White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said President Donald Trump doesn't know alleged pardon brokers after a recent "60 Minutes" report aired on Sunday.
Page A7From§Eachthe late evening edition — 14 September 2026
Pardon brokers named on '60 Minutes' get a White House shrug and a campaign promise to investigate later.
As it ran on the front
Let's be reasonable. The White House spokesperson, Lauren Bis, said Sunday that President Trump does not know the pardon brokers a '60 Minutes' investigation just named, and there is no reason to complicate a clean, simple denial. A market for pardons is a serious allegation, and an allegation is just words until someone can point to a name, a price, a person cutting the check. Sunday night, '60 Minutes' pointed. The White House's answer is that the President has never heard of the people whose names were just broadcast to a national audience, about a market built entirely around access to him. That is the defense. It is not a complicated one.
And it holds up, as far as it goes. A president cannot personally interview every person who claims to speak for him. It would be unreasonable to expect Trump to have sat down with every broker allegedly running a pardon operation in his name — although if that is true, if people are selling access to the Oval Office using his name and he genuinely never met with any of them, then somebody else was taking the meetings. That is not a defense against the allegation. That is the allegation, restated as an alibi.…
…(cont) Meanwhile — no. Not meanwhile. That is the wrong word for something that happened the same week, about the same report. Democratic lawmakers watched the same '60 Minutes' segment and made a promise of their own: if the party controls Congress, they will investigate the market the report named. Not this Congress. Not this year. A commitment to look into it exactly as soon as somebody wins an election for the privilege.
So set the two responses down next to each other, because that is the whole story now. A market for pardons gets named on national television with video. The White House's answer is that the man it is built around has never heard of it. The opposition's answer is that they will find out, conditionally, later, pending a majority they do not currently have. Neither one is an investigation happening now. One is an alibi. The other is a promise with an election attached to it.
I was going to write that the denial settles this. It does not settle this. It is the reason the promise had to be made at all.
“They didn't really deny anything — the man doesn't need to know a broker's name to know the market exists around him. Democrats saw the same segment and made the safest promise in politics: they'll look into it once they win, which lands on nobody's calendar but a fundraising email. This isn't about one broker's name; it's about who gets a pardon and who gets a public defender.”
“Look, the President cannot be expected to personally vet every person claiming access to him — that's just scale, that's the job. He's never sat down with these brokers, never taken a meeting, so there's simply no connection to— well, if he never met them and they're operating in his name anyway, someone was clearly running that operation without him noticing, which, hang on, is not actually the reassurance I meant to give.”
The receipts
Senior Democratic lawmakers vowed to investigate the new market that has sprung up around President Trump's pardons, citing CBS News video that aired in a 60 Minutes report.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.