Trump sets fraudster free from prison for a second time
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and SUSANNE CRAIG
In 2021, a convicted fraudster named Adriana Camberos was freed from prison when President Donald Trump commuted her sentence.
Rather than taking advantage of that second chance, prosecutors said, Camberos returned to crime. She and her brother were convicted in 2024 in an unrelated fraud.
Late last week, Trump pardoned both siblings, marking the second time Trump had opened the prison gates for Camberos.
Their pardons were among a handful of clemency grants quietly issued by Trump on Thursday and Friday.
Among the other lucky recipients: a man whose daughter had given millions to a Trump-backed super political action committee, a former governor of Puerto Rico and a former FBI agent — all of whom had pleaded guilty in a political corruption case.
The pardons, most of which have not been previously reported, were supported by people with close ties to Trump’s orbit, including lawyers who had worked for him.
They continue a trend in which Trump has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to reward allies and those who have paid his associates or donated to his political operation. The approach stands in contrast to Justice Department guidelines that prioritize the clemency applications of people who have completed their prison sentences or demonstrated remorse and a lower likelihood of recidivism.
The pardons, several of which forgave white-collar crimes and frauds by affluent perpetrators, strike a discordant note with the Trump administration’s announcement that it was suspending federal funding for programs intended to serve poor people in Minnesota in order to root out fraud.
A White House official justified the clemency grants in a statement as rectifying excessive sentences or prosecutions that were politically motivated to target Trump supporters. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the clemency grants on the record, suggested that Trump made the clemency decisions based on the merits, not whether the recipients had political connections or had made donations to groups he supports.
Three of the recipients were scheduled to be sentenced this month in a political corruption case related to accusations that former Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico had accepted bribes from Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan Italian banker, in 2020.
In late 2024, while Herrera was facing felony bribery and other charges in the case, his daughter, Isabela Herrera, donated $2.5 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Trump and run by his allies.
In May, her father’s lawyer, Christopher Kise, who had served on Trump’s legal defense team, negotiated an unusually lenient deal with the Justice Department. Under the deal, which was authorized by a top Trump appointee, Julio Herrera agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor campaign finance charge, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for a harsher sentence.
In July, Isabela Herrera donated another $1 million to MAGA Inc. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump this week pardoned Julio Herrera, Vázquez and Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent who had worked as a consultant for Herrera. All three had pleaded guilty in August to misdemeanor campaign finance charges.
The White House official denied that Isabela Herrera’s donations had played any role in her father’s pardon. Instead, the official suggested that pardon and the others related to the Puerto Rico case were motivated by a belief that the investigation into the matter was retribution for Vázquez’s endorsement of Trump in 2020.
Julio Herrera “is profoundly grateful” to Trump, Kise said in a statement.
Lawyers for Vázquez and Rossini did not respond to requests for comment.
As for Camberos, she was among a number of people granted clemency by Trump who have been charged with new crimes after receiving a second chance.
Camberos began serving a 26-month prison sentence in December 2019 for her role in a scheme to sell millions of counterfeit bottles of the caffeinated drink 5-Hour Energy. Trump commuted her sentence in the final days of his first term after she enlisted two lawyers with connections in his orbit. One of them, Stefan Passantino, had been a deputy White House counsel in the first Trump administration. Another, Adam Katz, represented Rudy Giuliani in a defamation case related to his effort to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
But soon after her release from prison, she and her brother Andres embarked on a new fraud, federal prosecutors in California said. The siblings were charged in 2023 in a complicated scheme: They bought consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount, purportedly to sell them in Mexico — a legal practice. Instead, prosecutors said, the siblings sold the goods in the United States at higher prices and then committed bank and mail fraud to cover their tracks.
They were convicted in 2024. In April, Camberos was sentenced to more than one year in prison — 12 months for the new conviction and additional months for violating her probation on her earlier conviction — and Andres Camberos was given one year of home confinement. Adriana Camberos had begun serving her sentence.
They were ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution to the companies they defrauded.
The White House official did not respond to a question about whether the pardon would wipe away the Camberos siblings’ restitution payments, but pardons typically erase financial penalties.
The siblings’ supporters had argued privately that they were targeted by prosecutors because Trump had wiped away Camberos’ sentence from her earlier conviction — a claim echoed by the White House official.
Passantino and Katz had worked to secure pardons for the siblings, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
The two lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Marcus Bourassa, another lawyer for Camberos, said in a statement that his client was wrongfully convicted and is grateful to the president and others for their support.
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