U.S. President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order on tariffs, in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis

President Donald Trump pardoned former private equity executive David Gentile this week, and made it so he will also be free from the responsibility of making his victims whole.

That's according to a Wednesday article in Politico, which reported that Gentile — who was convicted of conspiring to defraud thousands of people to the tune of $1.6 billion – will no longer have to come up with $15.5 million in restitution a judge ordered him to pay to victims. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Gentile was innocent in the scheme he was convicted of carrying out with his business partner, Jeffry Schneider.

"At trial, the government was unable to tie any supposedly fraudulent representations to Mr. Gentile," Leavitt said. "This is another example that has been brought to the president’s attention of the weaponization of justice from the previous administration and therefore he signed this commutation."

At the time he was pardoned, Gentile had served less than two weeks of a seven-year prison sentence.The scam involved Gentile misrepresenting the performance of three different of three private equity funds, and masking the source of investor payments. Gentile and Schneider's scheme affected approximately 17,000 investors, with 4,000 of those people being senior citizens.

Bloomberg reported this week that the judge overseeing Gentile's sentencing said she received hundreds of letters from victims of the scam. Some wrote that they had lost their life savings to Gentile's fraudulent scheme. One retiree in their seventies said that the scam cost them $450,000. Schneider is still serving his sentence and has not received clemency from the administration.

Gentile is merely one of several white-collar defendants who Trump had pardoned in recent days. CNN reported Wednesday that Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife, who were charged in 2024 with accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities. While Cuellar is a Democrat, he has consistently spoken out against the Democratic Party's pro-choice stance and has endorsed Republican calls for more stringent border enforcement.

"Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Click here to read Politico's full report.