Who is Trevor Milton, the startup founder and donor pardoned by Trump
Nikola founder Trevor Milton, convicted by a New York jury in 2022 for misleading investors about the electric vehicle (EV) maker’s technology, was pardoned Friday by President Trump, according to a White House official.
Milton said Thursday in a post on social platform X that he spoke to Trump over the phone and that he signed his pardon of “innocence.”
“The prosecutors can no longer hurt me; they can’t destroy my family; they can’t rip everything away from me; they can’t ruin my life,” Milton said in a video accompanying the post.
Milton, a major Republican Party donor, was convicted in October 2022 on securities and wire fraud charges. Prosecutors said he was overstating the claims about the company’s production of zero-emission trucks. Investors lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The businessman was sentenced to four years in prison and was fined $1 million in late 2022. He has been free on bail while appealing the case, where he has denied wrongdoing.
Milton’s pardon comes just over a month after Nikola, an EV start-up, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company lost hundreds of millions over the scandal around Milton.
During the trial, prosecutors zeroed in on the company’s video, produced by Milton, of a prototype truck that looked like it was going downhill, appearing like the company created a working vehicle. The prosecutors said it was actually a General Motors unit that had a Nikola logo stamp, The Associated Press reported.
Milton resigned from Nikola in 2020 after investment fund Hindenburg Research released a lengthy report, accusing the company’s founder of making substantial false statements.
“We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size,” the fund wrote in the report that was published in September 2022.
When asked about the pardon on Friday, Trump contended that Milton was persecuted because he was supportive of the president and that the Utah entrepreneur was “highly recommended” by lots of people.
“They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “He supported Trump. He liked Trump. I didn’t know him, but he liked him.”
“There are many people like that,” he added. “They support Trump, and they went after him.”
Milton has given nearly $3 million in contributions to various GOP lawmakers’ campaigns, PACs and GOP state-level committees since July 2016, Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show.
He gave $920,000 to Trump 47 Committee, a joint fundraising committee that split money between Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, the Republican Nation Commitee (RNC) and state party groups, on Oct. 10, just over a month before the president won the last year’s election.
The same month, separately, he dished out $284,000 to the RNC, the records show.
Milton also supported the MAHA Alliance, a Super PAC that worked to convince Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s supporters to back Trump after the ex-independent presidential candidate dropped out of the race and endorsed the then-GOP nominee, with a $750,000 in mid-September last year, according to the FEC filing.