The promise of a presidential pardon has become a lucrative business for well-connected fixers, especially during Donald Trump‘s second term.
But as political influence becomes more valuable, allegations are growing that self-styled power brokers are selling access they don’t have.
Unfortunately, rapper Boosie Badazz, one of Louisiana’s biggest names in hip-hop, found out the hard way.
The “Set It Off” chart-topper thought he could buy his way out of federal trouble.
Now, he’s finding out the hard way that not everybody selling access to Trump is actually connected to him.
To be clear, Boosie, whose real name is Torence Hatch Jr., isn’t suing the president himself.
According to NOTUS, his legal team is suing two far-right operatives for allegedly taking his money and delivering nothing but a phone call full of lies.
Boosie faced a federal gun charge in San Diego after a 2023 traffic stop, the Department of Justice reported.
Boosie has filed a lawsuit claiming he paid $600,000 to political operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman to help secure a presidential pardon from Donald Trump that never happened.
— No Jumper (@nojumper) July 13, 2026
Boosie alleges the pair claimed they had connections to Trump’s inner circle and promised a pardon… pic.twitter.com/k0Kkb6qtMx
As a convicted felon, possession of a firearm landed him in serious federal trouble, and by August 2025, he’d agreed to plead guilty.
With sentencing looming, Boosie went public, repeatedly pleading with Trump on social media for a pardon and insisting he’d been unfairly targeted.
He even took his case straight to “pardon czar” Alice Marie Johnson during a White House Black History Month event. That got him nowhere.
Desperate and out of options, according to Billboard, Boosie turned to Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, two controversial right-wing operatives running JM Burkman & Associates.
The pair claimed they’d already secured nine pardons for other clients — a claim that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, since federal disclosures show only one of their clients has actually received a pardon.
Boosie signed on anyway. He paid the firm a staggering $600,000, with a contract clause promising him a $300,000 refund if the pardon didn’t come through by a set deadline.
On New Year’s Day, Burkman and Wohl allegedly called Boosie’s lawyer with big news: Trump had signed the pardon. His federal record was clean.
But when Boosie’s team checked with prosecutors and the courts, there was no pardon on record. A White House official later claimed that the office had never even seen his application.
Boosie was sentenced anyway — just 10 days of time served and three years of supervised release.
But the $300,000 he was promised back never showed up. Burkman and Wohl reportedly told his team they were essentially bankrupt, buried under more than $6 million in debt from a prior robocall fraud settlement.
That’s when Boosie’s lawyers filed for arbitration to get his money back, a case that became public this week — the first known legal action against a pardon lobbyist during Trump’s second term.
Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,700 people in his second term, the bulk of them tied to a blanket pardon covering roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants.
He’s also pardoned a wave of white-collar offenders, wiping out an estimated $1.3 billion in restitution.
His clemency record touches others in hip-hop.
On his final day in office in January 2021, Trump pardoned Lil Wayne over a federal gold-plated handgun charge and commuted former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s 28-year racketeering sentence.
He also commuted Kodak Black’s 46-month sentence for firearms paperwork violations after pressure from Lil Yachty and Lamar Jackson and freed Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris following decades in prison and advocacy from Snoop Dogg.
In May 2025, during his second term, Trump granted Louisiana rapper NBA YoungBoy a full pardon on federal gun charges.
Alice Marie Johnson received clemency during Trump’s first term. She now serves as his unofficial “Pardon Czar” and advises him on pardon requests.
Reports say Trump bypassed the DOJ’s standard review process in most of these cases, favoring applicants backed by well-connected lobbyists. Boosie claims it’s the same system that he got burned by.
Reaction online was swift and split between disbelief and sympathy.
“That’s a wild lawsuit if the allegations are true,” an X user commented. Someone else added, “They pocketed boosie money and went on vacation. I dont think boosie wants to mess with the government.”
“Why is he incriminating himself? This is highly illegal,” one user questioned. Another joked, “Studio gangstas getting scammed by the true gangster — Boosie, don’t snitch now!”
You'd think being from the ghetto he would know an okie dokie when he saw one but instead he got got by the swamp.
— GenXcellent (@GenX_Cellent) July 13, 2026
“You’d think being from the streets he’d know an okie dokie when he saw one, but instead he got got by the swamp,” someone posted. Still, one warned, “Exposing the president for taking bribes is not a good move.”
Someone else joked, “He let the white folks hustle him lol smh.”
One person gave it straight: “Boosie filing this lawsuit after trying to purchase clemency is peak irony. He wanted an easy exit from his gun case and when it didn’t work he ran straight to the legal system he was trying to bypass in the first place.
