Trump Promises Pardons for Journalists Who Expose Fraud in Democrat States

President Trump made it crystal clear Tuesday that he’s willing to use his pardon power to protect journalists who expose government fraud from prosecution by future Democrat administrations. When The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan asked whether a Democrat president might go after reporters who uncovered fraud in blue states, Trump didn’t hesitate. “Sure. We have the power of pardon,” he said. “If I have to use it to protect people like Nick, I’d use it very openly, very gladly.”

The Nick he’s talking about is Nick Shirley, the 24-year-old YouTuber from Utah who basically ended Tim Walz’s political career with a single video. Shirley walked through Minneapolis with a camera and found daycare centers that looked about as operational as a ghost town, yet they were somehow collecting millions in taxpayer dollars. His 42-minute investigation went viral in December 2025, and the dominoes started falling fast.

Health and Human Services froze Minnesota’s childcare payments. Walz dropped out of his reelection race. Federal agents raided more than 20 locations in the Twin Cities by April. One daycare owner, Fahima Mahamud, got hit with wire fraud and conspiracy charges in May and pleaded guilty two months later. Shirley celebrated the governor’s exit on X with characteristic subtlety: “ENDED TIM WALZ.”

Now here’s where things get darker. Shirley says he’s received death threats warning he’ll be “Kirked,” which is a reference to Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September. His family gets harassing calls. People post his location online while he travels. One threat even named a specific date. The kid now travels with security and has asked his supporters to help cover the costs. You know what? That’s the America we’re living in right now, where a journalist doing basic accountability work needs bodyguards.

Trump’s promise has its limits, obviously. Presidential pardons only work for federal offenses and only cover past conduct, not future crimes or state charges. But the gesture matters. The president gave Shirley a hero’s welcome at the White House, telling him, “I’d give him a big hug today,” before adding it was “too bad that you had to ruin your youth to find that such bad people exist, but welcome to the world.”

The Minnesota scandal goes deeper than empty daycares. A House Oversight Committee report alleged that Walz’s administration threatened state employees who tried to flag the fraud. Whistleblowers claimed the state spent millions on private investigators and law firms to intimidate them into silence. Most of the 30 whistleblowers the committee interviewed were state employees, and many were Democrats themselves. That detail matters because this isn’t some partisan witch hunt when people from your own party are calling you out.

Vice President JD Vance referred allegations against Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison to the Justice Department in June. Predictably, Walz’s people dismissed the whole thing. His spokesman called the committee “a joke,” and Ellison’s spokesman said the report was inaccurate and politicized. Classic playbook stuff.

Shirley hasn’t been controversy-free himself. Back in February, he responded to a post promoting another YouTuber’s antisemitic video about New Jersey with “EXPOSE IT ALL.” That’s the kind of misstep that reminds you these new media figures are still learning as they go, sometimes stumbling badly.

There’s a delicious irony here that can’t be ignored. Trump’s talking about preemptive pardons while Joe Biden spent his final days in office handing them out like Halloween candy. Biden pardoned General Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of the January 6 committee before he left. The same Democrats who screamed about the rule of law suddenly found preemptive pardons perfectly acceptable when their people needed protection.

What Trump’s doing is sending a message to citizen journalists and traditional reporters alike: if you dig up real fraud, real corruption, real waste in government programs, this administration has your back. That’s significant because state governments have enormous power to make life miserable for journalists through selective enforcement and politically motivated prosecutions. The threat is real, and Shirley’s death threats prove it.

The Minnesota daycare scandal represents everything broken about how we handle government programs. Millions flowing to facilities that don’t exist or barely operate. Officials who know about the fraud but look the other way or actively silence whistleblowers. A governor more concerned with protecting the grift than protecting taxpayers. And when someone finally exposes it all, they face death threats instead of appreciation.

Trump’s pledge won’t fix journalism’s deeper problems or make investigations risk-free. But it does something important. It tells people like Shirley that someone in power sees what they’re doing and values it enough to offer protection. In an environment where doing basic investigative work can get you killed, that’s not nothing.

Related: The Real Scandal at CBS News Isn’t What Bari Weiss Asked but Who’s Complaining About It