President Trump pardoned nine mechanics and truckers convicted of disabling diesel emissions controls, calling their prosecutions an act of Biden-era "weaponization and stupidity."
Trump signed pardons on Friday for eleven people, nine of them men and women who had been charged under the Clean Air Act for installing or selling so-called defeat devices, aftermarket kits that reprogram diesel trucks to bypass federally required pollution controls. "It is my Great Honor to have just signed Pardons for people who were persecuted by the Biden Administration, and were in, or being sent to, prison, for 'fixing their car,'" Trump wrote on Truth Social. The named recipients include Ryan and Wade Lalone, Matt Geouge, Tim Clancy, Mackenzie Spurlock, Joshua Davis, Barry Pierce, Aaron Rudolf and Jonathan Achtemeier, according to Fox News, CBS News, CNN and UPI. Two additional pardons went to figures unrelated to emissions cases, including former Jack Abramoff associate Adam Kidan.
Among the clearest cases is Mackenzie Spurlock, a diesel mechanic and Alaska Air National Guard veteran who ran Matanuska Diesel LLC in Wasilla. Federal agents raided his shop in 2022, and a grand jury indicted Spurlock and his business partner, Brendan Trevors, on charges of conspiring to remove required air pollution equipment and tamper with monitoring devices on diesel trucks, according to Alaska's News Source. Spurlock pleaded guilty, was fined, had his travel restricted and lost certain civil rights as a felon. His defenders, including business owners in the state, said the modifications were meant to keep trucks running in temperatures that regularly drop below zero. Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan welcomed the pardon, calling the prosecution unjust and thanking Trump for correcting what he described as EPA overreach against a small business owner and veteran.
The devices at the center of these cases disable emissions systems and suppress dashboard warning lights. Left uncorrected, the same trucks can be forced into a "derate" mode that cuts engine power, a safety hazard truckers say pushed some of them toward tampering in the first place rather than pay for costly dealer repairs.
The Clean Air Act cases against these defendants were part of a broader Justice Department and EPA enforcement push that ramped up during the Biden administration, targeting the sale of defeat devices nationwide. Federal prosecutors argued the devices, often marketed as "delete kits," let diesel trucks emit unchecked levels of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, pollutants linked to respiratory illness and smog formation. The EPA has estimated that a single tampered truck can emit pollution equivalent to dozens of properly functioning vehicles, and the agency pursued both manufacturers of the kits and the shops that installed them with multimillion-dollar civil penalties in parallel to the criminal cases.
Michigan brothers Ryan and Wade Lalone ran a business, Punch It Performance and Tuning, that federal prosecutors said sold thousands of defeat devices and tuning software over several years, generating substantial revenue before agents shut the operation down. Matt Geouge, who ran a similar tuning business in Louisiana, faced comparable allegations of selling software designed specifically to defeat onboard diagnostics systems. Prosecutors in these cases generally argued that the sheer scale of devices sold, sometimes numbering in the thousands, amplified the environmental harm well beyond a single truck owner tinkering with his own vehicle.
Defense advocates and rural trucking associations have long argued the Biden-era crackdown blurred the line between industrial-scale polluters and small operators simply keeping aging equipment on the road. Groups representing independent truckers noted that emissions components on modern diesel engines, particularly diesel particulate filters and selective catalytic reduction systems, are notoriously expensive to repair and prone to failure in extreme cold, a problem Alaska- and Midwest-based defendants repeatedly raised in court filings.
Trump's pardons continue a pattern from his second term of using clemency power to revisit cases he casts as examples of regulatory or prosecutorial excess under his predecessor, following similar moves involving other federal enforcement actions. The White House has not detailed whether the administration plans to revisit EPA's broader defeat-device enforcement program or pursue policy changes to the underlying Clean Air Act rules, leaving open whether Friday's pardons will translate into looser federal scrutiny of the diesel tuning industry going forward. Environmental groups are likely to push back on any such shift, while trucking advocates will almost certainly press the administration for clearer, cheaper compliance paths rather than criminal exposure.
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