Christine

Trump just erased $80 million owed to one of the poorest Native American tribes in the country. Here’s the story nobody’s telling. Jason Galanis was a financier, the son of a man who’d already done federal time for fraud. In 2014 he ran one of the most cynical schemes imaginable. He targeted the Wakpamni Lake Community Corporation, the economic development arm of a community within the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest places in the United States. The bonds he engineered were supposed to fund what a place like that desperately needs: jobs, development, a future. Instead, prosecutors said, Galanis and his co-conspirators issued more than $60 million in worthless tribal bonds through lies, sold them to investors, and pocketed the proceeds, spending the money on personal luxuries including jewelry instead of reinvesting it as promised. They looted a development fund meant for a tribe that could least afford to lose it. Galanis himself testified his companies were “entrusted with $11 billion of union members’ pension fund money whose trust I betrayed.” Galanis pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 16 years in federal prison, and ordered to pay more than $80 million in forfeiture and restitution to his victims, including the tribe Now the twist. One of his co-conspirators was Devon Archer. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Archer was Hunter Biden’s former business partner, who became a star witness for House Republicans investigating the Biden family. In March 2025, Trump fully pardoned Archer, wiping out his conviction. His own staff secretary admitted the “tone and tenor” of the case “changed dramatically” after Archer began cooperating against the Bidens. Days later, quietly, with no announcement, Trump commuted Galanis’s sentence too, to time served, with “no further fines, restitution, probation, or other conditions.” Read that last part again. Trump didn’t just let Galanis out early. He erased the roughly $80 million in restitution owed to the Oglala Sioux and the other victims he defrauded. The tribe was supposed to be made whole for the rest of his life. That debt simply vanished. And it fits a pattern. A commutation used to just end a sentence. Trump uses clemency to wipe out debts owed to victims and taxpayers. California’s governor’s office tallied that his clemency grants have erased close to $2 billion in victim and taxpayer recovery across Medicare fraud, tax fraud, and cases like this. A man stole $60 million meant for one of the poorest Native communities in America, spent it on jewelry, got 16 years and $80 million in restitution. His co-conspirator became a witness against the Bidens. Both walked free within days of each other. The Oglala Sioux don’t get their money back. Galanis keeps what’s left of it.