It is my Great Honor to have just signed Pardons for six people who were persecuted by the Biden Administration, and were in, or being sent to, prison, for "fixing their car." While I know this sounds ridiculous, it is nevertheless a fact, and part of the Weaponization and Stupidity that our Country had to endure during four long years of Sleepy Joe Biden. I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW! President DONALD J. TRUMP
3:24 PM · July 3, 2026 · archived post
They were not "fixing their car." They were defeating pollution controls, some on hundreds of vehicles.
The short version
The people he pardoned were convicted under the Clean Air Act for selling or installing "defeat devices," the parts and software that switch off a vehicle's emissions controls, and for tampering with the monitors that catch it. One did it to hundreds of vehicles; another case was about disabling controls on semi-trucks; several were businesses that sold the devices. That is not "fixing their car." And it was not a Biden vendetta: the Clean Air Act dates to 1970, defeat-device enforcement is bipartisan and long-running (Volkswagen paid billions for the same kind of violation), and Trump's own Justice Department has since moved to drop these cases. The "fixing their car" line is also the friendly headline on a batch of eleven pardons that quietly included a major Republican donor.
Take the actual convictions. Per CNN's account of the pardons, Jonathan Achtemeier was sentenced for tampering with the monitoring devices on hundreds of vehicles nationwide so they would not flag that pollution hardware had been stripped out. Matt Geouge was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act by selling defeat devices. Joshua Davis was under an EPA settlement that ordered him and several Illinois businesses to stop manufacturing and selling them. Ryan and Wade Lalone were sentenced over a scheme to disable the emissions controls on semi-trucks. These are deliberate, and in several cases commercial, acts to defeat federal pollution law, not a weekend spent under the hood.
"Persecuted by the Biden Administration" does not survive the calendar either. The Clean Air Act was signed in 1970, and the EPA and Justice Department have pursued defeat-device cases for years under presidents of both parties; the largest, Volkswagen's, brought billions of dollars in penalties for exactly this conduct, installing software to cheat emissions tests. If anything, the current pressure runs the other way: CNN reported that Trump's own Justice Department ordered prosecutors this year to drop criminal investigations and pending defeat-device cases. The "weaponization" he describes is the enforcement of a law that predates Biden by half a century.
And the count is worth keeping straight. He said six. His own White House list, per the Associated Press, had nine emissions pardons, inside a batch of eleven. The other two are the tell: one went to Adam Kidan, the former business partner of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to fraud and conspiracy over a fleet of gambling boats, has since given generously to Republicans, and in March co-hosted a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. "Fixing their car" is the sympathetic story on the outside of a pardon list that also let out a fraud-convicted party donor. It is the same move covered in our page on the pardons.
What "fixing their car" means. #
The conduct behind the phrase, from the cases themselves.
What is true here. #
There is a real argument in here, and it is worth stating plainly: some in the diesel and tuning world believe the penalties for emissions "deletes" have been heavy for small operators and enthusiasts, and reasonable people can debate whether prison is the right tool for it. The pardon power is also genuinely the president's to use, as our pardons page lays out.
But that debate is not what the post makes. "Fixing their car" and "persecuted by the Biden Administration" misdescribe both the conduct, deliberately defeating pollution controls, often as a business, at scale, and the history, a bipartisan 1970 law his own department is now declining to enforce. The honest version is "I think these emissions penalties were too harsh, so I pardoned them." Not "Biden jailed people for fixing their cars."
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This is one post in a running series that sets a recent Truth Social claim beside the record. The post text is reproduced verbatim from the archived original (posted 3:24 PM Eastern, July 3, 2026); the rendering above is ours, not a screenshot. Sourcing is CNN's and the Associated Press's reporting on the pardons, the EPA's record of Clean Air Act defeat-device enforcement, and the cases' own convictions, as of July 2026. The pardon power is the president's; the check is on how the post describes what he pardoned. Corrections welcome.