Michael Milken Deserved a Pardon, But He Didn’t Need One

Of all the pardons President Donald Trump has handed out and all the prison sentences he has commuted, it is hard to think of one less meaningful than the one he granted on Tuesday to Michael Milken. He is 73. He was released from prison 27 years ago. He is worth nearly $4 billion, most of which he has accrued since his release in 1993. Today, he presides over the Milken Institute, a highly regarded think tank based in Los Angeles. He spends millions on philanthropic pursuits.

Yet when his obituary is written, Milken’s decades of good works will take a back seat to the events that caused him to become the symbol of the “greed-is-good” 1980s. He will be remembered for how he invented junk bonds from his X-shaped desk in the Los Angeles office of Drexel Burnham Lambert, and how his creation became the means by which a new breed of investors such as Carl Icahn, Ron Perelman, T. Boone Pickens and others terrorized corporate America with their takeover attempts. And how Rudy Giuliani, the country’s top federal prosecutor at the time, finally brought Milken down, getting him to plead guilty to six felony charges, including conspiracy and fraud.