President Joe Biden handed out a historic number of pardons and clemency orders during his final days in the White House.
“As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for nonviolent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses,” Biden said in a statement.
During what the White House described as “the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history,” Biden, in early December, commuted the sentences of approximately 1,500 prisoners and pardoned another 39 citizens. One in particular, his son Hunter Biden, sparked backlash. However, there are many other convicted criminals whom critics similarly say did not merit the act of mercy.
Here is a breakdown of Joe Biden’s most controversial acts of clemency.
Rita Crundwell
Rita Crundwell, 71, worked for years as a comptroller in Dixon, Illinois, a city best known as the boyhood home of former President Ronald Reagan. Crundwell has been described as the “largest municipal fraudster in U.S. history” after her nearly $54 million dollar embezzlement scheme was uncovered in 2012.
Court documents revealed that Crundwell’s criminal activity took place for over two decades in Dixon. She siphoned roughly $2.5 million annually by creating false invoices, using the funds to support an opulent lifestyle impossible to sustain on her $80,000 government salary. She was ultimately sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison for her actions and ordered to pay the city back $53.7 million in fines.
Some of the funds stolen went to support her quarter horse breeding business. Crundwell’s 405 horses were sold at an auction following her arrest. She subsequently became the subject of a 2017 documentary called All the Queen’s Horses, which describes how the former comptroller used the stolen funds “to build one of the nation’s leading quarter horse breeding empires, all while forcing staff cuts, police budget slashing, and neglect of public infrastructure.”
Dixon Mayor Glen Hughes expressed anger over Joe Biden’s decision to commute Crundwell’s sentence, telling Forbes that he did not have any warning from the White House that the move was coming.
“As Mayor of the City of Dixon, I believe that most of the City is probably stunned, and maybe even angry, that President Biden would provide clemency to Rita Crundwell, the preparator of probably the largest municipal misappropriations of funds in U.S. history. The Crundwell incident is one that the City would like to move past, but this action has rubbed salt in the wound,” Hughes said.
Republican Illinois state Sen. Andrew Chesney suggested Joe Biden’s decision came because he was “extending clemency to anyone with political connections, including corrupt government employees.”
Michael Conahan
Michael Conahan is a former judge from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who was involved in a so-called “Kids for Cash” scandal. He was found guilty in 2011 of sending kids to jail in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks from private prisons. Similar to Crundwell, Conahan was also the subject of a 2013 documentary exploring how the judge pulled off the scandal.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor strongly criticized Joe Biden’s move to commute the ex-judge’s sentence during a press conference following the pardon.
“I’ll offer these thoughts as an outsider, not privy to all the information he looked at, but I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania,” the governor added,” Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) said, ironically speaking from Joe Biden’s childhood hometown of Scranton in a building on Biden Street.
“Families were torn apart,” Shapiro said of the scandal. “There was all kinds of mental health issues and anguish that came as a result of these corrupt judges deciding they wanted to make a buck off a kid’s back.”
Joe Biden’s move also provoked an outcry from parents such as Sandy Fonzo, whose child committed suicide after Conahan sent him to prison for eight months for drinking underage.
“I want to see [Conahan’s] name removed because that’s just … another slap in the face, another injustice, on top of all of the grief that everybody in this community has already endured,” said Fonzo.
Wendy Hechtman
Wendy Hechtman is a Nebraska resident who pleaded guilty to trafficking carfentanil and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Working alongside her husband, Hechtman spearheaded a drug ring based out of their Omaha home, developing a marketing team of roughly 40 people.
The powerful fentanyl analog can kill users who absorb just a few grains of the drug through their skin. Police blamed Hechtman’s illegal operation for a surge of overdoses and deaths in Nebraska before she and her husband were convicted in 2017.
“People were dying, people were overdosing, families were being destroyed on a daily basis, and then it stopped,” one Omaha investigator told a local news outlet.
Thanks to Joe Biden’s pardoning power, Hechtman will be free once again.
“I will be dancing at my daughter’s wedding this summer,” Hechtman’s mother told the New York Times. “I can’t wait.”
Shelinder Aggarwal, another opioid trafficker, also found his way onto Joe Biden’s pardon list. The former Alabama doctor was sentenced in 2017 to 15 years in prison for putting “hundreds of thousands of pills on the street illegally.”
Prosecutors said he “directly contributed to the opioid epidemic” and cost taxpayers millions of dollars by “fraudulently claiming government reimbursement for thousands of lab tests that he never used to treat patients.” The Drug Enforcement Administration labeled Aggarwal “the biggest pill-pusher in North Alabama.”
Aggarwal was recorded on video saying his patients were “dropping like flies; they are all dying.”
Meera Sachdeva
Meera Sachdeva is a Mississippi oncologist who pleaded guilty in 2012 to chemotherapy fraud. Between 2007 and 2011, Sachdeva systematically gave her patients partial doses of their prescribed cancer treatment despite charging them for the full amount.
Sachdeva’s Rose Cancer Center in Pike County was the heart of her fraudulent activity. It was there that she reused needles and handed out expired chemotherapy treatments to patients. Sachdeva’s cancer center was said to be “so unsanitary that multiple patients were admitted to local hospitals with infections” after visiting her clinic, according to a local news report. At least one patient said they had been infected with HIV as a result of the unhygienic practices, according to the Post Millenial.
Before Joe Biden extended clemency to the one-time doctor, Sachdeva was sentenced to two decades in prison and ordered to pay $8 million in fines for her actions.
“It’s a very small thing to send this woman to jail for the next 20 years when you compare it to the damage she has done,” U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan III said in court at the time of her sentencing.
Joseph Shereshevsky and financial fraudsters
Joe Biden also commuted the sentences of a stream of people, including Joseph Shereshevsky, Paul Daugerdas, Eric Bloom, and Paul Burks, who committed massive financial crimes.
Shereshevsky was sentenced in 2011 to over two decades in prison for his role in a $255 million real estate Ponzi scheme targeting Orthodox Jews. One of the many victims who got caught up in Shereshevsky’s WexTrust Ponzi scheme, Norfolk resident Vivian Orgel, said she “went from being a millionaire to worrying about the price of ketchup overnight,” according to a local news outlet. Orgel and many other victims only received restitution for 10% of what they lost.
“Forget about wine. Forget about things that you enjoy, It’s not going to be important. What’s going to be important is your survival,” Orgel said.
Joe Biden also commuted the sentence of Daugerdas, a former New York tax attorney who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in one of the largest criminal tax fraud cases in U.S. history. Operating fraudulent tax shelters for roughly two decades, Daugerdas cost the government more than $1.63 billion in tax revenue, raked in $95 million for himself, and paid under $8,000 in personal income taxes.
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Also on Joe Biden’s list was Bloom, who was sentenced in 2015 to 14 years in prison for his role in the largest financial fraud case ever prosecuted in the federal court of Chicago. The ex-CEO of Northbrook-based Sentinel Management Group stole over $665 million from hundreds of customers.
Burks, the now 75-year-old former CEO of ZeekRewards who operated a $900 million internet Ponzi scheme, additionally saw his 176 months sentence commuted after scamming more than 900,000 victims.