Trump Pardons Six Men Convicted Of Ripping The Pollution Controls Off Their Trucks, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Poisoning A Neighbor's Air Was Still A Federal Crime

WASHINGTON. Capping a week of Independence Day festivities, President Trump on Friday granted full pardons to six men who had been convicted of removing the federally mandated equipment that keeps their vehicles from poisoning the air, an act the President described as "fixing their car."

The six had been prosecuted under the Clean Air Act for installing so-called aftermarket defeat devices, hardware and software designed to disable the emissions controls on diesel engines. With those controls defeated, the trucks in question are free to emit many times the legal limit of the nitrogen oxides and fine soot associated with asthma, heart disease, and premature death, a capability that enthusiasts refer to approvingly as "rolling coal."

"I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW!," the President wrote on Truth Social, characterizing the prosecutions as an act of "weaponization and stupidity" by federal lawyers who had objected to the men making the air around them measurably worse. The White House declined to release the names of those pardoned, a formality handled instead by a lobbyist representing five of the six, who thanked God and the President for taking an interest in the parties.

Friday's clemency continued a pattern established last fall, when the President pardoned a Wyoming mechanic who had served seven months in prison for disabling pollution controls on diesel engines. Earlier this year, the Justice Department had already instructed prosecutors to drop every pending defeat-device case in the country, leaving the six recipients among the last Americans still technically accountable for the contents of their own exhaust.

Administration officials framed the action as a natural extension of the President's broader environmental agenda, which over the preceding eighteen months has lifted limits on power-plant carbon, opened the coasts to drilling, rescinded rules on forever chemicals in drinking water, and freed public companies from disclosing their climate risk. "The President believes deeply that no American should go to prison simply for choosing to pollute," said one source within the administration, "and that the Clean Air Act has spent fifty years standing between the citizen and that choice."

At press time, the newly freed men were reportedly idling in the White House driveway, awaiting a photo opportunity that Rose Garden staff had asked them to attend with the engines off.