Louisiana rapper Boosie Badazz paid two Washington lobbyists $600,000 to get him a Trump pardon. The lobbyists told him Trump had already signed it. The White House told his lawyer it had never heard of him. Now Boosie wants $300,000 back, and the lobbyists say that was never part of the deal.
Half a Million Dollars and a Story About Speed Dial
Here's the thing about the Trump pardon economy: it runs entirely on vibes and access cosplay. You pay someone who claims to know someone who can get a message to someone who might put a piece of paper in front of the president. Then you wait. Then nothing happens. Then you find out via your own lawyer calling the White House directly that your $600,000 apparently bought you nothing but a very confident pitch.
Boosie, whose legal name is Torence Hatch, hired the firm JM Burkman & Associates in 2025 to lobby for a presidential pardon connected to a 2023 federal weapons charge, according to reporting by Notus, which covers the federal government. He pleaded guilty to possessing a loaded firearm as a convicted felon after police spotted him during a traffic stop connected to an Instagram Live shoot in San Diego. The plea got him supervised release, community service, and a $50,000 fine. The pardon was supposed to wipe it away.
Instead, he reportedly got a string of updates from the lobbyists claiming Trump had signed the paperwork and they were just waiting on the White House announcement. When his attorney went directly to the White House, per Notus, the response was essentially: we have no idea what you're talking about.
Meet the Lobbyists
Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are not exactly the buttoned-up, gray-suited Washington fixers you might picture when you hear the phrase "federal lobbying firm." These are men with a history. A colorful, legally eventful, aggressively embarrassing history.
In 2022, both pleaded guilty in Ohio for running an illegal robocall campaign that targeted Black voters, according to the Guardian. They later settled, paying $1.25 million to New York authorities and $5 million to the FCC. They've also been connected to attempts to manufacture sexual harassment allegations against Pete Buttigieg and the late Robert Mueller, neither of which went anywhere. At one point they convinced the Washington Post to run a story about a fake FBI raid on Burkman's home.
These are the guys Boosie paid $600,000 to get him a meeting with the most powerful person on earth. And when he first called them, per Notus, Boosie said they were "real aggressive, they were talking like they had Trump on speed dial." Of course they were.
The Part Where the Lobbying Gets Creative
So what did $600,000 actually buy? According to Burkman, it bought "a massive, highly tailored advocacy campaign across Congress, the executive branch and leading political influencers and media figures." The Guardian reports the firm's efforts included lobbying Trump ally Laura Loomer to ask Natalie Harp, the president's executive assistant, to bring the application to Trump's attention.
Wohl was also quoted by Notus as saying Loomer "is the person for the Jewish guys," which is a sentence that exists in a published news article about a pardon campaign for a Black rapper from Baton Rouge, and we are all just going to sit with that for a moment.
Federal lobbying records confirm the firm registered to contact the White House, the Justice Department, and Congress. Whether any of those contacts accomplished anything remains, to put it generously, unclear.
The Refund Fight No One Planned For
Hatch is now pursuing the matter through arbitration, seeking back half of that $600,000 fee. The firm's position, according to the Guardian, is that "no provision to return half the fee was ever actually agreed to." The firm also reportedly told Hatch's attorneys that they were effectively bankrupt, which is a very specific kind of answer to give someone asking for their money back.
Other lawyers and pardon advocates who spoke to Notus said a refund clause is highly unusual in this business, which tells you everything you need to know about the structural incentives of the clemency economy. You pay upfront. You get whatever you get. The access merchants keep the cash either way.
Burkman, to his credit, still publicly believes his client deserves clemency. "We continue to believe that Boosie very much deserves a pardon," the firm said in a statement. Great. Very helpful. Send it to the White House, which apparently hasn't heard of him.
The Bigger Picture Is Genuinely Disturbing
Boosie's situation is not an isolated scam. It's a symptom of something much larger. The Guardian notes that millions of dollars have flowed to lobbyists, lawyers, and pardon advocates throughout Trump's second term, all of them offering some version of access to a president who has made clemency a signature tool of political loyalty and personal whim.
Trump has handed out pardons en masse to January 6th participants, political allies, and people whose cases caught his attention through the right media channels. The result is a shadow system where desperate people with federal convictions and real money are funneling cash to whoever claims to have the right contacts, with zero consumer protection and apparently zero accountability.
A separate but related case surfaced in March, per the Guardian, when New York lawyer and lobbyist Joshua Nass was charged with attempting to extort money from a former client over an alleged $500,000 debt connected to a presidential pardon for a nursing home operator convicted of fraud. Burkman was involved in that case too. This ecosystem is exactly as chaotic and predatory as it sounds.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what happened here. A rapper with a federal weapons conviction paid $600,000 to two men who once ran illegal robocalls targeting Black voters, in order to access a pardon system that the president of the United States runs like a personal favor exchange with no formal process, no transparency, and no oversight. The lobbyists told him the pardon was done. It wasn't. Now they say they never promised a refund. The whole thing is legal, and that is the most disturbing sentence in this article.
The clemency economy is not a glitch in the Trump administration. It is a feature. When the president can pardon anyone for any reason at any time, and when he has made abundantly clear that loyalty and attention are the currencies that matter, you get an entire predatory industry built to simulate access. Some of those people probably have real connections. Some are Wohl and Burkman. The person writing the check has no way to tell the difference until it's too late.
Boosie got taken for $600,000 by guys who fooled the Washington Post with a fake FBI raid and paid millions in fines for targeting Black voters with disinformation. He is not the villain of this story. He's just the most recent person to learn the hard way that in Trump's Washington, "we have Trump on speed dial" is the equivalent of a Nigerian prince email, and the pardon is always in the mail.
