WASHINGTON — As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.

Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Donald Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.

Fago had raised millions of dollars for Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.

Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees’ taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.

Still, weeks went by, and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.

Then, Fago was invited to a $1 million-per-person fundraising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.

It came just in the nick of time for Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.

The pardon, however, indicated otherwise. The case of Fago and Walczak is the latest example of the president’s willingness to use his clemency powers to reward allies who advance his political causes and to punish his enemies.

Walczak’s pardon application was described to The New York Times by a person who received it but was not authorized to share.

Fago, Walczak and his lawyer did not respond to questions.

A White House official echoed the framing in Walczak’s application, asserting in a statement to the Times that he was “targeted by the Biden administration over his family’s conservative politics.”

Walczak, 55, joined his mother’s nursing home business after dropping out of college, eventually becoming CEO. After she sold the company in 2007, they invested $18 million in a new nursing home venture based in South Florida, where they lived a luxurious lifestyle.

By 2011, prosecutors said, Walczak had stopped paying employment taxes.

Between 2016 and 2019, they said, he withheld more than $10 million from the paychecks of the nurses, doctors and others who worked at his facilities under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal income taxes. Instead, he used some of the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high-end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier, prosecutors said.

He was charged in February 2023 with 13 counts of tax crimes.

By the time he pleaded guilty to two of the counts and agreed to pay the restitution Nov. 15, 2024, Trump had been elected for a second term in the White House.

The family had reason to believe the incoming president might look fondly on a pardon application.

Fago, 74, had helped host at least three fundraisers for Trump’s campaigns. She and her son Joey Fago (Walczak’s half brother) and his wife attended VIP events at Trump’s 2017 and 2025 inaugurations, according to social media posts, including one in which she was shown posing with Trump.

Fago and other family members spent election night 2020 at a White House watch party. After Trump lost, they were invited back the next month to attend a White House Christmas party.

During his final weeks in office, Fago was among a slew of loyalists tapped by Trump for appointment to government boards and commissions. She resisted an effort by the Biden administration to rescind her appointment to the National Cancer Advisory Board, according to her son’s pardon application, which said that she told a board representative that Biden did not have the right to remove her.

In January, with Trump preparing to move back into the White House, Fago and her family traveled to Washington for the inauguration. They got VIP access to the Trump victory rally at Capital One Arena in Washington.

In February, a pardon application was submitted on Walczak’s behalf. It suggested that Donald Trump Jr., as well as Guilfoyle and other Trump allies, supported his clemency.

They all agreed, according to the application, that the only reason Walczak was prosecuted criminally was that he was the son of a prominent Trump supporter.

Guilfoyle declined to comment. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

The application cited Biden’s justification for issuing a sweeping pardon to his son Hunter Biden for tax and gun crimes in December. The elder Biden had claimed in a statement that Hunter “was singled out only because he is my son.”

As Fago and Walczak awaited word on the pardon, she was invited to the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser with Trump.

An invitation billed it as an intimate “candlelight dinner” with “very limited” space available to people who paid $1 million each. It was sponsored by MAGA Inc., a political action committee that can accept unlimited donations to support candidates and causes backed by Trump.

The ask was far more than her previous largest federal donation on record — $100,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2002 — and dwarfed the more than $12,000 she had directly donated to Trump’s presidential campaign committees.

Two people briefed on the candlelight dinner said that Fago attended. It is not clear whether she donated to MAGA Inc. or how much.

Representatives for MAGA Inc. did not respond to questions.

The group has until the end of July to disclose the identities of donors from the first half of this year, which will most likely include those who paid to attend the dinner.

The White House official cited the Biden administration’s effort to oust Fago from the cancer board as evidence of the political motivations that contributed to Trump’s decision to issue the pardon.