Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Almost $19 Million to a Grieving Family

When Amanda Coulson was a child, she visited her mother at work at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Doris Coulson was a nurse, and one memory never left her daughter. A code blue was called, and suddenly her mother was racing alongside a patient’s bed. “She jumped into the middle of the bed and was doing CPR in the bed as it flew down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson said years later in court. “I realized she didn’t play at work all day.” That was the kind of caregiver her mother was: someone who understood what quality care meant because she had spent her life giving it to others. After Doris Coulson retired, she became a patient at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman who was buying up nursing homes across the country. The staff wasn’t supposed to serve her solid food, but they did, and she died. Doctors told the family they found scrambled eggs in her lungs. Nine years after Coulson’s death, President Donald Trump pardoned Schwartz in a federal case in which he had admitted to withholding $39 million in employee payroll taxes from his nursing home empire and diverting the money