President Donald Trump is considering a pardon for Pras Michel, the hip-hop legend facing 22 years in prison in a federal conspiracy and corruption case, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
The U.S. Justice Department prosecuted Michel — the Grammy-winning rapper-producer best known as a member of The Fugees — for his part in a multi-billion-dollar, globe-spanning scandal that the FBI deemed the “largest kleptocracy case to date.” The saga has brought down the Malaysian prime minister, a top Goldman Sachs banker and a key first-term Trump fundraiser. It’s also ensnared other high-profile Hollywood players, including Leonardo DiCaprio, who’d become close to the saga’s alleged criminal mastermind.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. Michel declined to speak about the matter. In a statement his publicist Erica Dumas tells THR that his legal team “is exploring all available options following his case,” adding, “we remain optimistic about potential paths forward.” Michel has recently pursued his appeal process in part by arguing the incompetence of his trial attorney, who garnered headlines for bungling closing arguments through misuse of an artificial intelligence program.
The lawyer handling Michel’s clemency request is Adam Katz, who has represented Rudy Guiliani in litigation arising from the former New York City mayor turned Trump consigliere’s own legal effort to thwart the 2020 presidential election. In recent years Katz also assisted in Trump ally Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress case for refusing to testify to the Jan. 6 committee. During the first Trump administration Katz was able to secure a commutation for a Southern California businesswoman who’d been sentenced to 26 months in federal prison for fraud after her brother made his first federal political donation to a Republican — $50,000, to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. (The siblings have since been convicted of another fraud.)
Trump — who on Jan. 29 filed his intent to appeal the 2025 felony conviction at his campaign hush money trial — has a history with Michel. In 1998, the president, then still an Empire State personality, made a cameo on Michel’s debut solo studio album Ghetto Supastar. In a voicemail played during one interlude, Trump says, “I have no doubt that you’re going to be a big success,” adding, “I hope very soon you’re going to be in the leagues with me.”
The possible pardon comes after Corey Amundson, the head of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit which prosecuted Michel, quit on Jan. 27. The Trump administration had tried to reassign Amundson in apparent retaliation for his involvement in a pair of criminal investigations into Trump’s retention of classified records after completing his first term and the president’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election.
Michel, 52, who has made documentaries about L.A.’s homelessness crisis (Skid Row) and Haiti’s woes (Sweet Micky for President), is currently awaiting sentencing in his case, for which he was found guilty of 10 counts, including witness tampering, conspiracy and failure to register as an agent of China. The trial hinged on his association with the fugitive businessman Jho Low, who’s accused of defrauding a Malaysian state sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB.
The free-spending, club-hopping financier first met the well-connected celebrity in the mid-2000s. Later, the U.S. government, which charged Michel under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, argued that he’d worked on Low’s behalf as a go-between, money launderer and political fixer. This included efforts to end a long-running Justice Department investigation into Low’s purported financial misdeeds. Plus, notably, assisting China, a Low ally and protector, in its attempt to extradite U.S.-residing Guo Wengui, a government critic and billionaire who has partnered with Bannon on ventures critical of the Communist Party. (Guo has since himself been convicted in America of a separate large-scale fraud.)
“I like spy movies, but I never wanted to be a spy,” Michel told Variety in November, while acknowledging that “technically, I’m a foreign agent.”
Michel, a New Jersey native, has insisted he always acted in America’s interest. There’s no disputing that his interactions with a high-level Communist Party official led to the release of a pregnant American citizen who’d been held by the Chinese government as a bargaining chip to force her U.S.-based mother, accused by Beijing of embezzlement, to return to the country. “That should be commended,” says Joel Denaro, one of Michel’s attorneys. “He did his country a great service.”
Michel isn’t the only prominent entertainment figure to have been caught up in what’s become known as the 1MDB scandal. Jamie Foxx, Kim Kardashian, Fergie, Paris Hilton and Pharrell Williams reportedly benefited in different ways from celebrity-fixated Low’s ill-gotten largesse. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose The Wolf of Wall Street was financed with some of the swindled funds, cooperated with the Justice Department’s investigation, then handed over Low’s gifts, including Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront Oscar and a first edition of The Great Gatsby. (He was later a star witness for the prosecution at Michel’s April 2023 trial.) Likewise, the model and actress Miranda Kerr gave up millions of dollars in gifted jewelry. Meanwhile, the music producer Swizz Beatz was recently sued for receiving stolen money via Low.
Other individuals who worked to influence Trump and his Justice Department on Low’s behalf aren’t looking at decades in federal lockup. The top Trump donor and former Republican National Committee deputy finance chair Elliot Broidy, who pled guilty to “back-channel lobbying” and acting as an unregistered foreign agent, was pardoned by the president at the end of his first term in 2021. A federal judge ruled that Republican megadonor Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino magnate with significant business interests in the Chinese gambling mecca Macao, didn’t even have to register as a foreign agent for his lobbying on the Guo matter.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA, was enacted in 1938 to combat domestic political subversion by foreign adversaries amid rising Nazism. It’s rarely been enforced, and its definitional boundaries have long been debated among legal experts. However, over the past decade prosecutors have increasingly utilized it as a tool against perceived geopolitical threats, particularly from Russia and China. In January the white-shoe law firm Cravath, Swain & Moore retroactively registered under FARA for its work with a Hunter Biden-linked Ukrainian company in the scandal that had weeks earlier led outgoing President Joe Biden to pardon his son.
“It’s a broad law,” explains attorney Matthew T. Sanderson, who defends clients in FARA-related inquiries. He says that historically FARA is deployed to counter those considered hostile to U.S. interests, like domestic supporters of the Irish Republican Army in the 1980s. Which may be why Michel’s connection to the Chinese government moved the Justice Department to prosecute as it did: “The involvement of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in this case suggests why.”
Paul Pelletier, who spent decades as a Justice Department prosecutor, believes Michel was an especially enticing target. “The Feds love to go after celebrities because they get press,” he says, “and Pras was the ant on the elephant of Jho Low.” Perhaps more importantly, Michel refused to cooperate. “He told the government to fuck off. The government doesn’t like that.”
Michel’s lawyer Denaro contends the predicament is simple: “I think he’s in the legal problem that he’s in because he exercised his right to go to trial — and he lost.”
Now Trump, the fellow convict, may grant Michel his freedom.
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