Trump Should Pardon "Junk Bond King", Says Wealth Manager

Tom Burroughes

31 August 2017

A prominent wealth manager has reportedly urged President Donald Trump to pardon Michael Milken, a famous Wall Street figure who was jailed for 22 months after pleading guilty in 1990 to securities fraud.

David Bahnsen, a managing director at Morgan Stanley before he started his own wealth-management group in 2015, told Trump in a letter that Milken’s prosecution was a result of “a period of class envy run amok”. Bahnsen, a Republican donor, said in an email he’s never met Milken, Bloomberg and other media outlets reported.

Milken is associated with the rise of the high-yield sector during the 1980s, a period associated with leveraged corporate takeovers. He ran the high-yield team at Drexel Burnham Lambert, playing a significant part in merger and takeover activity that affected business in the US and overseas. The era was lampooned in the Oliver Stone film, Wall Street, although much to the horror of some, the villain of the film, Gordon Gekko , achieved almost heroic status for his “Greed is Good” speech in that film.

Bahnsen, whose Bahnsen Group oversees more than $1 billion, told Trump the pardon would signal a stop to “headline-seeking, human-damaging corporate prosecutions, devoid of due process.” The banker said he sent an earlier version of the request and revised it after Trump pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio last week.

The financier has become a philanthropist in areas such as around cancer research, for which he has drawn praise.