Should Trump pardon Kim Dotcom?
- Grant McLachlan
- 15 hours ago
- 7 min read
A president who built his second term on the word “lawfare” has freed a parade of crypto convicts. The man who fits his own logic most cleanly is sitting in New Zealand, waiting to be put on a plane.
On 31 May, Last Week Tonight handed its main segment to Donald Trump’s pardons — a running tally of allies, donors and cronies sprung from prison or spared it altogether. John Oliver’s charge was that Trump has turned the most monarchical power the constitution grants a president into a loyalty card: do the right favours, and the slate gets wiped. The segment never mentioned Kim Dotcom. It should have, because no living case tests Trump’s own stated principle more cleanly.
Here is the part that gets lost in fourteen years of headlines: no United States court has ever convicted Dotcom of anything. He has spent those years in New Zealand fighting extradition, and in April the Court of Appeal reserved its decision on whether he can be sent to face charges his own lawyer says could keep him locked up for the rest of his life. A United States president can grant a pardon before any charge is laid — a power the Supreme Court has long held reaches an offence "before legal proceedings are taken", as when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.
It is whether, by his own logic, he can justify not doing so.
Contents
The lawfare playbook
Trump’s entire account of his own legal troubles rests on one word. His prosecutions, he has argued, were “driven by an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose” — lawfare, the criminal justice system bent into a weapon against a political rival. A House Judiciary Committee report reached the same verdict about the Manhattan case against him, calling it politically motivated and aimed at one man. Dotcom has made an almost identical claim for more than a decade: that he was a Hollywood scalp, hunted to please the studios that bankrolled a Democratic president.
That is where honesty has to enter, because it cuts against the case as much as for it. New Zealand’s courts have repeatedly rejected the political-motivation argument. In September last year Justice Christine Grice of the High Court dismissed it outright, finding no evidence that politics drove the extradition. “Lawfare” is Dotcom’s framing and Trump’s framing; it is not a judicial finding. The symmetry between the two men is rhetorical, not proven — which is precisely why it appeals to a president who trades in exactly that kind of symmetry.
The pardons already signed
Whatever the principle, the practice is established. In January 2025 Trump granted a full and unconditional pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder serving a double life sentence, declaring that the people who convicted him were “the same lunatics” behind the weaponisation of government against Trump himself. He then pardoned the founders of the BitMEX exchange, and the company with them. In October he pardoned Changpeng Zhao — “CZ” — the Binance founder who had pleaded guilty to money-laundering failures, paid a US$4.3 billion penalty and served four months. The White House framed each as the correction of a Biden-era “war on cryptocurrency.”
The message to anyone in Trump’s tech-and-crypto orbit could not be plainer: clemency is on the table. Dotcom — the original internet outlaw, the man who turned his own extradition fight into livestreamed theatre — is the conspicuous name still missing from the list.
What Megaupload actually was
Strip away the gold chains and the helicopters and the case is narrower than the mythology. Megaupload was an early cloud-storage and file-sharing service, operating in the same broad space as Dropbox or Google Drive: users uploaded files, some lawful and some not. United States prosecutors say the business took in at least US$175 million and cost copyright holders more than US$500 million. Dotcom’s lawyers have always answered that it was the site’s users, not its founders, who chose to pirate.
That distinction is the whole game. If hosting a platform on which some users infringe copyright is itself a crime worth a lifetime in prison, the principle does not stop at Dotcom; it reaches every executive at every service where people upload files.
Copyright scholars, Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig among them, questioned from the outset whether the conduct even amounted to the offence alleged.
The crime that wasn’t quite a crime
New Zealand’s own courts have wrestled with that question, and the answer is genuinely mixed — not the clean exoneration Dotcom’s supporters claim, nor the open-and-shut case Washington asserts. In 2017 High Court Justice Murray Gilbert ruled that online communication of copyright-protected works to the public is not a criminal offence in New Zealand — so the copyright charges, on their own, could not support extradition. But he allowed the extradition to proceed anyway, on the separate ground of general criminal fraud. In 2020 the Supreme Court upheld that he was eligible for surrender, while throwing out one money-laundering count for having no extradition pathway at all.
