Trump Just Pardoned a Convicted Fraudster He Previously Freed from Prison for a Different Fraud in 2021

Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term, reported The New York Times’ Kenneth Vogel and Susanne Craig.

According to the Times, California resident Adriana Camberos started serving a 26-month sentence in December 2019 after she got caught trying to sell millions of counterfeit bottles of 5-hour Energy drinks.

In early 2020, she hired an attorney with connections in Trump world. About a month later, her brother Andres Camberos donated $50,000 to Trump’s re-election, his first ever to a federal Republican candidate.

And then in the final days of Trump’s first term in January 2021, he signed a clemency petition that released Adriana Camberos about a year early.

“She did not stay out of trouble for long,” the Times reported, and her brother was also entangled in this criminal scheme:

Soon after her commutation, she and her brother Andres embarked on a new fraud, federal prosecutors in California said. The siblings were charged last year in a complicated scheme: They bought consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount, purportedly to sell them in Mexico — a legal practice. Instead, prosecutors said, the siblings sold the goods in the United States at higher prices and then committed bank and mail fraud to cover their tracks.

Both Camberos siblings were convicted of that fraud. She was sentenced to prison, and he was sentenced to house arrest. They were ordered to repay millions of dollars in restitution to the businesses they defrauded.

And both of their names were on the clemency petitions that the president “quietly” signed this week.

Also among the recipients of Trump’s “Get Out of Jail Free” cards were three defendants who were awaiting sentencing after being convicted for “a political corruption case related to accusations that former Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico had accepted bribes from Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, in 2020,” reported the Times.

Herrera’s daughter Isabella Herrera, donated $2.5 million to MAGA, Inc., Trump’s super PAC, in late 2024. He had been facing felony charges, including bribery, but his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, “who had served on Mr. Trump’s legal defense team, negotiated an unusually lenient deal with the Justice Department” that let him plead to just a misdemeanor campaign finance violation last May.

Both Vázquez and a third defendant in the case, former FBI agent Mark Rossini, who served as a consultant for Vázquez, also pleaded guilty to the lesser misdemeanor campaign finance charges.

Two months later, Herrera’s daughter dropped another $1 million into MAGA Inc.’s coffers.

Trump’s pardons this week included Herrera, Vázquez, and Rossini.

The White House has denied any wrongdoing or that Herrera’s donations played a role in the pardons, instead suggesting these pardons “were motivated by a belief that the investigation into the matter was retribution for Ms. Vázquez’s endorsement of Mr. Trump in 2020,” reported the Times.

Other recent Trump pardons included Terren S. Peizer, a former business executive who was serving 42 months in prison after being convicted in 2024 of insider trading, and Jacob Deutsch, who was sentenced to 62 months for participating in a mortgage fraud scheme.

Peizer’s sentence also included ordering him “to pay a fine of $5.25 million and forfeit more than $12.7 million.”

The White House official who spoke to the Times did not reply when asked if these pardons would wipe away the restitution the courts ordered from Peizer and the Camberos siblings, “but pardons typically erase financial penalties,” the Times noted.

Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein highlighted the contrast between Trump’s approach to pardons and some of his predecessors in a tweet Friday.

“When George W. Bush pardoned someone whose family member was a donor, he wasn’t told, got super pissed, and withdrew the pardon,” wrote Gerstein. “Then he told [Barack] Obama to be very careful about pardons.” Gerstein added a link to a 2008 Politico article by Ben Smith (now at Semafor) about Bush cancelling the pardon for mortgage scammer Isaac Toussie.

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