Pardon brokers offer to "put pressure on the president" — at sky-high costs

It was mid-August at the bar inside the plush Ritz-Carlton hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just outside Washington, and Jack Burkman and his business partner Jacob Wohl were making their latest sales pitch. They were seated at a table with Ammon Covino, a convicted felon, and his wife, Crystal.

"With this particular White House, you have to put pressure on the president from all directions in a consistent way to force his hand," Burkman explained. He and Wohl, lobbyists and right-wing provocateurs, had become avatars of a lucrative new cottage industry of brokers courting those seeking pardons from President Trump.

Now, they were zeroing in on the man they hoped would be their next client: Covino, an aquarium operator who served nearly two years in federal prison for illegally transporting a shark and a stingray across state lines.

Covino had already filled out and submitted a pardon application form by mail to the Biden Justice Department. But his request was rejected in July by Mr. Trump, one of thousands of pardon-seekers denied clemency as part of the administration's effort to clear its backlog of applicants.

Mr. Trump has employed a different approach to clemency over the last 18 months. On his first day in office, he cleared more than 1,500 people charged or convicted in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot through pardons, commutations and dropped prosecutions. Dozens of clemency grants for white-collar criminals, often wealthy and well-connected, have followed.

Burkman and Wohl's pitch at the Ritz-Carlton meeting leaned into what they described as a new path to a pardon. "It's more energy and less process," Burkman said. "...And contacts."

But it would come with a price, they told Covino. For $300,000, they predicted, they could secure him a pardon by as early as October. What they didn't know was that Covino wasn't a real prospective client. CBS News' 60 Minutes was investigating the world of pardon brokers. To uncover exactly how this business operated, CBS News asked Covino to approach the brokers — with hidden cameras in tow.

The archetypical pardon recipient is a repentant mercy-seeker who has paid his due to society. Presidents have long deviated from that formula, and long courted controversy.

President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. President Carter pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers. On his final day in office, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose wife, Denise Rich, was a major donor to the Clinton presidential library. In December 2024, President Biden faced scrutiny for 11th-hour pardons of allies, donors and family, including his son, Hunter Biden , who was convicted on firearms charges and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in a separate case.