No United States court has ever convicted Kim Dotcom of anything. He has spent fourteen years fighting extradition over a copyright theory that the country he lives in does not treat as a crime.
The raid, and what was actually unlawful
The arrest was pure cinema.
At dawn on 20 January 2012, two helicopters and dozens of officers, some armed, descended on Dotcom’s rented Coatesville mansion, seizing luxury cars, cash and art. New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau — the country’s signals-intelligence agency, which is barred by law from spying on residents — had illegally surveilled Dotcom, who held New Zealand residency, prompting an apology from then Prime Minister John Key.
But the record needs straightening, because this is where the popular version overreaches. The High Court did initially rule the search warrants unlawful in 2012 — and that finding was later overturned, with the courts ultimately holding the raid itself lawful. What the courts did condemn was the shipping of cloned copies of Dotcom’s hard drives to the FBI in the United States, in breach of an order that the material stay in New Zealand. The state’s conduct was sloppy and at times illegal.
It was not the wholesale frame-up the legend insists on.
Where the case stands now
The clock has nearly run out.
In August 2024 then Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the order surrendering Dotcom to the United States. His two co-accused, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, pleaded guilty in New Zealand in 2023 and were sentenced to two and a half years; in exchange, the United States dropped its bid to extradite them. A third, Finn Batato, died of cancer in Germany in 2022. Dotcom alone remains.
And Dotcom is not the man who was arrested in 2012. In November 2024 he suffered a stroke, and still reports speech and memory impairment. At April’s Court of Appeal hearing his lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, argued that a United States sentencing expert had put his likely prison term at between 30 and almost 150 years without parole — a sentence that would breach section 9 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, which forbids disproportionately severe punishment. Justices French, Thomas and Campbell reserved their decision.
A stroke survivor in his fifties, facing what amounts to death in a foreign prison over a copyright case: this is the man waiting for the plane.
The Ver comparison
It is worth remembering why Roger Ver used to belong in this conversation — and why he no longer does.
“Bitcoin Jesus” faced United States tax-evasion charges over holdings he kept when he renounced his citizenship in 2014, a prosecution Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called “extreme” and politically motivated. Ver hired Trump’s associate Roger Stone to lobby for a pardon. Then, in October 2025, he simply settled: a deferred-prosecution deal, nearly US$50 million paid, charges to be dismissed — and the pardon request quietly withdrawn.
That is the tidy ending Dotcom can never have. Ver had an off-ramp because there was money on the table and a deal to be done. Dotcom has none: New Zealand will not try him, the United States will not settle, and so the only mechanisms left are a foreign prison cell or a presidential signature.
The Ver case does not weaken the argument for a Dotcom pardon. It shows what a humane resolution looks like — and underlines that Dotcom has been denied one.
The cost of clemency
None of this means a Dotcom pardon would be clean, and pretending otherwise would be the same dishonesty the case is supposed to expose.
Trump’s crypto pardons stink of self-dealing. Zhao’s Binance had compliance failures that prosecutors say let money flow to sanctioned entities and terrorist groups; his pardon came after Binance struck a deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s own crypto venture — a conflict that watchdogs and a former Justice Department pardon attorney have called alarming. Ulbricht’s marketplace was tied to real overdoses and real deaths. These were not innocents.
So the honest case for pardoning Dotcom is not that it would be pure. It is that it would be consistent — and that the man at the centre of it has, on the evidence, done less than almost anyone Trump has already freed. He ran a file-locker, not a drug bazaar; he moved no money for terrorists; he has never been convicted. Against that sits the alternative: a government that rails against lawfare allowing an ally state to ship a sick man across the world to die in prison over a copyright theory its own courts found wanting. Set beside the men already pardoned, Dotcom is the easy case, not the hard one.
Trump has pardoned men who did far worse, for far weaker reasons. If the word lawfare means anything to him at all, Kim Dotcom is the simplest case he will ever be handed.
