For some time, it appeared Elizabeth Holmes was all over the place.
Peering wide-eyed and black-turtlenecked from a shelf load of journal covers. Honored as a “Woman of the Year” by Glamour. Touted as one in every of Time’s “100 Most Influential People.”
At age 30, Holmes was considered a preternatural enterprise expertise — and, extra impressively, described because the youngest self-made feminine billionaire in historical past — owing to her founding and stewardship of Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up that promised to revolutionize well being care by diagnosing a number of maladies with only a pinprick’s value of blood.
It was all a giant con job.
Her medical claims had been a sham. Theranos’ know-how was bogus. Even the husky TED-talking voice Holmes used to take a position herself with higher seriousness and authority was a put-on. (The turtlenecks had been an austere affectation she cribbed from Steve Jobs.)
In January 2022, a jury in San Jose convicted Holmes on 4 counts of fraud and conspiracy. At age 37, she turned a case research in gullibility and greed. Months later, Holmes — by then a mom of two — was sentenced to 11 years and three months in jail. She started serving her time period in Might 2023, at a ladies’s jail camp outdoors Houston.
Now, Holmes — who spawned a best-selling guide, podcasts, a documentary, a TV miniseries and, not by the way, stole a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from traders — is lobbying for a pardon from President Trump.
And why not?
Sport is aware of sport. Grift is aware of grift.
Presidential whim
Of all of the powers a president wields, few match his superior pardon authority.
It’s sweeping and life-changing. Idiosyncratic, resting wholly on private whim, and irrevocable. As soon as granted, it’s not possible to reverse.
The facility to pardon can be, like all grant of authority, topic to mismanagement and abuse.
Nearly each president “has issued his share of controversial pardons and more than that, perhaps, pardons that just were in terrible taste, that violated all sense of reason and propriety,” stated Larry Gerston, a San Jose State political science professor emeritus and longtime pupil of Silicon Valley.
Extra being Trump’s signature, the president has, true to kind, taken his pardon energy to indecent and unholy extremes.
As quickly as he settled again into the Oval Workplace, Trump pardoned greater than 1,500 felony defendants tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, together with some who beat and pepper-sprayed legislation enforcement officers.
Different malefactors he’s let off the hook embrace Changpeng Zhao, the money-laundering former CEO of Binance, which has ties to the Trump household’s cryptocurrency enterprise; disgraced former congressman and embezzler George Santos; and Illinois’ politically corrupt former governor, Rod Blagojevich.
Simply final week, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker who, in line with prosecutors, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the USA. This on the similar time the U.S. army ramps up its presence in Latin America and blows boats out of the Caribbean in a professed struggle in opposition to drug smuggling within the area.
If you happen to can sq. these actions with Hernández’s pardon and never throw your again out within the course of you’re both extra pliable than most or willfully obtuse.
Or attempt reconciling Trump’s supposed tough-on-crime stance along with his pardon of crypto cult hero Ross Ulbricht.
Ulbricht, whom a decide described as “the kingpin of a worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise,” was sentenced in 2015 to life in jail for operating Silk Highway, a darkish internet market the place criminals used Bitcoin to conduct a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in illicit commerce.
Performing from behind bars, with assist from household and supporters, Ulbricht mounted a social media marketing campaign clamoring for his launch. Amongst those that took notice was Trump, who championed Ulbricht’s trigger in the course of the 2024 marketing campaign as a approach to woo libertarian-minded voters. A day after his inauguration, the president granted Ulbricht a full, unconditional pardon.
Apparently, Holmes additionally took notice.
Medical charlatans
From her minimal safety lockup, she’s begun mounting her personal social media blitz in a seeming try to win Trump’s favor and get sprung from jail and free of accountability for her epic swindle.
Holmes’ feed is a babbling stream of self-help epigrams, ankle-deep reflections and plenty of, many photographs of herself. “I gave my life to fighting for our basic human right to health information,” says the would-be Joan of Arc.
In fact, there may be additionally loads of Trump flattery together with paeans to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his cockamamie make-America-sick-again agenda, as one medical charlatan nods to a different.
Nowhere does Holmes supply the slightest expression of guilt or regret for her appreciable ill-gotten features. At one level, she even likens herself to a Holocaust survivor, displaying each staggeringly poor style and utter cluelessness.
All of which makes Holmes a really perfect candidate for a pardon from Trump, who’s turned self-dealing and victimization into an artwork kind. Possibly if Holmes is free of jail she will be able to discover a job someplace in his administration.
She’d match proper in.
Mark Z. Barabak is a columnist for the Los Angeles Instances. ©2025 Los Angeles Instances. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
