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“Tiger King, Joe Exotic,” filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Justice because the Trump administration rejected his application for a full pardon, according to The Daily Wire.
Joe Exotic is currently serving a 22-year sentence for his role in a multi-state murder-for-hire plot against Florida animal rights activist Carole Baskin.
“The pardon, Joe’s legal team is, like, sending out the requests for it and all of this next week, I believe, or the week after,” Maldonado-Passage’s husband told Fox News in August “They’re driving a car all the way up to D.C. to deliver it in person.”
“We all know the situation, like, people that are actually in Joe’s life.”
“We know that he was confronted with this ‘plot’ kind of thing to take out Carole.”
“Exotic — whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage — argues that the denial is not valid because the request was not presented directly to President Trump himself,” the Post notes, adding that “Exotic alleges that Sargent-Burns never forwarded a formal recommendation to the president — something the lawsuit alleges she was required to do as an adviser, due to the fact that Trump has the sole authority to issue pardons.”
“Many people have come out and publicly expressed their disagreement with Joe Exotic’s conviction and subsequent sentence.”
“Among those, are members of the President’s own family. Donald Trump Junior has been an advocate for Joe Exotic to be Pardoned.”
Donald Trump, Jr., jokingly said, “it doesn’t seem like he was totally innocent of anything.”
“‘We’re putting this guy away for 30 years,’ I’m saying that seems sort of aggressive.”
President Donald Trump, said only that he might “take a look” at Maldonado-Passage’s case.
From The Daily Wire:
Maldonado-Passage rose to viral fame after Netflix aired a limited series about his life, his Nebraska wildlife park, and his long-running feud with Baskin, that culminated in the bizarre murder-for-hire plot as well as in a federal investigation into animal cruelty reportedly taking place at Maldonado-Passage’s “zoo” facility.
The Trump administration denied Maldonado-Passage’s pardon request less than a week after it was filed and Thursday, he fired back, naming the Justice Department and Acting Pardon Attorney Rosalind Sargent-Burns in a Federal complaint, according to the New York Post.
The lawsuit even cites the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., as a public “Joe Exotic” fan.