Trump Pardons Puerto Rico’s Ex-Governor Just as the Case Against Her Heats Up

For a brief moment this week, it looked as if federal prosecutors were about to yank away the plea deal they’d extended to corrupt former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, who faced years in prison for bribery.

Prosecutors told a federal judge they were appalled that, since the plea deal, Vázquez Garced shrugged off all responsibility, blamed her advisers and told reporters “none of that happened,” despite the mountain of evidence that documented how billionaire Italian-Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini deployed his riches to help the gubernatorial candidate on the condition she’d replace a bank regulator who worried him.

The sudden aggressive turn from federal prosecutors seemed odd, given that the case was already on a path toward fading away ever since President Donald Trump’s one-time personal defense lawyer, Chris Kise, got involved last year on the banker’s behalf. Further helping Vázquez Garced, according to sources familiar with the investigation who spoke to NOTUS on condition of anonymity, Kise initiated pressure from DOJ brass on line prosecutors. One of them, a member of the DOJ’s severely shrunken public integrity unit, recently quit the department.

But on Friday, Trump blew up the case entirely by deciding to pardon her and the banker and a disgraced former FBI agent who played middleman to the entire affair.

A White House official, speaking on background, justified the intervention, arguing the case was another anti-MAGA “political prosecution” and that the investigation into Vázquez Garced began 10 days after she endorsed Trump in 2020.

Rep. Pablo José Hernández, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner and a non-voting member of the House of Representatives, slammed the pardon in a statement.

“Impunity protects and fosters corruption. The pardon granted to former Governor Wanda Vázquez undermines public integrity, shatters faith in justice, and offends those of us who believe in honest governance,” he said.

Several former prosecutors familiar with the case told NOTUS that it is among the most glaring examples of how the DOJ now operates, handing out favorable treatment for well-connected and well-heeled donors who employ the cadre of Trump’s personal lawyers who defended him from civil and criminal cases during his four years out of office. Additionally, Herrera Velutini’s daughter donated $2.5 million to a Trump super PAC nearly two months after the 2024 presidential election.

One person familiar with these arrangements, speaking to NOTUS on condition of anonymity, noted that leveraging those connections has become a lucrative channel that continues to pay dividends — largely because former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, who worked alongside many of these attorneys, remains second-in-command at the DOJ as deputy attorney general.

The criminal case in Puerto Rico was on track to be the most high-profile corruption takedown in the island’s history.

In charging documents and subsequent court records, prosecutors pointed to interviews and recordings to lay out how Herrera Velutini privately texted associates about his displeasure at the way George Joyner, the top official at the island’s banking regulator, OFIC, was cracking down on his international operations. For years, the office of the commissioner of financial institutions had found that Herrera Velutini’s Bancrédito International Bank had failed to properly file “suspicious activity reports” as required after the post-9/11 crackdown on illicit financing.

A 2019 examination found dozens of instances where Bancrédito should have filed a required report, including several where a top executive was personally involved in the transaction. (NOTUS last month filed a public records request for more details but was denied access to any of the records on Tuesday.)

Investigators documented how Herrera Velutini hired Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent-turned-contractor, to influence the gubernatorial candidate — using his status as an American citizen to avoid raising red flags about any attempt to inject money into her political campaign. Rossini, a former supervisor at the law enforcement bureau who spent 17 years there, was criminally sentenced to a year of probation in 2009 after he was discovered accessing FBI databases for “personal purposes.”

Federal prosecutors laid out how Herrera Velutini broke laws against foreign influence in American politics by using his exclusive investment company, Britannia Global Investments, to fund Vázquez Garced’s primary campaign by hiring political consultants at the global firm CT Group to conduct opinion research — and creating the Prosperity Through Leadership PAC. The objective, documented by investigators who pointed to extensive seized text message conversations, was to engage in a quid pro quo by which the banker would support Vázquez Garced on the condition that she’d replace the banking regulator.

The banking regulator eventually lost his job, and the DOJ under then-President Joe Biden filed its grand jury indictment in 2022. The case chugged along, with the judge rejecting attempts to dismiss the charges. In August 2024, Kise — then Trump’s personal lawyer — appeared in court papers representing Herrera Velutini. On the last day of that year, his daughter, Isabela Herrera, who had previously only donated $20 to the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue earmarked for Pete Buttigieg, shelled out $2.5 million to MAGA Inc. — suddenly becoming the pro-Trump super PAC’s second-highest donor that cycle.

The case went sideways in June 2025, when Trump’s DOJ cut a deal with the defendants, prompting the judge overseeing the case to complain about how she remained “in the dark as to the specifics of the agreement.”

Vázquez Garced, Herrera Velutini and Rossini — who initially faced conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud charges — were now simply accused of “contribution by a foreign national.”

U.S. District Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll decried what she described as “the government’s decision to shift gears at the eleventh hour.” Last-minute disagreements led prosecutors to assert that they had a strong felony case but were deciding to opt for a misdemeanor plea anyway.

The case remained on ice for months until things heated up in recent weeks, with prosecutors ripping the former governor over the way she “continues to display a reckless disregard for the truth.”

On just this past Tuesday, the Puerto Rico U.S. Attorney’s Office public corruption section chief, Seth Erbe, pointed out to the judge that Vázquez Garced should have known better than to allow foreign money to taint the gubernatorial elections with an influence campaign — after all, she’s an experienced lawyer who was a district attorney for two decades and was once Puerto Rico’s secretary of justice, equivalent to a state attorney general, as the island’s chief legal officer.

“If Vazquez-Garced breaches the plea agreement,” he warned, “the United States could pursue a bribery conviction at trial.”

The former governor quickly responded that she had indeed admitted that there was an illegal deal in place with the banker, but with a caveat.

“The stipulation quantifies the promise, not actual contributions received,” her lawyers wrote.

By Friday, none of that mattered. Pardons were underway.