AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Six hundred thousand dollars - that's the amount rapper Boosie BadAzz reportedly paid a Washington lobbying firm to secure a presidential pardon. The rapper, whose real name is Torence Hatch, was looking to overturn a federal conviction over the unlawful possession of a firearm. But the pardon hasn't happened. Now Hatch is reportedly looking to recover half of what he paid through arbitration. The rapper's case represents a growing industry in Washington, D.C., wealthy clients paying to try and secure clemency from President Trump. Jasmine Wright covers the White House for NOTUS. She's been reporting on this trend of paying for pardons. Good morning.
JASMINE WRIGHT: Good morning.
RASCOE: Can you first explain how has the pardon process traditionally worked in the U.S.?
WRIGHT: Yeah. It's a great question. So traditionally, the pardon process works under the Department of Justice umbrella in an office called the Pardon Office in which a group of people go over thousands of federal pardon applications that the government gets to see who would apply, and they follow - or they used to follow, rather, strict guidelines.
Typically, it was that people had served some portion of their sentence, that they showed contrition. They apologized. They said that they were guilty, and that if restitution was to be paid by their individual cases, that had already been done. And so that was the kind of amount of things that people needed to prove to then be considered for a pardon. And it was a huge litmus test for folks who had been convicted already to get a pardon, following these very strict guidelines under the Department of Justice, and that just doesn't exist anymore.
RASCOE: So what does exist under the Trump administration? How does it work now?
WRIGHT: There was a impetus by folks around the president and the president himself to do more of these pardons, taking that power away from the Department of Justice. Now, there still is a pardon attorney. His name is Ed Martin. But taking that power really away from the Department of Justice and putting it inside the White House. And so now what happens is that a group of White House aides, including the White House counsel - so lawyers - go over various pardons and then present them to the president. But the way that they get those pardons is very different than the way the Department of Justice used to get them.
RASCOE: Is it just through who you know? Is a lot of it about who you know?
WRIGHT: Largely, it's through who you know. But I've talked to a lot of different pardon attorneys, pardon lobbyists, folks who are involved in this business. And they say that their No. 1 advice to their clients is 1, call who you know. If you know anybody remotely close to the White House, let them know that you're looking for a pardon.
And 2, try to get in front of the president. I've talked to people who say that they have advised their clients to go to Mar-a-Lago, the president's resort residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Any way that you can get your application, why you deserve clemency in front of the president, they say, is an easier way to get closer to a pardon.
RASCOE: Well, let's talk about the money, though, because that's what happened in this case with Boosie. In your article, you describe a high-stakes pardon economy during Trump's second term. How much money are we actually talking about here in terms of the lobbyists and what they're charging clients to try and secure clemency? And also, this is legal?
WRIGHT: This is legal. To be fair, people have always paid attorneys, lobbyists for pardons. You're not paying for the individual pardon. You're paying the person to go advocate on your behalf to get you a pardon clemency commutation.
What's happening now is that because of the normal barriers in which existed to get a pardon, it is easier for people who have some sort of association. They don't have to have a legal degree. They don't even have to be an actual lobbyist to now go and advocate to the White House to get their clients' pardons. And so it has created and normalized this new economy in which people are paying up to $5 million, in some cases, to individual lawyers or lobbyists to then go advocate on their behalf in hopes of getting a pardon. Now, not everybody that is doing this is getting a pardon, as we can see by this case.
RASCOE: How has the White House responded to critics of the new way that presidential pardons are processed?
WRIGHT: They have said that, one, it is ultimately up to President Trump to decide who gets a pardon, and that is true. It is his power. Nobody can make that decision for him, theoretically. They have, on the whole, rejected this idea that the process that they have in place is one that creates this economy that could be seen as nefarious or creating malfeasance. In a way, you know, their position has been that we, you know, don't engage with this. We aren't getting any sort of funds. We are doing the process in which the president wants us to do, and all of that stuff happening on the outside is not a part of what we're doing on the inside.
RASCOE: That's Jasmine Wright, who covers the White House for NOTUS. Jasmine, thank you so much for being here.
WRIGHT: Thank you so much for having me.
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