A Trump voter has recalled the shock moment he learned that the president commuted the prison sentence of a woman who scammed him and his son out of nearly $500,000.
John Long, 80, told The Sunday Times he was at his pig farm in Colorado when he found out that Marian Morgan — who was sentenced to nearly 34 years in prison in 2013 and ordered to pay $20 million for defrauding Long, his son and others via a Ponzi scheme — was granted clemency by the president last year.
“We had justice and now it’s kind of like … ‘we’re going to let these criminals go out and do it again,’” Long told the newspaper.
After he was contacted by Morgan and co-conspirators in 2006, Long and his son made the nearly half-a-million-dollar investment in what was presented as a low-risk, big-return investment out in Europe.
But when he didn’t see the money and upon learning that Morgan was in Florida despite her claim that she was in Europe on business, he contacted the FBI, leading to her 2009 arrest and, later, her 2011 conviction. (John Morgan, her husband, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the scheme.)
Trump’s decision wrote off restitution payments that Marian Morgan was ordered to make to the dozens of investors she defrauded in the scheme, despite a 2021 court statement where she expressed her desire to pay back her victims “so they know I am truly sorry for the damage I caused.”
Most of the millions of dollars in restitution debt owed was unpaid by the time of Trump’s clemency order, The Washington Post reported last year.
The president’s decision reflects a number of others that have included forgiving those granted clemency of court-ordered restitution payments.
It comes as lawyers sound the alarm over a “cottage industry” of sorts under Trump where “attorneys and lobbyists” have used their proximity to the administration to get pardons, per The Sunday Times.
A White House spokesperson has rejected this notion, telling Reuters in June that “anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money.”
Just last year, Tom Barber, a Trump-appointed U.S. District Court judge, denied Morgan’s request for a compassionate release from prison, noting that “she would continue to pose a danger to the public.”
Long, who described Morgan as “criminally insane,” said she could “suck money out of somebody” again.
“Our justice system would be a much better system if we took the pardoning power out,” said Long, who noted that Trump’s decision shows “bad judgement” on his part to free people like Morgan.
“No matter who is in that power circle, it is just a corrupt system.”