesman for Milton said that Brad Bondi was “not involved in any form or fashion in the pardon process.”) “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for President,” Trump said then. When the President called Milton to inform him of the pardon, Milton recalled, Trump told him, “You’re clean, you’re cleaner than a baby’s bottom, and you’re cleaner than I am, Trevor.”
Today, Milton is the C.E.O. of SyberJet Aircraft, an Arizona-based company, which claims that a new nine-seat jet will be the fastest of its kind. (“SyberJet is pushing the limits of light jet aviation in ways no other manufacturer is,” the company’s website says.) I wrote to Milton to ask about his pardon and his ramped-up political giving. “I was never offered a pardon until I received it,” he wrote in response. “Never bought a pardon. I never offered to donate for a pardon. I was never asked to donate.” Shortly afterward, the Journal reported on a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign that SyberJet was conducting, which included sponsoring the lavish SyberJet Lounge at the Kennedy Center. “I walk into meetings now, and I’ll get high fives from the most wealthy people in the world,” Milton said. “They’re, like, ‘Welcome to the club. You can withstand the fire. We can trust you now.’ ”
Another recent Trump pardon beneficiary is Paul Walczak, from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, whose family owned nursing homes. On November 15, 2024, ten days after Trump’s reëlection, Walczak pleaded guilty to failing to pay withholding taxes for his employees. Prosecutors argued that he should face a sentence of between five and six years. According to their sentencing memorandum to the judge, Walczak “used the funds to enrich himself,” purchasing a two-million-dollar yacht and spending corporate funds at Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier, and Saks. In addition, the memorandum continued, “when the IRS persisted—refusing to allow him to simply walk away with the millions of dollars he took from his employees under the guise of complying with the tax code—the Defendant tried to hide his personal wealth by starting a new business under the name of his then twenty-year-old daughter.”
After pleading guilty, Walczak agreed to pay the taxes and asked for leniency. But, prosecutors said, “awarding a lesser sentence to a defendant simply because he is wealthy enough to pay back millions of dollars after being caught is not justice.” Rather, they wrote, “to maintain confidence in the justice system, it must be the case that nobody can pay his or her way out of jail.”
Unbeknownst to prosecutors, Walczak was maneuvering to do just that. Even before Trump returned to office, Walczak’s lawyers had prepared a clemency petition that cited, among other things, the millions of dollars that Walczak’s mother, a conservative activist named Elizabeth Fago, had raised for Trump and for Republican causes. During the 2020 campaign, the petition noted, she’d hosted a Trump fund-raiser, attended by Donald Trump, Jr., where a diary stolen from Biden’s daughter Ashley was circulated. The petition highlighted support for Walczak from Trump, Jr., and his then girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. It made the argument, sure to appeal to Trump but unsupported by the evidence in the case, that prosecutors had singled out Walczak because of his mother’s Republican ties. And, to bolster Fago’s claim that her son was being punished for her political activity, it noted Biden’s assertion that he’d been compelled to pardon Hunter because of selective prosecution by his Justice Department.
