Credit C-SPAN
Experts say a South Dakota criminal no longer has to pay his victims nearly $3 million in restitution after President Trump pardoned him and labeled his crimes “minor.”
That criminal, Paul Erickson, of Sioux Falls, is best known as the boyfriend of Russian operative Maria Butina. She was deported in 2019 after illegally working as a foreign agent in the United States.
Erickson was not prosecuted for the assistance he allegedly provided to Butina. Instead, in a separate case, authorities accused him of defrauding dozens of people in numerous business schemes. His pattern – which he repeated multiple times over many years – was to pitch an investment opportunity to friends and acquaintances, convince them to invest, and then pocket the money rather than putting it into the investment.