President Trump signed onstage pardons for two Alaska diesel shop owners he said Biden-era prosecutors wrongly charged over engine work, wiping out probation and heavy fines.

At a pre-midterm election rally in Wasilla, Alaska, late Tuesday, President Trump called Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming onto the stage, ordered an aide to bring the papers, signed the pardons at the podium, and handed them over in front of the crowd. CBS News reported he held one up for the audience to see.

The two men co-owned Arm Rippin Toys, an Alaska shop that specialized in diesel vehicles. In 2022 they pleaded guilty, along with third co-owner Michael Hanzuk, to conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act. Each drew five years of probation, $66,000 in fines, and community service.

Federal prosecutors said the shop offered to strip emission control systems from customers’ vehicles for fees ranging from $1,140 to $5,445. That work included modifying physical parts and blocking diagnostic systems from flagging the change, which prosecutors said made the trucks put out more pollutants.

Trump told the rally the pair had been “wrongly charged” and cast the Biden-era Justice Department cases as having “viciously targeted the Alaskan way of life.”

Shop owners say the charges wrecked their lives

Fleming addressed the crowd after receiving his pardon and did not say much about the damage.

Fox News reported one of the men told supporters the prosecution “really did destroy us. It destroyed friendships. It destroyed families.”

"We're not criminals. We're not trying to hurt anybody. We want to help Alaskans. We want to help people with diesel trucks, with vehicles, across the world."

Trump framed the original exposure in blunt terms from the podium.

"Think of it: They want to put them in jail for 10 years because they fixed an engine. How sick?"

He also said he was “taking care of” a third person. Hanzuk, the remaining Arm Rippin Toys co-owner, had already received a pardon the previous month. Earlier this year Trump pardoned another Alaska diesel mechanic, Mac Spurlock, who faced similar Clean Air Act charges for removing pollution controls. Supporters of Spurlock have long argued those modifications were needed to keep trucks running in Alaska’s extreme cold.

The Wasilla event doubled as a boost for Sen. Dan Sullivan, who faces a challenge from Democrat Mary Peltola. Sullivan had applauded the Spurlock pardon in July and called those charges the product of “overzealous federal prosecutors.” He has argued EPA rules should be adjusted for cold-weather states.

Trump’s willingness to use the pardon power this way fits a broader pattern of clemency for people he views as over-charged, including a PGA caddy cleared of a decades-old drug conviction.

Biden DOJ pursued the cases; policy later shifted

During the Biden administration, officials warned that cutting out emissions controls “results in a massive increase in air pollution from even a single vehicle.” Scot Adair, then the special agent in charge of the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division in Alaska, vowed to “hold accountable those who jeopardize human health and the environment for the sake of profit.”

The New York Post reported the men had pleaded guilty over work on at least 37 diesel vehicles and that Trump described the Biden DOJ approach as crazy while signing unconditional pardons for Czubak and Fleming.

In January the Justice Department announced it would “no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act based on allegations of tampering with onboard diagnostic devices.” That policy change came after the three shop owners had already been sentenced.

Trump used the rally stage to draw a sharp contrast with other federal priorities.

"Now if you murder somebody, no problem. Unless a Republican does the murdering. Then it's, you know, the electric chair, right?"

He closed the moment with a familiar line about the effect of a pardon, then joked about the old saying itself.

"When you give somebody a pardon, they say that means, and I don't know how this works and why it's an expression, but it's well-used, that means you're as clean as a newborn baby's a**. I never understood that. Why is that so clean?"

Similar clemency for service members caught in technical weapons cases has also drawn attention, as when Trump pardoned a Navy veteran sentenced over inert relics.

Cold-weather engines and the right-to-repair fight

Just the News reported Trump cast the work as undoing “environmental crap that makes it inefficient and expensive,” then asked why that should mean jail time. He signed the papers while campaigning for Alaska Republicans and touting energy priorities.

The Trump administration has moved to relax fuel-economy standards and ended an EPA policy that gave credits to manufacturers for start-stop emissions systems. Alaska mechanics and truck owners have long said rigid federal rules ignore the realities of sub-zero starts and long hauls on remote roads.

Fleming and Czubak’s guilty pleas left them with ruined businesses, large fines, and years of supervision for work their customers sought to keep diesel trucks operational. The onstage pardons erase the federal convictions and the collateral damage that followed.

Trump has also used commutations in labor cases, including when he commuted the sentence of a Philadelphia union boss convicted in a large embezzlement case.

Partisan fights over who deserves clemency are nothing new in Washington. Even Biden-era officials privately weighed dramatic options, including whether to consider a pardon for Trump himself in 2023.

In Wasilla the choice was simpler and public. Two shop owners who fixed engines for Alaskans walked off the stage with clean records, signed in front of the voters who live with the weather, the trucks, and the rules.

When federal prosecutors treat practical cold-weather repairs like environmental crimes, working people pay first. A president willing to correct that on a rally stage puts the country back on the side of common sense.