“…As for Ms. Camberos, she was among a number of people granted clemency by Mr. Trump who have been
charged with new crimes after receiving a second chance.
Ms. Camberos began serving a 26-month prison sentence in December 2019 for her role in a scheme to
sell millions of counterfeit bottles of the caffeinated drink 5-Hour Energy. Mr. Trump commuted her sentence in the final days of his first term after she enlisted two lawyers with connections in his orbit. One of them, Stefan C. Passantino, had been a deputy White House counsel in the first Trump administration. Another, Adam Katz, represented Rudolph W. Giuliani in a defamation case related to his effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
But soon after her release from prison, she and her brother Andres
embarked on a new fraud, federal prosecutors in California said. The siblings were charged in 2023 in a complicated scheme: They bought consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount, purportedly to sell them in Mexico — a legal practice. Instead, prosecutors said, the siblings sold the goods in the United States at higher prices and then committed bank and mail fraud to cover their tracks.
They were
convicted in 2024. In April, Ms. Camberos was sentenced to more than one year in prison — 12 months for the new conviction and additional months for violating her probation on her earlier conviction — and Andres Camberos was given one year of home confinement. Ms. Camberos had begun serving her sentence.
They were ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution to the companies they defrauded.
The White House official did not respond to a question about whether the pardon would wipe away the Camberos siblings’ restitution payments, but pardons typically erase financial penalties.
The siblings’ supporters had argued privately that they were targeted by prosecutors because Mr. Trump had wiped away Ms. Camberos’s sentence from her earlier conviction — a claim echoed by the White House official.…”
