President Donald Trump has used the power of the pardon as a way to attack the Deep State’s weaponization of the justice system. While it can take years – or perhaps decades – to reform the entrenched federal bureaucracy, President Trump can circumvent that with the stroke of a pen, and to his great credit, he has.
From average Americans who were in Washington on January 6th to former Democratic Governor Blagojevich President Trump has used the power of the pardon to right the wrongs of a politically charged DOJ. To quote conservative activist and one of the founders of the Tea Party movement, Debbie Dooley: “President Trump is standing up for those who were politically targeted by the DOJ and he should keep going…pardon baby pardon.”
As such, President Trump issued a record number of pardons and commutations during the first year of his second term, and that is expected to continue throughout the entirety of his administration. There are many more cases deserving attention but one case that is drawing attention from Trump supporters is that of Matjaž Škorjanc, a Slovenian programmer and crypto entrepreneur.
In 2021, a federal indictment in Washington charged Škorjanc and several co‑defendants with a racketeering conspiracy for developing and distributing malware. According to the DOJ, Škorjanc and two co‑defendants—Florencio Carro Ruiz and Mentor Leniqi—remain fugitives because Slovenia, Serbia and Spain declined to extradite them. The case lingers on from the Biden administration despite the fact that justice has already been served, and it is a lingering vestige of the Biden war on cryptocurrency and pro-freedom innovation in the tech industry.
Even worse this case is duplicative and wasteful because Škorjanc was previously convicted in Slovenia only to have it overturned by the Slovenia Constitutional Court in 2025. The continued prosecution by the DOJ violates double‑jeopardy principles and is a wasteful, superfluous distraction from the DOJ’s mandate under the Trump administration of cracking down on violent crime networks, human trafficking, drug gangs, radical leftist agitators and deep state interlopers.
Despite the continuing DOJ investigation, Škorjanc has become a successful innovator in the cryptocurrency industry, developing NiceHash, a cryptocurrency trading platform featuring an open marketplace for buyers and sellers of hashing power. NiceHash allows users to sell their computing power to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, creating an additional avenue for wealth creation through the rising digital asset marketplace.
Several crypto-related entrepreneurs and innovators – including Silk Road founder Russ Ulbrecht and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao – have received pardons from President Trump. The tech sector was unfairly targeted during the Biden administration through policies known as Operation Chokepoint 2.0 when crypto entrepreneurs were regularly debanked and treated like drug dealers or terrorists while examples were made of high-profile actors in an attempt to scare people out of the industry.
A pardon of Škorjanc by President Trump would further indicate that America is open for business for crypto. Škorjanc served years in prison for charges that were ultimately overturned in court and then left prison to help build a rising industr,y freeing markets and opening capital to a new generation of people. His case should not fall through the cracks as the Trump administration achieves transparency in DOJ investigations and restores due process nationwide.
