Todd Haugh of the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, a former white collar criminal defense lawyer who now studies corporate crime and federal sentencing policy, dug into decades of data to determine whether the rate at which white collar defendants are granted clemency under President Donald Trump is an anomaly.
"There's this debate — and a lot of it is driven, frankly, by Trump not using the pardon office like prior presidents — about whether the pardon process is valuable, or is it broken," Haugh said. "There's a lot of work, generally, on pardons, but I don't know if anybody's really looked empirically at white collar pardons."
Haugh told Law360 he was taken aback by what his research group discovered: White collar offenders have, on average, been the beneficiaries of more than half of all pardons going back to at least 1989, when former President George H. W. Bush occupied the White House.
"I was shocked to see the percentage of pardons that were white collar in nature," Haugh said in a recent interview. "I assumed it was kind of high, but not nearly that high."
Haugh and his research group, which has support from the Institute for Corporate Governance & Ethics at Indiana University, used artificial intelligence to analyze and filter data from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney, which keeps a public record of clemency actions, followed by a manual review of any potentially ambiguous data.
The study is based on "multiple levels of review to make sure we're categorizing everything correctly," Haugh said. He said his team is currently analyzing clemency data before 1989, which is not as readily accessible. The ongoing study does not yet have a publication date.
The research is focused on "areas of misconduct [that] usually involve nonviolent crimes, often committed in a business setting, designed to achieve financial gain through deception or fraud," according to the study's methodology.
The study filters out about 1,500 pardons Trump has issued en masse for Jan. 6 insurrection defendants and, in a separate sweeping pardon action, for dozens of people involved in the so-called fake elector scheme to overturn Trump's election losses in certain states, including Georgia.
The clemency study filters out such categorical pardon actions that cover specialized cases and can potentially skew the overall clemency data for a particular president, according to Haugh.
"Any kind of compilation of these data are going to be full of these choices that can create different kinds of reflections from shining light on what's being done," said Douglas Berman, a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law who focuses on criminal law and criminal sentencing and is not involved in Haugh's study.
"That is why this work is important," he added, "because this data is so challenging and the different categories and ways to structure it can be so fraught."
What Sets Trump Apart
During his first term, Trump issued a total of 144 pardons. Of those, 101, or about 70%, were granted to white collar offenders, according to Haugh's analysis.
George W. Bush had the highest first-time pardon percentage for white collar offenders at 76%, but his actual number of pardons – 22 – was far lower than Trump's. Bush's two-term total for white collar pardons rests at 95, or about 50%.
In his first term, Bill Clinton granted 37 white collar pardons, representing 69% of his total pardons. He granted significantly more white collar pardons in his second term – 202 – but his overall rate sits at around 60%, slightly higher than George H.W. Bush's 57%.
Barack Obama has the lowest rate of first-term white collar pardons at 40%. But his overall rate follows the trend, with nearly 52% of his total pardons going to white collar offenders.
About a year into Trump's second term, he has granted 89 pardons unrelated to Jan. 6 or the "fake elector" scam, with 49 of those – or 55% –having gone to white collar criminal defendants, including Binance crypto exchange co-founder Changpeng Zhao, Silk Road dark web marketplace creator Ross Ulbricht and billionaire Trevor Milton, founder of electric truck maker Nikola.
Presidents have historically used their broad clemency powers to "give breaks to people they empathize with the most," Mark Osler, a clemency expert and professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, told Law360. He is not involved in Haugh's study.
Obama, for instance, met in 2015 with people incarcerated at federal prison in Oklahoma who were convicted of drug offenses and told reporters afterward, "When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren't that different from the mistakes I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made."
Obama later commuted the sentences of about 60 nonviolent drug offenders.
"We sometimes forget that presidents are people and that human emotions, including the empathy for people we perceive to be like us, guides action," Osler said.
Trump issued a batch of pardons on Jan. 15 that mostly benefited white collar offenders, including Puerto Rico's former Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, who pled guilty in August 2025 in a bribery case. The White House has asserted that the prosecution of Vázquez Garced, who endorsed Trump in 2020, and her co-defendants was politically motivated.
Julio Herrera, who allegedly paid bribes to Vázquez Garced and pled guilty to a campaign finance charge, also got a pardon. His daughter has donated $3.5 million to a Trump super PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records. Repeat white collar offender Adriana Camberos, who was convicted of fraud after receiving a commutation from Trump in 2021, was also among the recent batch of pardon recipients.
Trump is himself a white collar felon. A Manhattan jury in 2024 found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn actress to keep her quiet about an alleged extramarital affair in order to bolster Trump's chances of winning the 2016 presidential election. Trump has appealed the verdict.
Trump has also faced criminal charges alleging that he mishandled sensitive national security documents and conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but the cases were dismissed after he was reelected in 2024. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all cases, arguing that he was the target of a political "witch hunt."
While white collar offenders have received on average more than 50% of pardon grants since 1989, the average for white collar commutation grants during that same period is only about 25%, according to Haugh's study.
"Generally speaking, white collar defendants get lower sentences," which lowers their incentive to seek early release through a commutation, according to Berman. He added that white collar defendants also might be more incentivized to seek pardons — rather than commuted sentences — to lessen the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction, such as loss of a broker's license.
"That can be another pitch for white collar offenders to say, 'Hey, I get punished extra. It's not fair that I'm suffering even more from this conviction,'" Berman said. "It may give them another reason to be eager to pursue a pardon."
Interest in seeking clemency directly from the White House continues to build during Trump's second term, as experts say it's become increasingly clear that the path to pardons no longer runs through the traditional process at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Wealth and political connections have always played a role in securing presidential pardons and commutations, but white collar attorneys told Law360 that influence has become particularly significant under the Trump administration. Some said earlier this year that their clients were being asked to pay six to seven figures to consultants who said they could help secure clemency from the White House.
High-profile white collar offenders currently asking for clemency from Trump include former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and former billionaire Wall Street investor Bill Hwang, founder of collapsed private investment firm Archegos Capital Management.
The White House has not responded to a request for comment on Trump's clemency actions.
"A lot of people say, 'Oh, that's corruption,'" Osler said. "To me, it sounds a lot more like lobbying. Some people have access and others don't. What it represents is a broken system that exacerbates the favoritism Trump already shows to people convicted of crimes of dishonesty."
--Additional reporting by Katryna Perera and Rae Ann Varona. Editing by Alanna Weissman.