What we searched
On September 17, 2026 we queried the FEC’s public API for itemized receipts (Schedule A) filed under contributor names drawn from the clemency record, limited to the 2024 and 2026 election cycles (contributions dated January 1, 2023 onward), in two passes:
- 42 names already in the ledger, at or above $5,000. These are mostly clemency recipients, but not only: they include one relative of recipients, Savannah Chrisley, daughter of Todd and Julie Chrisley, and the two pardon brokers themselves.
- 29 names — every recipient in the September 3, 2026 batch exactly as the Justice Department listed them — at or above $2,500.
Two further names, Samuel Reed and Mark Rossini, were run at $5,000 as a follow-up on September 18, 2026, and Emory Jones was re-run at the lower $2,500 threshold. None of the three searches returned a filing at or above its threshold.
That is 73 names in all (71 in the sweep and two in the follow-up), not the whole clemency record. Of the 156 people on the Justice Department’s list of clemency grants as of September 17, 2026, 94 were not searched on either date. The list links the January 6 and 2020-election proclamations but does not include the people they cover in its tables; the sweep included eight of them.
A contribution counts as a match only when the contributor’s name, city and stated employer are all consistent with the person in the record. Where a joint fundraising committee and the receiving committee both report the same transaction, it is one payment, not two.
What came back
Sixty-two of the seventy-one names in the September 17 sweep produced no qualifying filing whatsoever, and neither did the two follow-up names. They include nearly every name a reader would expect to find: Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Enrique Tarrio, Stewart Rhodes, Todd and Julie Chrisley, Ross Ulbricht, Rod Blagojevich, Devon Archer, Michele Fiore, BitMEX’s Arthur Hayes, and the pardon brokers Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl themselves. Changpeng Zhao and BitMEX’s Ben Delo also returned nothing, but that tells us little: Zhao is a Canadian citizen and Delo a British citizen, and federal law bars foreign nationals who are not U.S. permanent residents from making U.S. contributions.
Reading all nine hits
Nine names returned rows. None of them is a confirmed contribution by a recipient to a Trump committee:
- Five appear to be other people who share a name. In each, the filing’s city, stated occupation or full name does not fit what the record holds for the recipient, or the money went to the other party. One of these searches also returned a second, unrelated donor whose hyphenated surname merely contains the name. We are not naming or further identifying these donors: they are private individuals whose only connection to any of this is a coincidence of spelling, and the Ledger does not publish identifying detail about people who are not part of the record.
- One is a politician funding his own politics. Four of Henry Cuellar’s nine rows are him giving to his own campaign; the other five are his committee transferring money out to the DCCC and through ActBlue. None of it goes to Trump.
- One is not Trump money. A $3,000 contribution to a congressional campaign, unconnected to any Trump committee.
- Two name Trump committees and we still will not count them. The searches for Brian Kelsey and George Peterson each returned one contribution at or above the search threshold through a Trump joint fundraising committee. The other rows those searches returned are the same payments again: the joint committees’ shares passed on to other Trump committees (in Kelsey’s case, Save America), and the WinRed conduit’s report of each gift. For Peterson, the donor’s city does not match the Waggaman, Louisiana, home we hold for the recipient, so we treat that donor as a different person and do not publish the contribution’s details. Kelsey is different: the filings name a retired Brian Kelsey of Lexington, Kentucky, who gave $12,500 to the Trump 47 Committee on August 26, 2024, and $2,500 more that day, below the $5,000 threshold. Tennessee Lookout reported in September 2024 that the former Tennessee senator had been living in Lexington, and his America First Policy Institute biography says he moved there, to his wife’s hometown. The name and city are consistent with the recipient, but nothing in the filings themselves confirms the donor is him. Unverified is not a finding, so we count neither.
One recipient is documented as a large donor to committees supporting Trump — Trevor Milton, whose giving with his wife exceeded $1.8 million. He was not part of this sweep, because his contributions were already established from FEC filings in his own entry and did not need re-running. Every outlet covering this beat already has Milton. He is the exception; the rest of the search did not confirm a second example.
Five cases where the money is documented
The search failed in an informative direction. The payments this record can actually show are not recipients writing checks to campaigns. They run through people who can give in their own name, and through brokers who charge for access and are under no obligation to deliver. None of these figures comes from the sweep above; each comes from the cited sources on its own entry.
Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl (pardon brokers)
Rapper Boosie Badazz told 60 Minutes he paid Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl $600,000 up front to pursue a pardon that never arrived, and has filed an arbitration claim to recover $300,000. Wohl told 60 Minutes there is nothing corrupt or improper about their work; the pair refuse to refund Boosie, calling his contract invalid.
Joseph Schwartz
The compiled clemency record reports Burkman and Wohl accepted $960,000 to lobby for a pardon for Joseph Schwartz. Schwartz then hired Josh Nass, whom prosecutors allege sought $500,000 he said he was owed for pardon work. That charge is an allegation, not a finding; Schwartz is not accused in the case, and the compiled record describes him and his son as its alleged targets.
Paul Walczak
FEC filings show a $1,000,000 contribution to MAGA Inc. from Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, dated April 3, 2025, twenty days before his pardon, and his clemency application cited her fundraising. The Daily Beast reported that a White House official told The New York Times the pardon was inspired by her plea as a mother, not by her donation.
Julio Herrera Velutini and Wanda Vázquez Garced
Campaign Legal Center reports that Julio Herrera Velutini’s 25-year-old daughter, whose only prior donation was $20, gave $3.5 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC before the pardon. CLC filed a complaint arguing she was not the true source of the money; that is an allegation, not a finding. A White House official told CBS News the donations had nothing to do with the pardon.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (Binance)
Binance retained lobbyist Ches McDowell, a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., under a contract Bloomberg reported at $450,000 for one month of lobbying the White House and the Treasury Department on financial policy issues and “executive relief.” Zhao’s lawyer Teresa Goody Guillén told the AP that any claim of a quid pro quo by Binance or CZ is a clear misstatement of the public record.
What this does not show
This is the part that matters most, and we would rather state it than have it pointed out.
- It is not proof that no pardon was bought. It is evidence that these names did not appear as donors in their own names, at these thresholds, in FEC filings for the 2024 and 2026 election cycles (contributions dated January 2023 onward). Giving before 2023, including the 2020 and 2022 cycles, was not searched.
- An FEC search of the recipients misses most of this. The FEC does not record payments to lobbyists or pardon brokers, which is where three of the five documented cases above sit, nor state-level giving, nor, for the most part, who funds 501(c)(4) groups (it sees their election spending, but their donors only when they gave for that spending), and money routed through a straw or foreign source appears only under the name it was filed in. It does record a relative’s gift, but under the relative’s name. Payments to registered lobbyists are disclosed separately under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which this sweep did not search; fees paid to brokers who do not register, and a relative’s gift filed under her own name, are not tied to the recipient in any public filing. That blind spot is the finding, not a caveat to it.
- Many of these people are broke. A fair objection to any null result like this one is that convicted defendants under restitution orders were never likely to be five-figure federal donors. We think that is part of the point: the people around them were, and those payments seldom appear under the recipient’s name in campaign-finance filings.
- Name matching is imperfect in both directions. Someone who gave under a spouse’s name, a business, or a trust would not appear. And as the nine hits show, common names generate false matches easily.
- A payment beside a pardon is a sequence, not a purchase. The Ledger does not claim any of the cases above caused the grant that followed it, and in two of them the White House says explicitly that it did not.
- This is a snapshot of a subset, not the whole record. It covers the 71 names searched on September 17, 2026 — the 42 names already on Ledger entries and the 29 recipients in the September 3, 2026 batch — and the two names added on September 18, 2026, for 73 in all. Of the 156 people on the Justice Department’s clemency list as of September 17, 2026, 94 were not searched, among them Imaad Zuberi, Timothy Leiweke, Terren Peizer, David Gentile and Glen Casada, all 24 people pardoned on January 23, 2025, and all 11 people pardoned on July 3, 2026. Almost none of the people covered by the mass proclamations were searched: the sweep included two of about 1,500 January 6 defendants (Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes) and six of the 77 people named in the 2020-election proclamation. Later grants have not been swept either, and filings are amended over time.
Use this, and check it
The ledger data behind this is free, structured and licensed CC BY 4.0 as CSV and JSON. If you are reporting on clemency and want the sweep output (every name searched, the query settings and every hit, with the donors we treat as different people left unidentified), or want a name run, write to the editor — no charge, no condition beyond attribution.
If you find an error here we will correct it and say so in the corrections log, as we have 58 times already.