Headline of the Day

New York Lawyer Linked to Trump Pardon Charged with Attempted Extortion

—The Guardian, noting that lawyer and lobbyist Joshua Nass.

Not a surprise.  

Trump's pardons are ineluctably corrupt, and the people lobbying him for those pardons are corrupt as well.

A New York lobbyist and attorney connected to a presidential pardon issued by Donald Trump in November has been charged with attempting to extort money from a former client and the client’s son over an alleged $500,000 debt.

Joshua Nass, 34, was arrested on Friday after being charged in federal court in Brooklyn with attempted Hobbs Act extortion. US justice department prosecutors contend that Nass threatened a client for payment that he claimed he was owed for his services.

Nass is alleged to have provided an unnamed individual with a phone number as well as addresses while instructing the individual to visit the client at his home. It was an effort to intimidate the client into paying up, as prosecutors put it.

According to prosecutors, Nass told the individual in question to “do anything and everything” to force to the payment, including “physically assaulting” the client’s son or “forcing him into a car with masked men and threatening him to make someone in [the son’s] family pay Nass”.

………

Nass had a role in Trump’s 14 November 2025 pardon of Joseph Schwartz, who had been convicted in Arkansas over his ownership of a nursing-home empire that had failed to pay nearly $40m in employment and payroll taxes – and had been charged with Medicaid fraud.

Neither Schwartz nor his son are mentioned in the government’s press release.

But Nass conspicuously reported in a public filing that he was paid $100,000 toward the end of 2025 “for advocacy concerning executive clemency and post-conviction relief, including federal presidential pardon advocacy and subsequent efforts to obtain expedited parole and state-level relief in Arkansas”.

Separately, in documents pertaining to the extortion case against the attorney, prosecutors allege that the son of Nass’s client facilitated a $100,000 payment out of $600,000 owed for lobbying services.

Trump is selling pardons.  According to the Supreme Court, this is legal.