Trump
Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner
Paul
Walczak’s pardon application cited his mother’s support for the president,
including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a
Biden family diary.
Kenneth P.
Vogel
By Kenneth
P. Vogel
Kenneth P.
Vogel has reported on presidential pardons. He reported from Washington.
May 27, 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 shown posing with Mr. Trump.
An
‘Unbelievable’ Diary
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.”
Michael S.
Schmidt, Adam Goldman and Devon Lum contributed reporting.
Kenneth P.
Vogel is based in Washington and investigates the intersection of money,
politics and influence.
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