Six Who Got Trump Clemency Have Been Charged With New Crimes

In 2019, Adriana Camberos began serving a 26-month sentence in federal prison for selling counterfeit bottles of the caffeinated drink 5-hour Energy that had been filled with a fake concoction. Camberos, a Southern California businesswoman, insisted she was innocent. Her family navigated a back channel to President Trump as he was embarking on a clemency spree. In the final days of Trump’s term in 2021, without a recommendation from the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the president commuted the sentence of Camberos, springing her from prison a year early. She did not stay out of trouble for long, reports the New York Times. Soon after her commutation, she and her brother Andres embarked on a new fraud. They were charged last year in a complicated scheme: They bought consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount, purportedly to sell them in Mexico and then sold the goods in the U.S. at higher prices and then committed bank and mail fraud to cover their tracks.

.

A law journal focused on criminal justice found that only 25 of the nearly 240 clemency grants issued by Trump were vetted and recommended by the pardon attorney’s office. As Trump campaigns for another term, he is again dangling the prospect of executive clemency for supporters and cases that align with his politics. He has promised to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of an online drug marketplace. Ulbricht’s cause has been championed by the cryptocurrency industry, which Trump has cultivated. Trump has pledged to pardon people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by his supporters. Camberos is among six people granted clemency by Trump and known to have been charged with new crimes after they received a second chance. Stephen Bannon, a Trump political adviser who was pardoned for charges related to fund-raising fraud, is in prison for defying a congressional subpoena to testify to the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Bannon is set to stand trial in December, six weeks after his release date, on New York state fraud charges that echo the federal case wiped away by the pardon.