By Kennedy Maize
President Trump has given an unconditional pardon to convicted fraudster Trevor Milton of Nikola electric truck notoriety.
Milton, founder of the once high-flying electric truck company that is now bankrupt, was facing four years in prison following his 2022 federal jury conviction of one court of securities fraud and three counts of wire fraud. He was out of prison pending appeals. He was also fined $1 million.
The New York Times quoted Trump from the Oval Office on the pardon: “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for a president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump.”
Indeed, Milton liked Trump so much that, according to the Associated Press citing Federal Election Commission data, Milton and his wife “donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election.”
There’s another connection to the Trump administration. Milton’s lawyer is Brad Bondi of Washington’s Paul Hastings white shoe law firm, specializing in white collar securities defense. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because Brad’s sister is Pam Bondi, U.S. attorney general in the Trump administration.
Also on Milton’s legal team was Marc Mukasey, noted New York criminal defense attorney who defended Trump in the 2019 charity dispute over misuse of funds.
Milton told the Wall Street Journal in a video interview that Trump called him about a week before official pardon. According to Milton, Trump said, “I’ve got some news for you. I’m going to give you a full and unconditional pardon.” Milton said, without elaborating, that he got a second Trump call sometime later.
Milton walked away from a staggering Nikola in 2020, which once fooled investors with a fake 2016 demonstration of one of the company’s semi-tractors rolling along on a desert highway, including a 2018 YouTube video. It was smoke and mirrors. The company had acquired “gliders,” truck platforms without engines. Nikola had towed the engineless truck to the top of a hill, and it was rolling because of gravity.
Milton, 42, a former door-to-door salesman and college dropout, founded the company from his Utah basement in 2015 and took it public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) in 2020, raising over $3 billion. The SPAC was run by run by former General Motors vice-chairman Stephen Girsky. Girsky was chairman of the Nikola Board and became Nikola CEO after Milton left the company.
Nikola (it’s not coincidental that the chosen company name is also the first name of legendary electric pioneer Nikola Tesla, mimicking Elon Musk’s Tesla) over the years claimed it had lined up orders for a variety of electric-powered heavy trucks, including battery-powered models and the latest, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The initial offer was for a semi that would use natural gas to turn a turbine, generating electricity for an electric motor. That was followed by claims for a battery-electric truck and a hydrogen fuel cell electric power system.
In Milton’s fraud trial, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said, “Trevor Milton lied to Nikola’s investors—over and over and over again. That’s fraud, plain and simple, and this office has no patience for it.” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Witnesses testified that he lied to ordinary investors about nearly every aspect of Nikola.”
Nikola was temporarily worth $13 billion, making it more valuable than Ford Motor Co. Nikola’s shares began a precipitous decline after Hindenburg Research, an activist short selling firm, in September 2020, released a devastating report on the company. Hindenburg said that “we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its Founder and Executive Chairman Trevor Milton’s career.
“We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola Founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.” It later became known that Hindenburg had the aid of a Nikola whistleblower.
The company’s shares, which opened at $65.90/share not long after going public, closed at 87 cents at the end of 2023, when Milton was sentenced. Last month, Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and “filed a motion seeking authorization to pursue an auction and sale.”
Milton walked away from Nikola with a lot of money. Trevor Milton is certainly a man of means, but by no means King of the Road.
To subscribe, for back issues, and a searchable archive, The Quad Report.
To comment