Trump donor's $1m dinner leads to son's last-minute pardon. Photo / Getty Images
As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated President.
Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Donald Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Walczak’s offences but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.
Fago had raised millions of dollars for Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign by publicising the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden – an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.
Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for 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 Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.
Then, Fago was invited to a US$1 million-per-person ($1.6m) fundraising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.
It came just in the nick of time for Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly US$4.4m ($7.3m) 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 Fago and 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.
Walczak’s pardon application was described to the New York Times by a person who received it but was not authorised to share.
Fago, Walczak and his lawyer did not respond to questions.
A White House official echoed the framing in Walczak’s application, asserting in a statement to the Times that he was “targeted by the Biden administration over his family’s conservative politics”.
Walczak, 55, joined his mother’s nursing home business after dropping out of college, eventually becoming CEO. After she sold the company in 2007, they invested US$18m in a new nursing home venture based in South Florida, where they lived a luxurious lifestyle.
By 2011, prosecutors said, Walczak had stopped paying employment taxes.
Between 2016 and 2019, they said, he withheld more than US$10 million from the paycheques 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 US$2m 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 November 15, 2024, 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.
Fago, 74, had helped host at least three fundraisers for Trump’s campaigns. She and her son Joey Fago (Walczak’s half brother) and his wife attended VIP events at Trump’s 2017 and 2025 inaugurations, according to social media posts, including one in which she was shown posing with Trump.
During Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, Fago tried to help the candidate in other ways.
Ashley Biden had left her diary and other belongings in a house where she had been staying in Delray Beach, Florida, 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.
Kurlander contacted Fago. When she was first told of the diary, she said she thought it would help 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.
Kurlander and Harris brought Biden’s diary to a September 2020 fundraiser at Fago’s home in the exclusive Admirals Cove community of Jupiter, Florida. The featured guests were Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and the younger Trump’s girlfriend at the time, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
At the fundraiser, the diary was shown to Caroline Wren, a campaign finance consultant who helped organise the event.
“So I go back there, I start reading through it, and there was just unbelievable stuff,” 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 FBI and said, ‘You need to come pick this up immediately.’”
The FBI did not retrieve the diary. Instead, Kurlander and 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, Fago’s daughter.
The Justice Department during 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 Ashley Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary.
Fago and other family members spent election night 2020 at a White House watch party. After Trump lost, they were invited back the next month to attend a White House Christmas party.
During his final weeks in office, Fago was among a slew of loyalists tapped by 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 Biden did not have the right to remove her.
The scrutiny of the diary matter continued when 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 Fago, Walczak, Kurlander, Harris and others “about obtaining, transporting, transferring, disseminating or otherwise disposing of Ashley Biden’s stolen property”.
Kurlander and Harris would later plead guilty, admitting to conspiring to steal, transport and sell the diary to Project Veritas. Harris was sentenced to one month in prison. Kurlander is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
When Trump won the presidency for a second time, it offered hope to Project Veritas, Fago and Walczak.
In January, with Trump preparing to move back into the White House, Fago and her family travelled to Washington for the inauguration. They got VIP access to the Trump victory rally at Capital One Arena in Washington.
On February 5, Trump’s Justice Department said it was closing the investigation into the diary. Fago and Walczak were not charged, nor was anyone from Project Veritas.
In the meantime, a pardon application was submitted on Walczak’s behalf. It suggested that Donald Trump jnr, as well as Guilfoyle and other Trump allies, supported his clemency.
They all agreed, according to the application, that the only reason Walczak was prosecuted criminally was that he was the son of a prominent Trump supporter.
Guilfoyle declined to comment. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
The application cited Biden’s justification for issuing a sweeping pardon to his son Hunter Biden for tax and gun crimes in December. The elder Biden had claimed in a statement that Hunter “was singled out only because he is my son”.
As Fago and Walczak awaited word on the pardon, she was invited to the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser with Trump.
An invitation billed it as an intimate “candlelight dinner” with “very limited” space available to people who paid US$1m each. It was sponsored by MAGA Inc., a political action committee that can accept unlimited donations to support candidates and causes backed by Trump.
The ask was far more than her previous largest federal donation on record – US$100,000 ($168,095) to the Republican National Committee in 2002 – and dwarfed the more than US$12,000 she had directly donated to Trump’s presidential campaign committees.
Two people briefed on the candlelight dinner said that 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 Fago from the cancer board as evidence of the political motivations that contributed to Trump’s decision to issue the pardon.
After 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,” with the hashtag “MAGA”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kenneth P. Vogel
Photographs by: Jefferson Siegel
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