President Donald Trump announced Monday, May 26, that he granted an unconditional pardon to a former Virginia sheriff, one day before the sheriff was scheduled to report to prison after a jury convicted him of federal fraud and bribery charges. In 2024, a jury found Scott Jenkins, 53, who had served as sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, for over a decade, guilty of accepting more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for deputizing businessmen without requiring them to undergo training.
Jenkins’ sentence
In March 2025, the court sentenced Jenkins to 10 years in prison. Prosecutors said that Jenkins took bribes from at least eight people, including a pair of FBI agents, through a combination of campaign donations and cash. Three men involved in the case pleaded guilty to secondary roles in the crimes. According to prosecutors, Jenkins accepted bribes from these men. Investigators said the former sheriff gave businessmen official badges and law enforcement credentials so that they could avoid traffic tickets and carry guns without a permit.
Prosecutors with the Biden administration’s Department of Justice stated that none of the individuals deputized were “trained or vetted,” nor did they provide “any legitimate services to the Sheriff’s Office.”
Trump’s response
Trump defended his pardon of Jenkins in a Truth Social Post on Monday. The president said the ex-sheriff was a “victim of an overzealous” Biden-era Department of Justice and didn’t “deserve to spend a single day in jail.”
Trump accused the judge presiding over Jenkins’ case of barring the former sheriff from presenting “evidence to support himself.” Instead, Judge Robert Ballou “refused to allow it, shut him down, and then went on a tirade.” The president called Jenkins a “wonderful person” and claimed that “Radical Left Monsters” targeted him and “left [him] for dead.” Trump also said that Jenkins and his family were “dragged through HELL.”
Following his conviction, Jenkins had requested that the Trump administration intervene in his case.
“I believe wholeheartedly in the president,” Jenkins said in April, adding that he also believed Trump would help if he “heard the information.”
Trump’s pardon history
Voters first elected Jenkins to sheriff of Culpeper County in 2011 and re-elected him in 2015 and 2019. The former sheriff is a supporter of Trump. Jenkins’ pardon comes after the president’s nearly 1,600 pardons or commutations of sentences for people charged in the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.
