When Trump returned to power in 2026, a handful of people smelled opportunity earlier than anyone else. A clutch of former campaign staffers and administration officials incorporated a federal lobbying firm called Mo Strategies — and their business is now expanding into one of the most lucrative territories of all: the presidential pardon.
Their first client has already paid $500,000.
Across Trump's second term, a cottage industry of well-connected lobbyists, lawyers and influencers has grown up around the presidential clemency power. This is not a string of isolated "abuse of office" cases but a systemic loophole in American political institutions — the separation-of-powers design never anticipated that the pardon power could be commercialized in quite this way.
How Mo Strategies Operates
Mo Strategies president Marty Obst did not mince words when he sat down with CBS News: "I'm preparing for the possibility of congressional oversight, so any decision we make will be made in a way that can withstand scrutiny."
Obst's résumé is a textbook fit for the Trump orbit: senior positions on the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and a stint as a senior adviser to then–Vice President Mike Pence. His lobbying partner Robert Gold is cut from the same cloth — he served as the president's Special Assistant for Domestic Policy in Trump's first White House term and shaped the 2016 campaign's education platform.
Once the two teamed up to incorporate Mo Strategies, they began methodically standardizing "lobbying-for-pardon" into a turnkey business process:
- Step One: attorneys screen client cases and identify which are eligible for a presidential pardon
- Step Two: lobbyists "walk" the White House and the Department of Justice through the process, signaling which kinds of cases the West Wing will warm to
- Step Three: the president grants the pardon or commutation — a path already validated on multiple indicted allies of the administration
Obst's own phrasing captures the logic of the model with precision: "A pardon and clemency are both a legal process and a political process."
How Large the Industry Has Become
According to CBS News's analysis of disclosure filings, the $500,000 in revenue that the law firm Blessinger Legal reported in a single disclosure period ranks among the largest pardon-related disclosures in the Senate lobbying database.
An even larger figure sits behind it: the single largest disclosure on record — $960,000 — was filed by political operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl on behalf of Joseph Schwartz, a nursing-home operator who had pleaded guilty to charges involving a payroll-tax fraud scheme worth nearly $39 million. He served just three months of a three-year sentence before receiving Trump's pardon.
A single $960,000 payment, a three-year sentence truncated to three months, and that is only the largest disclosed figure — undisclosed transactions are necessarily larger. In Trump's second term, more than twenty lobbying registrations have been filed in this space, and only a small fraction of them were registered before the pardon itself.
The Mo Strategies Client Roster
Mo Strategies' client list itself tells a story. The firm's biggest payer is the U.S. subsidiary of the Chinese tech giant Tencent — Obst has previously helped the company navigate U.S. trade and defense policy. Other clients include Florida-based NextEra Energy; Team Hemp, which lobbies Washington on behalf of the U.S. cannabis industry; the Republic of Serbia — and, most recently, the law firm Blessinger Legal.
CBS News investigative report, translated and summarized by Lingshi Xiantan (领事闲谈, a commentary account on current affairs).
The Institutional Foundation of Pay-for-Pardon
Trump's pardon policy is already running on a fully assembled operating logic: pardons or commutations for indicted allies, and for individuals who have hired people with direct lines to the president.
Two official responses from the administration are worth noting in this light. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has stated that Trump "abhors anyone trying to profit off pardons" and that "a rigorous review process" stands between an application and the president's desk before it reaches him. A Justice Department spokesperson has likewise said that the Office of the Pardon Attorney "has received a record number of clemency petitions" and that "this long-standing process has never strayed."
Read together, these two official statements inadvertently confirm two facts. The first is the sharp jump in pardon applications — a "record number" is itself an unusual signal, indicating that the pardon expectations attached to Trump's second term have systematically drawn a flood of applicants. The second is that the existence of "a rigorous review process" has done nothing to stop paid lobbying — which means the design flaw lies outside the process, not inside it: lobbyists can route around the review by offering "guidance," not by confronting it.
This is not one individual's moral failure; it is a natural extension of the lobbying industry in American politics. When every executive power can be lobbied, the pardon power will not be the exception. The crux of the matter: the pardon was originally designed to correct miscarriages of justice — once it is folded into a commercial lobbying workflow, "review" becomes a stage of "negotiation" rather than a barrier against it.
Oversight and Accountability — The Democratic Midterm Variable
The Schwartz pardon is one of several cases Democratic members of the House and Senate are now investigating, as part of a broader inquiry into the pardon process and the alleged pay-for-pardon scheme. Reporting cites analyst expectations that, if Democrats win majorities in both chambers in the midterms, Trump's pardon activity will become a central plank of their oversight agenda.
Obst plainly understands the stakes — "I'm preparing for the possibility of congressional oversight." Read literally, the sentence means: the workflow has already been designed with the "can-withstand-scrutiny" margin built in. That, in a word, is the professionalism of the lobbying industry — not law-breaking, but the institutionalization of the legal gray zone.