Trevor Milton Lists All Of The Cozy Relationships With Trump That Definitely Didn’t Lead To His Pardon

We chronicled the implosion of the company Nikola and the fall from grace of its CEO, Trevor Milton, for years. If you don’t recall the story, Nikola was built to develop over the road trucks with a hydrogen propulsion system. In 2020, in a bid to gain more investment and boost confidence of current investors, Nikola showed off footage of what it called a working prototype moving down a lonely highway road. The problem is that it wasn’t a working prototype for the purposes of the footage. Instead, the truck was towed towards a descending hill and then allowed to roll down it with that momentum, with the filming camera tilted to make it appear as though it were on level ground. A sort of Adam West in Batman approach, in other words.

From there Nikola lost contracts, attempted to silence criticism via copyright, ended up in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Milton was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 4 years in prison for his role in this fiasco. Justice, it appeared, was done.

But last week Donald Trump pardoned Milton, who will now see no jail time, as he’d been out on bond as he appealed the case. Conmen of a feather flock together, it seems.

“It is no wonder why trust and confidence in the Justice Department has eroded to nothing. I wish judges would stop believing whatever the prosecutors feed them so Americans could trust the justice system again,” Milton said in a statement.

Milton was convicted by a jury. He was represented in that trial by Brad Bondi, a partner at law firm Paul Hastings and the brother of current U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Now a free man, Milton has said he plans to release a documentary that he believes will tell his side of the Nikola story.

Milton apparently did not note whether that documentary would feature a permanently tilted camera in order to keep things consistent.

But as you can tell, there is no remorse here. Far from any contrite admission of guilt, Milton is pitching his pardon as a validation that he was innocent all along, the victim of the Biden administration, rather than a valid conviction handed down from a jury. If there were accusations to be made of political fuckery in any of this, they should have been made at trial, not as part of a post-pardon media commentary.

Now, if you’re concerned that Milton’s cozy relationship between his attorney and the U.S. Attorney General, or that the millions his family donated to the Trump campaign had anything to do with his getting pardoned, rest easy. Milton is here to tell you that these conflicts had nothing to do with it, one by one.

Milton said donations he and his wife made to the Trump campaign in October played no role in the pardon.

“I wouldn’t even know how to do that,” he said. “It would be illegal to do that.”

Milton also said that Trump-appointed Attorney General Pamela Bondi, the sister of one of his attorneys, also had no role in the pardon. Milton on Monday repeatedly said he was a political victim under the Biden administration, adding the pardon says, “Trevor is innocent.”

I like to imagine that he made these comments with a shit-eating grin on his face and punctuated them with an exaggerated wink. A pardon of course does not confer innocence onto the convicted. But it’s not crazy to suspect that donations and familial relationships at play here factored into his pardon. Just watching how Trump operates over the last few years should at least raise suspicions.

But again, there is no responsibility being taken by Milton for any of this.

Milton, who confirmed he sold more than $300 million in company shares in 2021, said he would not repay any of the investors. But he would be open to helping those people in future ventures.

“So, I’m not heartless,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I feel for these people probably more than most.”

One wonders if there is a hill steep enough to prevent those investors from running up them in response.