Pardon Brokers Quoted a Felon $300,000 for a Trump Pardon by October. 60 Minutes Had Him Wired.

Ammon Covino runs aquariums and has a federal conviction for trafficking in marine life. In July, the Trump administration turned down his pardon application. In mid-August, he and his wife Crystal sat down at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, with two men who said they could fix that. What Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl did not know was that CBS News had asked Covino to take the meeting, and that he was wearing a hidden camera.

The pitch, broadcast Sunday night on the season premiere of 60 Minutes, was blunt. "Look, you can't, you can't just submit a pardon application. It doesn't work that way," the brokers told the Covinos. "With this particular White House, you have to put pressure on the president from all directions in a consistent way to force his hand." The price was $300,000, and the promise was a pardon as early as October. Their strategy, as they described it, was "more energy and less process. And contacts." Wohl added a piece of advice: "Taking responsibility for a crime is not the way you get these things approved." Crystal Covino later summed up the two routes for correspondent Lesley Stahl. The official one costs "a postage stamp." The broker's route costs "$300,000."

Burkman and Wohl are not obscure figures. Both pleaded guilty in Ohio in 2022 to fraud charges over a robocall scheme aimed at suppressing Black voters, and pleaded no contest in Michigan in 2025 to voter intimidation charges. Each time they received probation. The Federal Communications Commission fined them $5 million. In 2018, they staged a press conference alleging sexual misconduct by special counsel Robert Mueller and produced no evidence. After learning their meeting had been recorded, they agreed to an interview and rejected the idea that they are part of a pay-to-play market. "There's nothing corrupt about it. There's nothing improper about it," they said. "We don't work for free any more than you do."

Their earlier clients were less satisfied. The rapper Boosie Badazz, whose legal name is Torence Hatch, paid the pair $600,000 up front after a federal gun conviction, under an agreement that said half was refundable if no pardon came. No pardon came. Hatch has filed an arbitration claim to get his money back. Text messages sent from Wohl's phone number, which he later denied writing, told Hatch that MAGA influencers including Laura Loomer and House Speaker Mike Johnson would "endorse" his pardon. Loomer told CBS her name was used "without consent." Johnson's office denied endorsing the pardon. Turning Point USA's Erika Kirk also denied any involvement. "This is the way it's done. I'm paying these guys, you know?" Hatch said. Asked what he got for the money, he said: "It's a bunch of BS."

The program placed Burkman and Wohl at the low end of a market where fees can reach $3 million. Joseph Schwartz, a nursing home operator who pleaded guilty to failing to pay $38 million in employment taxes, was pardoned in November 2025, three months into a three-year sentence. The lobbying firm that worked his case earned $960,000. The family of Doris Coulson, who died in a Schwartz-operated facility, won a $19 million judgment against him and, they told CBS, "never collected a dollar." Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney who now brokers clemency, told Covino he skips the Justice Department entirely. "I just send my petitions directly to the White House," he said, calling the department's review process "the fox watching the hen house." Tolman said he expected to handle 40 or 50 clemency cases before the end of the term and to succeed in more than two-thirds of them.

That is consistent with what CBS found in the numbers. About 70% of Trump's second-term clemency actions did not go through the Justice Department's pardon attorney. Counting the more than 1,500 January 6 defendants pardoned on his first day back in office in 2025, the figure is 92%. Ed Martin, who ran the department's pardon office from May 2025 until this month, said the broker economy does not exist. "When people say 'there's brokers, there's quid pro quo,' I've never seen it," he said, dismissing the brokers as "snake oil salesmen" and "swamp salesmen."

The White House said much the same. Spokesperson Lauren Bis said the administration "has a robust pardon review process" that runs through the White House counsel, the Justice Department and pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson, and that anyone paying a broker is "foolishly wasting their money." White House counsel Will Scharf said, "President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner." Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas who studies clemency, saw it differently. "There's an industry that's built up around helping people get access to this system that should be free, that should be available to everybody," he said. What exists now, he added, "is not a system. That's something different entirely. It's anarchy."