Correspondent Lesley Stahl launched the 59th season of “60 Minutes” with a hidden-camera investigation into the lawyers and lobbyists who promise convicted felons a pardon from President Donald Trump. The premiere aired Sunday, September 13, 2026, and Stahl put what the cameras caught to the man who ran the federal pardon office until last month.
Shachar Bar-On and Michael Kaplan produced the segment, titled “The Pardon Economy.” Brokers charge between $300,000 and $3 million to press a client’s case with the president, Stahl, 84, reported, and nothing they do is illegal. None of them would agree to an interview.
Inside the Hidden-Camera Sting
Ammon Covino, who runs zoos and aquariums, served 23 months after a 2013 conviction for illegal wildlife trafficking. He tried the conventional route first, filling out the Justice Department’s three-page application, and was rejected. Next he emailed a dozen brokers. Within seven minutes, lobbyists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl — whom Stahl described as self-styled pardon brokers — wrote back.
“60 Minutes” cameras rolled as Covino and his wife, Crystal Covino, sat down with the pair in a Virginia hotel lounge. The pair quoted $300,000, a figure that covered contractors, introductions to MAGA influencers and tickets to Mar-a-Lago events priced at up to $10,000 each. “I kept saying ‘This feels illegal,'” Covino told Stahl.
Burkman, on the recording, laid out a pressure campaign designed to wear the president down until he signed. A 2020 robocall operation aimed at suppressing Black votes left both men criminally convicted. The owner of a nursing home chain convicted of massive tax fraud won clemency through their work, the two men claim, and they say he paid them nearly $1 million for it.
The Rapper Who Says He Paid $600,000
Rapper Boosie Badazz said he handed the pair $600,000 up front and never got a pardon. “This is what I was led to believe: If you come with this money, you will get a pardon,” he told Stahl. His contract allowed him to request half the money back if no pardon materialized; Burkman and Wohl say he never signed it. Asking for it got him nowhere. “Just return it. You didn’t give me my pardon,” he recalled telling them. “It’s a bunch of BS. And they were so cocky.”
A text message he showed Stahl had the pair claiming to be recruiting people in Trump’s orbit: Erika Kirk, whose name was misspelled in the message, Laura Loomer, House Speaker Mike Johnson and presidential executive assistant Natalie Harp. All four denied any involvement.
Wohl, confronted by “60 Minutes,” said: “There’s nothing corrupt about it. There’s nothing improper about it.” Stahl put it to them plainly: “It seems that you have to have money to get a pardon these days.” Burkman answered: “We don’t work for free any more than you do, right? You’re well-paid for what you do. We’re well-paid for what I do.”
Stahl Presses the Pardon Attorney
Ed Martin, 56, took over the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney in May 2025. Trump announced his departure on August 24, saying Martin was leaving to work on legal battles in the coming elections; the department’s weaponization working group had also been under Martin’s direction. On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 January 6 defendants, and a few hundred more grants have been added to the department’s public clemency list since.
Stahl walked Martin through a series of cases. Electric vehicle company founder Trevor Milton had donated $2 million to Trump’s re-election campaign; the founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange received his pardon after he helped the Trump family move into cryptocurrency; and healthcare executive Paul Walczak, who pleaded guilty to tax crimes, saw his clemency follow his mother’s $1 million payment for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser.
“A pardon seeker going to Mar-a-Lago and joining in a fundraising event where you had to pay money and then getting a pardon, why isn’t that a quid pro quo?” Stahl asked Martin. “Why isn’t that pay to play?”
“I don’t know about those examples, but I would just say the prerogative, again the presidential prerogative, that it’s in the Constitution. It’s complete. It’s plenary,” Martin replied. He continued: “When people say, ‘It’s brokers, there’s quid pro quo,’ I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen it, haven’t heard it.”
“Ed, the point is they’re going around you. And they’re bragging about going around you,” Stahl said. “I just don’t see any evidence of some magical brokers. I think people are trying to make money,” Martin said. “So are you saying that these brokers, they’re con men?” Stahl asked. “They’re snake oil salesmen, they’re swamp salesmen. What word do you want?” Martin answered.
A White House statement, which Stahl read to close the piece, said: “Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money. President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner, and to suggest so otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious.”
A Premiere Under New Management
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss now oversees the broadcast, named in October 2025 when Paramount, under chief executive David Ellison, bought her outlet The Free Press. Correspondents Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley left the program, while Anderson Cooper announced his own exit and is staying at CNN. Nick Bilton, a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker with no previous television news experience, now runs the broadcast, having replaced Tanya Simon in May.
In July 2025, Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris; CBS News President Wendy McMahon resigned during that dispute. The rest of the premiere didn’t touch the show’s off-season upheaval: Norah O’Donnell interviewed the U.S. Air Force officer whose F-15E was shot down over Iran and who spent two days on the ground before rescue, and Jon Wertheim reported on the Los Angeles Rams and coach Sean McVay.