Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner

New York Times

27-05-2025

As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.
Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak's offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.
Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump's campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.
Mr. Walczak's pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother's efforts for Mr. Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees' taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.
Still, weeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.
Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.
Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.
It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there 'is not a get-out-of-jail-free card' for the rich.
The pardon, however, indicated otherwise. The case of Ms. Fago and Mr. Walczak is the latest example of the president's willingness to use his clemency powers to reward allies who advance his political causes, and to punish his enemies.
Mr. Walczak's pardon application was described to The New York Times by a person who received it but was not authorized to share.
Ms. Fago, Mr. Walczak and his lawyer did not respond to questions.
A White House official echoed the framing in Mr. Walczak's application, asserting in a statement to The Times that he was 'targeted by the Biden administration over his family's conservative politics.'
A $2 Million Yacht
Mr. Walczak, 55, joined his mother's nursing home business after dropping out of college, eventually becoming chief executive. After she sold the company in 2007, they invested $18 million in a new nursing home venture based in South Florida, where they lived a luxurious lifestyle.
By 2011, prosecutors said, Mr. Walczak had stopped paying employment taxes.
Between 2016 and 2019, they said, he withheld more than $10 million from the paychecks of the nurses, doctors and others who worked at his facilities under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal income taxes. Instead, he used some of the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high-end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier, prosecutors said.
He was charged in February 2023 with 13 counts of tax crimes.
By the time he pleaded guilty to two of the counts and agreed to pay the restitution on Nov. 15, 2024, Mr. Trump had been elected for a second term in the White House.
The family had reason to believe the incoming president might look fondly on a pardon application.
Ms. Fago, 74, had helped host at least three fund-raisers for Mr. Trump's campaigns. She and her son Joey Fago (Mr. Walczak's half brother) and his wife attended V.I.P. events at Mr. Trump's 2017 and 2025 inaugurations, according to social media posts, including one in which she was shownposing with Mr. Trump.
An 'Unbelievable' Diary
During Mr. Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, Ms. Fago tried to help the candidate in other ways.
Ashley Biden had left her diary and other belongings in a house where she had been staying in Delray Beach, Fla., when she moved to Philadelphia during the campaign, telling a friend that she planned to return to retrieve the belongings later. A woman who moved in, Aimee Harris, discovered the diary and enlisted Robert Kurlander, a longtime friend and former housemate, to help sell it.
Mr. Kurlander contacted Ms. Fago. When she was first told of the diary, she said she thought it would help Mr. Trump's chances of winning the election, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the matter.
Mr. Kurlander and Ms. Harris brought Ms. Biden's diary to a September 2020 fund-raiser at Ms. Fago's home in the exclusive Admirals Cove community of Jupiter, Fla. The featured guests were Mr. Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. and the younger Mr. Trump's girlfriend at the time, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
At the fund-raiser, the diary was shown to Caroline Wren, the campaign finance consultant who helped organize the event.
'So I go back there, I start reading through it, and there was just unbelievable stuff,' Ms. Wren recalled last year on a podcast. 'I contacted the campaign attorneys, and then that campaign attorneys said, 'Be very careful, don't take possession of this.' They wrote up a whole memo and then they contacted the F.B.I. and said, 'You need to come pick this up immediately.''
The F.B.I. did not retrieve the diary. Instead, Mr. Kurlander and Ms. Harris entered negotiations to provide it to Project Veritas, a Trump-allied undercover media group that had been tipped to the diary's existence by Stephanie Walczak, Ms. Fago's daughter.
The Justice Department during Mr. Trump's first term opened an investigation into the matter after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities before the 2020 election that several of Ms. Biden's personal items had been stolen in a burglary.
Ms. Fago and other family members spent election night 2020 at a White House watch party. After Mr. Trump lost, they were invited back the next month to attend a White House Christmas party.
During his final weeks in office, Ms. Fago was among a slew of loyalists tapped by Mr. Trump for appointment to government boards and commissions. She resisted an effort by the Biden administration to rescind her appointment to the National Cancer Advisory Board, according to her son's pardon application, which said that she told a board representative that Mr. Biden did not have the right to remove her.
The scrutiny of the diary matter continued when Mr. Biden took office.
In November 2021, investigators obtained a search warrant related to a Project Veritas official that sought information about 'potential co-conspirators,' including communications with Ms. Fago, Ms. Walczak, Mr. Kurlander, Ms. Harris and others 'about obtaining, transporting, transferring, disseminating or otherwise disposing of Ashley Biden's stolen property.'
Mr. Kurlander and Ms. Harris would later plead guilty, admitting to conspiring to steal, transport and sell the diary to Project Veritas. Ms. Harris was sentenced to one month in prison. Mr. Kurlander is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
A New Hope
When Mr. Trump won the presidency for a second time, it offered hope to Project Veritas, Ms. Fago and Mr. Walczak.
In January, with Mr. Trump preparing to move back into the White House, Ms. Fago and her family traveled to Washington for the inauguration. They got V.I.P. access to the Trump Victory rally at the Capital One Arena in Washington.
On Feb. 5, Mr. Trump's Justice Department said it was closing the investigation into the diary. Ms. Fago and Ms. Walczak were not charged, nor was anyone from Project Veritas.
In the meantime, a pardon application was submitted on Mr. Walczak's behalf. It suggested that Donald Trump Jr., as well as Ms. Guilfoyle and other Trump allies, supported his clemency.
They all agreed, according to the application, that the only reason Mr. Walczak was prosecuted criminally was that he was the son of a prominent Trump supporter.
Ms. Guilfoyle declined to comment. Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
The application cited Mr. Biden's justification for issuing a sweeping pardon to his son Hunter Biden for tax and gun crimes in December. The elder Mr. Biden had claimed in a statement that Hunter 'was singled out only because he is my son.'
As Ms. Fago and Mr. Walczak awaited word on the pardon, she was invited to the Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser with Mr. Trump.
An invitation billed it as an intimate 'candlelight dinner' with 'very limited' space available to people who paid $1 million each. It was sponsored by MAGA Inc., a political action committee that can accept unlimited donations to support candidates and causes backed by Mr. Trump.
The ask was far more than her previous largest federal donation on record — $100,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2002 — and dwarfed the more than $12,000 she had directly donated to Mr. Trump's presidential campaign committees.
Two people briefed on the candlelight dinner said that Ms. Fago attended. It is not clear whether she donated to MAGA Inc., or how much.
Representatives for MAGA Inc. did not respond to questions. The group has until the end of July to disclose the identities of donors from the first half of this year, which will most likely include those who paid to attend the dinner.
In a brief interview, Joey Fago downplayed the significance of his mother's connection to the diary saga.
'There was like hundreds of pardons,' he said. 'I'm sure there's plenty of other people you can write about.'
The White House official cited the Biden administration's effort to oust Ms. Fago from the cancer board as evidence of the political motivations that contributed to Mr. Trump's decision to issue the pardon.
After Mr. Walczak was pardoned in the tax case, he celebrated with his mother and family while wearing a red Trump-style hat reading 'Make Paul Great Again,' according to a social media post capturing the celebration.
In the post, Joey Fago wrote, 'What God has ahead of you, is greater than what is behind you,' along with the hashtag 'MAGA.'