Trump’s SEC forgives 3 scammers who bilked Americans out of millions | Opinion
In a week in which America was convulsed with the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assasination, his memorial service and a comedian’s free speech controversy, news about the Trump administration’s contempt for two centuries of efforts to purge corruption from American government and business barely registered.
You might have noticed a stray headline about a Trump official, the FBI and a paper bag with $50,000 in cash, but everybody already knows the Trump administration has lax ethical standards.
That starts at the top. Donald Trump’s connection to political power has conveniently coincided with a more than doubling of his and his family’s net worth according to Forbes. One way that has happened is that they’re involved in no less than five cryptocurrency businesses that launder promises of future payment in imaginary currency into cash flow now in hard dollars.
But what really got my attention last week is how Trump is spreading his contempt for the law out into the business world. It started with the president’s decision earlier this year to give inappropriate pardons, commutations, clemency and other assorted legal benefits to a gaggle of swindlers at the same time he was giving out pardons to the Jan. 6 rioters that got all the attention.
Among the swindlers are Devon Archer, Trevor Milton and Carlos Watson, a trio of scammers who bilked Americans out of more than three quarters of a billion dollars. Archer had been ordered to pay back $60 million dollars to pensions and a Native American tribe. Prosecutors had recommended Milton pay investors back $660 million after he inflated the technical prowess of his electric car company. Watson, was convicted of defrauding investors in a digital media startup of a cool $97 million.
Trump protected them earlier this year from the criminal penalties for their larcenous misdeeds. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped efforts in civil court to get them to give money back to those they had misled. Moreover, the SEC also dropped its efforts to ban the three investment scammers from working in the securities business or as leaders of publicly held companies ever again. Now they can go right back to the jobs for which they were so morally unfit.
So how are these three lovely guys connected to the Trump administration? Well, Archer was Hunter Biden’s business partner. After he was caught in his investment scam, he helped prosecutors and congressional Republicans go after President Joe Biden’s son. You remember, Hunter is the son our previous president pardoned for crimes he said he wouldn’t pardon him for.
Milton is a multimillion-dollar donor to the 2024 Trump presidential campaign and had the wisdom to hire Brad Bondi, the brother of previous Trump lawyer, now-Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Watson has ties to Trump pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson, recipient of a previous Trump pardon.
Allegedly, the SEC is independent of the Trump White House, but it is headed by a Trump administration appointee, and we all know how strictly Trump and his backers abide by protections for independent agencies like the Federal Reserve — which is to say, not at all.
Donald Trump has spent the year running away from what was once Republican orthodoxy. Markets need basic regulation and transparency to keep them honest. International trade benefits our nation. Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers in the economy. It’s all out the window and I can’t keep up.
This is the way the news goes in the Trump administration. The outrages come so hard and so fast that you can’t pay attention to one — like, say, the independent Federal Communications Commission chairman’s attempt to cancel a Trump-hostile late-night comedian — because if you do, you’ll miss the robbery of old people’s retirement accounts, a native tribe’s community center building fund and even billionaire liberal Laurene Powell Jobs, who lost millions in one of the scams.
I wish I knew what I was missing today.
David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and The Kansas City Star.
This story was originally published September 25, 2025 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Trump’s SEC forgives 3 scammers who bilked Americans out of millions | Opinion."
