Ed Martin, who recently stepped down as President Trump's pardon attorney, is hitting the road to counter claims from a 60 Minutes investigation that the White House clemency process doubled as a cash-for-pardons operation, allegations the White House flatly denies.
Martin left his government post after an hour-long Oval Office exit interview with the president roughly ten days before the article's publication. He told the Daily Mail that Trump personally encouraged him to take his case to the public, recounting the president's words: "You like doing media. Go do media. It's important to get out there."
The media tour, planned across ten states including New York, New Jersey, Iowa, and New Hampshire, is timed ahead of November's midterm elections. Martin framed the effort as both a defense of the administration's clemency record and a voter-mobilization push for Republicans. "If you want more of this, you're going to have to vote for Republicans," he said.
At the center of the controversy is a 60 Minutes investigation that featured covertly recorded meetings with Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, two political operatives who allegedly boasted about backdoor leverage with the White House and the ability to secure presidential pardons for fees as high as $600,000.
Martin did not hold back about the pair or the investigation's central characters:
"Those clowns that were on 60 Minutes, they basically admitted that they were playing fast and loose with what they could do. The one guy complaining failed to get a pardon, and the two guys that said they'd get it for him failed."
White House spokesman Lauren Bis reinforced that message, stating that "anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money and the President doesn't even know who these so-called 'lobbyists.'" The White House has consistently pushed back against the broader narrative of a "pardon economy."
The argument from Martin and the White House amounts to a straightforward rebuttal: the operatives caught on camera were freelancers who never had real access, failed to produce results, and cannot be laid at the administration's feet. Whether or not Burkman and Wohl tried to sell influence, the question is whether they actually had any to sell. Martin says they did not.
To illustrate how legitimate clemency works, Martin pointed to the case of Duke Tanner, a former inmate whose drug sentence Trump first commuted and later fully pardoned. Martin hosted Tanner on a recent online broadcast, where Tanner told the audience he never had a lawyer or broker working on his behalf.
"He just was doing the right things in prison, and everything found him," Martin said of Tanner. The case, Martin argued, shows the system working as intended, a non-violent offender earning clemency through conduct, not through a $600,000 check to a political fixer.
Martin described the scale of the clemency pipeline: the DOJ bureau responsible for pardons processes nearly 20,000 petitions and sends vetted batches of roughly 2,000 names to the White House each quarter. That volume alone suggests a bureaucratic grind, not a boutique pay-for-play shop. Trump has used his clemency authority broadly during this term, issuing pardons that have drawn both praise and criticism across the political spectrum.
Martin's exit was not entirely smooth. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who served as Trump's personal defense lawyer before taking over the DOJ, had previously clashed with Martin over press leaks. Those tensions led Blanche to strip Martin of his duties leading the department's anti-weaponization initiative, a move that preceded Martin's departure from the pardon attorney role.
Martin addressed the friction diplomatically, if not warmly. "You have to sort of grow into understanding what the boss wants," he said of Blanche. The remark carried an obvious subtext: Martin believed he understood what Trump wanted, and that Blanche was still learning.
No new pardon attorney has been announced. That vacancy raises practical questions about how the administration will manage a pipeline of 20,000 petitions without a confirmed point person, particularly as Trump has continued to exercise his pardon power at a pace that demands institutional capacity.
Beyond the pardon controversy, Martin offered a candid assessment of FBI Director Kash Patel's early tenure. He acknowledged what he called a "rocky start" but said the bureau had gained energy and focus over time.
"Kash took a little bit of time to get things going, and then he got things going. But inside DOJ, you see energy. So I felt and saw more energy out of the FBI than I did when Kash first started."
An unnamed law enforcement official echoed that assessment to the Daily Mail, saying, "The FBI under Kash has always moved aggressively but it is not a coincidence that it is moving better than ever after the change at AG." The implication was clear: Blanche's arrival at DOJ, whatever his friction with Martin, had improved coordination between the department and the bureau.
Martin's bond with Trump stretches back to 2016, rooted in his work alongside the late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, one of Trump's earliest and most prominent supporters. Trump, Martin said, "still loves to raise" Schlafly's name. That relationship gave Martin a direct line to the president that few DOJ appointees could match, and may explain both the trust Trump placed in him and the institutional friction his media-friendly style created.
The administration has not been shy about breaking with convention across multiple policy areas, and Martin's public role as pardon attorney was no exception. His willingness to speak openly, and his departure over it, illustrates an ongoing tension within the Trump administration between loyalists who want to fight publicly and institutional figures who prefer tighter control.
Martin described his departure as "strategic, timed to rally conservative voters before the midterms." He said he told Trump directly: "I want to go out and talk more about it, especially before November 3." Trump agreed.
The ten-state tour is designed to spotlight the administration's clemency record, particularly its push to restore gun rights to non-violent felons, as a tangible deliverable for conservative voters. Martin wants to turn what critics framed as a scandal into a selling point: proof that the Trump White House used its constitutional authority to give second chances to people the system had written off.
Whether that argument lands depends on whether voters see the 60 Minutes investigation as genuine accountability journalism or as another media hit job on a Trump ally. Martin is betting on the latter. His approach mirrors a broader pattern in this administration, where officials have increasingly taken their case directly to the public rather than relying on favorable coverage from mainstream outlets.
The open questions remain real. Who, if anyone, paid Burkman and Wohl? Did money change hands for pardon access at any level, even if it never reached the White House? And who will manage the clemency pipeline now that Martin is gone?
But the core allegation, that the Trump White House itself ran a pay-to-play pardon operation, rests, so far, on the recorded boasts of two operatives who, by Martin's account and the White House's own statement, had no actual access and delivered nothing. A con artist claiming to sell something he does not own is not evidence that the owner was in on the deal.
If critics want to prove the clemency process was corrupt, they will need more than hidden-camera footage of two men selling what they never had.