Correspondent Lesley Stahl launched the 59th season of “60 Minutes” with a hidden-camera investigation into the lawyers and lobbyists who promise convicted felons a pardon from President Donald Trump. The season premiere ran on Sunday, September 13, 2026, and Stahl put what she found to the man who ran the federal pardon office until last month.

Shachar Bar-On and Michael Kaplan produced the segment, titled “The Pardon Economy.” Brokers charge between $300,000 and $3 million to press a client’s case with the president, Stahl, 84, reported, and what they do is not illegal — yet none would agree to an interview.

Inside the Hidden-Camera Pitch

Ammon Covino, who runs zoos and aquariums, served 23 months following a 2013 conviction for illegal wildlife trafficking. He tried the conventional route first, filled out the Justice Department’s three-page application and was rejected. Then he emailed a dozen brokers. Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl — lobbyists Stahl described as self-styled pardon brokers — answered within seven minutes.

“60 Minutes” cameras rolled as Covino and his wife, Crystal Covino, sat down with the pair in a Virginia hotel lounge. They quoted $300,000, a price covering tickets to Mar-a-Lago events at up to $10,000 each, plus contractors and introductions to MAGA influencers. “I kept saying ‘This feels illegal,’” Covino told Stahl. He said he asked an AI model over and over whether the arrangement the brokers were offering was against the law, and each time he was assured it was not.

Burkman, on the recording, laid out a pressure campaign designed to wear the president down until he signed. Both men were criminally convicted over a 2020 robocall operation that aimed at suppressing Black votes. A nursing home chain owner convicted of massive tax fraud won clemency that the two men claim credit for; that client, they say, paid them nearly $1 million.

The Rapper Who Says He Paid $600,000

Rapper Boosie Badazz, identified in the broadcast as having been convicted for drug possession and for being a felon in possession of a gun, told Stahl he handed the pair $600,000 up front and never got a pardon. “This is what I was led to believe: If you come with this money, you will get a pardon,” he said. His contract entitled him to request half the money back if no pardon materialized; Burkman and Wohl say he never signed it. Asking got him nowhere. “Just return it. You didn’t give me my pardon,” he recalled telling them. “It’s a bunch of BS. And they were so cocky.”

He showed Stahl a text in which the pair claimed they were recruiting people in Trump’s orbit: Erika Kirk, whose name the message misspelled, Laura Loomer, House Speaker Mike Johnson and presidential executive assistant Natalie Harp. All four denied any involvement.

Wohl, confronted by “60 Minutes,” said: “There’s nothing corrupt about it. There’s nothing improper about it.” Stahl put it to them plainly: “It seems that you have to have money to get a pardon these days.” Burkman answered: “We don’t work for free any more than you do, right? You’re well-paid for what you do. We’re well-paid for what I do.”

Stahl Presses the Pardon Attorney

Ed Martin, 56, led the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the Justice Department from May 2025 until Trump announced his departure on August 24, saying Martin was leaving to work on legal battles in the coming elections. He also ran the department’s weaponization working group. From January to May 2025 he served as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and GOP opposition prevented his Senate confirmation. On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 January 6 defendants; the department’s public clemency list has added a few hundred grants since.

In a voiceover, Stahl said roughly 70 percent of the clemencies Trump has granted in his second term bypassed the Justice Department, a share that rises to 92 percent when his pardons of January 6 rioters are included.

She ran through cases. An electric vehicle company founder, Trevor Milton, had donated $2 million to Trump’s re-election campaign. The founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange was granted clemency after he helped the Trump family move into cryptocurrency. And a healthcare executive, Paul Walczak, pleaded guilty to tax crimes, with his clemency following his mother’s $1 million payment for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser.

“A pardon seeker going to Mar-a-Lago and joining in a fundraising event where you had to pay money and then getting a pardon, why isn’t that a quid pro quo?” Stahl asked Martin. “Why isn’t that pay to play?”

“I don’t know about those examples, but I would just say the prerogative, again the presidential prerogative, that it’s in the Constitution. It’s complete. It’s plenary,” Martin replied. He continued: “When people say, ‘It’s brokers, there’s quid pro quo,’ I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen it, haven’t heard it.”

“Ed, the point is they’re going around you. And they’re bragging about going around you,” Stahl said.

“I just don’t see any evidence of some magical brokers. I think people are trying to make money,” Martin said.

“So are you saying that these brokers, they’re con men?” Stahl asked. “They’re snake oil salesmen, they’re swamp salesmen. What word do you want?” Martin answered.

Stahl also asked whether people who use the traditional Justice Department application are largely ignored. “Is that a fair system?” she asked. “I reject your characterization of the system,” Martin answered, saying he had not seen or heard of such a system and had sat with a thousand people in his office over the past year, some of whom ended up with clemency or were pardoned.

She ended the segment by reading a White House statement: “Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money. President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner, and to suggest so otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious.”

A Premiere Under New Management

Overseeing the premiere was CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who got the job in October 2025 after Paramount, under chief executive David Ellison, bought her outlet The Free Press. Chairs have emptied on her watch: correspondents Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley left, while Anderson Cooper announced his own exit and is staying at CNN. Leadership also stalled at least two segments critical of the Trump administration last season. Nick Bilton, a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker with no previous television news experience, now runs the broadcast; he replaced Tanya Simon in May.

In July 2025, Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a dispute during which CBS News President Wendy McMahon resigned. Neither of the premiere’s other stories touched the show’s off-season upheaval. Norah O’Donnell interviewed the U.S. Air Force officer whose F-15E was shot down over Iran, an airman who spent two days on the ground before he was rescued, and the Los Angeles Rams and their coach, Sean McVay, were the subject of a report by Jon Wertheim.