White House: Presidential Pardons Cannot Be Bought

The White House moved quickly to distance itself from a $30 million pardon pitch aimed at securing clemency for crypto promoter Roger Ver, saying it had no knowledge of the effort and underscoring that pardons follow a formal, tightly controlled process. “The pardon process is a serious one, and outside grifters trying to make a big buck by overstating access to the White House will realize that soon enough,” spokesman Harrison Fields said. “The president, after consulting with his senior advisers, will have the final say on pardons.”

Beyond the warning shot at would-be intermediaries, the White House reiterated the nuts and bolts of how clemency is handled: all applications are thoroughly reviewed by the Office of the Pardon Attorney and the White House counsel’s office before reaching the president. That explicit process point is central to understanding why the proposal never gained traction inside government.

Officials also denied any awareness of the plan itself. The administration’s position was unambiguous: it had no involvement with, nor apparent visibility into, the fee-for-access idea that Florida dealmaker Matt Argall pitched to Ver.

Those statements came as Argall, often working alongside crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, proposed a two-part structure to Ver: $10 million wired to a trustee to “set the process in motion,” plus a $20 million success fee if a presidential pardon materialized. While the numbers were eye-catching, nothing in the plan indicated a formal channel into the pardon pipeline the White House had just described.

The administration’s framing lands in a broader context. As Trump’s second term began, a cottage industry of lobbyists, consultants, and influence peddlers sought to monetize supposed ties to senior officials, dangling introductions and “narrative strategy” in exchange for fees. The White House’s reminder about the official clemency workflow, paired with Fields’s “grifter” rebuke, amounts to a public boundary: petitions must run through the established process, not through private brokers selling proximity.

Matt Argall with girlfriend Valerie Haney (Source: TikTok)

Inside the specific episode, Argall claimed he could marshal MAGA-aligned influencers, recast Ver as unfairly targeted, and leverage relationships to surface the case for consideration. But the White House’s clear denial of knowledge undercuts any claim that the effort had actual access to decision makers. It remains “unclear whether Argall and his associates had genuine connections to people with power, much less the clout to persuade them that Ver’s pardon was a worthy cause,” the article notes—a gap that the administration’s comments only widened.

The legal and political name-drops around the proposal never hardened into official engagement. An exploratory call with an outside attorney did not translate into a mandate or endorsement, and there was no sign of a senior sponsor within the executive branch capable of steering a petition through the review ladder that Fields described. In practice, the endeavor stalled; by March, Ver had stopped responding to follow-ups. The White House’s process point explains why: without a documented petition moving through the pardon office and counsel’s vetting, there was no mechanism for the proposal to reach the president.

Taken together, the administration’s actions and words form the spine of the story. Officials publicly denied knowledge of Argall’s plan, restated the guardrails around clemency, and issued a pointed caution about outsiders trading on the appearance of access. Any path to a pardon, they emphasized, runs through the pardon czar and White House counsel—and only then to the president for a final decision. 

With material from Bloomberg news