Which pardoned individuals had restitution or fines erased and what were the amounts?
Executive summary
A set of high-profile clemency actions wiped away court-ordered financial obligations for multiple pardoned defendants and at least one corporation; reporting and tracking by former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer and media investigations list specific cases and dollar amounts but note uncertainty about whether amounts had already been paid [1] [2]. Congressional and investigative reports place the aggregate loss from erased restitution and fines at roughly $1.3–$1.4 billion, while legal experts say courts have not definitively adjudicated what happens to unpaid restitution after a pardon in every instance [3] [4] [1].
1. The named individuals and companies reporting says had restitution or fines remitted
Multiple outlets and trackers identify concrete cases where pardons removed financial obligations: Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was ordered to pay $50 million in restitution (reported as erased by his pardon) [2]; Ross Ulbricht was ordered to pay $183.9 million, which has been cited as wiped out after his pardon [2]; Milton—identified in reporting as owing roughly $676 million to shareholders and an investor in a Nikola-related case—had that restitution reported as erased by clemency [2]; HDR Global Trading Limited, the operator of a cryptocurrency exchange, had been ordered to pay a $100 million fine that reporting says was removed by a pardon for the company [1] [2]; Lawrence Duran was reported to owe $87.5 million in restitution for healthcare fraud before a pardon [1]; and Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing-home executive, was ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution and was pardoned shortly after, with reporting saying the restitution was wiped away [5] [6].
2. Aggregate tallies and institutional estimates—disagreement over totals
Trackers maintained by Oyer and summaries from Democratic committee and investigative reporting place the total of erased restitution and fines in the same ballpark: roughly $1.3 billion according to a House Judiciary Committee staff analysis and multiple news outlets, about $1.4 billion per Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s office, and similar totals cited in fact-checking and press coverage [3] [4] [1]. Those totals consolidate many individual cases (including the January 6 blanket pardons and large corporate penalties) and are the main basis for the frequently reported “more than $1 billion” figure [7] [8].
3. Which pardons involved groups or corporations, and why that matters
The president’s clemency in this period included a blanket pardon for roughly 1,500 people tied to January 6 prosecutions, in many cases removing restitution and fines that had been court-ordered, and it also included a corporate pardon—an unprecedented executive-clemency move for a multinational crypto operator—whose $100 million penalty was cited as remitted [7] [1]. Those group and corporate remissions account for a meaningful portion of the fiscal and victim-impact claims in reporting, and they amplify legal and political scrutiny because they affect public coffers and institutional victims as well as individual victims [7] [8].
4. Legal and evidentiary limits—what these sources cannot prove conclusively
Reporting repeatedly flags an evidentiary limit: presidential pardons can remit fines and restitution, but in many of these media-tracked cases it is unclear whether the full amounts had already been paid before the pardon, and courts have not resolved every question about unpaid restitution after clemency—so headline totals may overstate the cash actually lost by victims or the government in some instances [1] [9]. The former pardon attorney’s tracker and investigative outlets are explicit that they sum court-ordered amounts and that precise net losses depend on case-by-case payment records and subsequent legal steps [1] [2].
5. Competing narratives and implicit agendas in the coverage
Advocates and Democratic investigators emphasize victims’ losses and taxpayer cost, using aggregated totals to argue the clemency program favored allies and donors; the White House and supporters characterize clemency choices as within constitutional prerogative or as correcting perceived injustices, and some sources note political fundraising or allegiance near certain pardons [5] [2] [3]. Independent fact-checkers and legal experts called out by articles caution that the raw sum of court-ordered restitution does not equal realized loss without verifying payments, a caveat repeated across the reporting [1] [9].