President Donald Trump has been on a clemency kick. During his first year back in office, he granted clemency to about 1,600 people—more than six times as many people as he did during his first term—mostly for involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He also has granted clemency to dozens of people convicted of financial crimes, including pardoning the former CEO of the crypto exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao, and commuting the sentence of former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.)
Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, is the latest person convicted of criminal fraud to ask Trump to commute her sentence (that is, lessen her punishment), according to a request filed in 2025 with the Department of Justice.
Holmes experienced a meteoric rise in the early 2010s with the initial success of her company, Theranos, which claimed its medical device could detect diseases from a few drops of blood at a fraction of the price. The company raised almost $1 billion from investors such as Larry Ellison, Betsy DeVos, and Rupert Murdoch, and former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger sat on the board of directors.
But in 2015, Holmes was exposed for misleading investors and misrepresenting the efficacy of Theranos’s technology following a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal.
She began serving an 11-year sentence in May 2023 at a minimum-security federal prison in Texas after being convicted of defrauding investors. Her sentence was reduced to nine years for good behavior.
Supporters, who include venture capitalist Tim Draper and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), have criticized the heavy scrutiny of Holmes, especially in light of Silicon Valley’s “fake it till you make it” culture.
In February 2025, Holmes lost a bid in a federal appeals court to overturn her conviction. Now, the 41-year-old still has nearly six years left in her sentence, but maintains that she is innocent. Holmes has two children born in 2021 and 2023 with her partner, Billy Evans, who reportedly raised millions for a new diagnostic startup called Haemanthus, although it claims it’s not “Theranos 2.0.”
“We are continuing to fight for my innocence, and we know the truth can not be repressed forever. This is not over,” Holmes wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “The fight against weaponization of our justice system is just beginning,” she added, echoing a common Trump administration refrain that the Biden administration used the federal government to prosecute political opponents.
It appears Holmes is dictating posts from Federal Prison Camp Bryan: “Mostly my words, posted by others,” according to her X bio.
Holmes has recently supported several of the Trump administration’s policies and backed current and former administration officials such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on social media. On Jan. 15, she posted a video of Trump speaking about his plan to force hospitals and insurers that accept Medicaid or Medicare to post prices for medical treatments.
“Theranos did this in 2016, 10 years later it’s time we do it everywhere,” she wrote.
This is a notable switch from Holmes’s past support for Democratic candidates. In 2016, Theranos planned to host a fundraiser for then–presidential candidate Hillary Clinton before the event was moved to a different location after WSJ’s investigation exposing Theranos’s technology.
An attorney for Holmes did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Holmes’s potential commutation would follow the trend of the president’s recent clemency toward those convicted of white-collar crimes.
In October, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, who pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering regime and served four months in prison in 2024.
When asked why he pardoned Zhao, Trump told Norah O’Donnell of CBS News: “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
Binance launched a $800,000 lobbying campaign for Zhao’s pardon and U.S. policy changes, the Wall Street Journal reported. WSJ previously reported the company assisted in the building of the Trump family crypto platform World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, USD1, which was later listed on Binance.
The White House doesn’t comment on potential clemency requests, but the president is the ultimate decider on pardons and commutations.
About half of Trump’s pardon recipients during his second term (excluding Jan. 6 defendants) are either business executives or politicians, and more than half of the 88 individual pardons were for white-collar offenses, according to an analysis by NBC. Money laundering, bank fraud, and wire fraud were among the most frequent crimes the president pardoned.
The clemency process can take years as the request works its way through the Department of Justice, and Trump has not yet commented on Holmes’s application.
