In March 2026, social media users claimed U.S. President Donald Trump had pardoned a former nursing home owner at the center of a fraud scheme. (A pardon provides full forgiveness for a crime, relieving the pardoned person of associated legal consequences.)
A post on X (archived) claimed a fraud scheme involving Joseph Schwartz, the man Trump allegedly pardoned, totaled $39 million. According to the post, Trump issued the pardon three months into Schwartz's sentence.
Otherposts amplified the rumor, with one claiming Schwartz paid $1 million to "Trump lobbyists" before the pardon. Snopes readers searched the website seeking to confirm whether the claim was true.
The rumor stemmed from a ProPublica report published March 30, 2026. The news outlet reported that Trump had pardoned Schwartz in November 2025 after he pleaded guiltyto failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service taxes he withheld from his employees and failing to file a financial report for his employees' benefit plan.
Separately, following several lawsuits, courts ordered him to repay millions to the families of former nursing home residents, ProPublica reported. In 2023, Schwartz was ordered to pay $15.7 million to the family of Zelma Grissom, an 81-year-old Arkansas woman who died of sepsis after suffering untreated bedsores at one of his facilities, according to lawyer John Martell Landis, newsreports and an obituary. ProPublica said his pardon made it less likely for the families to recover the funds.
According to the ProPublica report, Trump granted the full pardon after Schwartz paid lobbyists nearly $1 million to advocate on his behalf to the White House, the Justice Department and Congress. The report did not say he or a member of his family had donated this amount directly to Trump.
Federal records confirm that Trump pardoned Schwartz, whose federal indictment accused him of a $39 million fraud scheme, on Nov. 14, 2025, after he served three months of his three-year prison sentence. A lobbying disclosure form also shows he spent nearly $1 million advocating for a presidential pardon before his release. Therefore, we've rated this claim true.
On April 17, 2025, a federal judge sentenced Schwartz, who owned Skyline Healthcare nursing homes, to 36 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to "willfully failing to pay over employment taxes withheld from employees of his company and willfully failing to file an annual financial report (Form 5500) with the Department of Labor for the employee 401K Benefit Plan Schwartz sponsored."
The publicly available lobbying disclosure form showed Schwartz paid two lobbyists, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, $960,000 during the second quarter of 2025 — presumably after his sentencing — to seek a federal pardon that Trump ultimately granted on Nov. 14, 2025, roughly three months after Schwartz reported to prison.
Skyline, which operated more than 100 nursing homes across 11 states, collapsed between 2017 and 2019. Many of the company's nursing homes shut down due to mismanagement. Some nursing homes ran out of money, while others shuttered due to documented neglect, NBC News reported.
Despite Trump's pardon, a judge ordered Schwartz in December 2025 to report to an Arkansas prison to serve out the remainder of his one-year state sentence for Medicaid fraud and tax evasion, according to the Arkansas Advocate. (Presidents cannot pardon people for state crimes.) However, he was granted parole less than a month later, news reportssaid.
For further reading, Snopes previously covered the story of Philip Esformes, a nursing home operator convicted of massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud in 2019 whose sentence Trump commuted in 2020.
