A cybersecurity executive was pardoned by Donald Trump. His crime was a mystery.

• In 2020, Donald Trump pardoned cybersecurity executive Chris Wade for crimes that had been sealed.

• Unsealed documents show he was part of a sophisticated spam email operation busted by an informant.

• Prosecutors want to keep part of his case sealed — the reason behind that remains a mystery.

In August 2005, years before he was an executive at a cybersecurity company, Chris Wade was vacationing at a casino in Las Vegas, planning to meet an associate who was supposed to hand him an envelope containing $2,500 in cash.

Wade, who controlled tens of thousands of hacked computers at the time, had agreed to use his network to send emails promoting a stock pump-and-dump scheme. The cash was payment for his services.

But what Wade didn’t know was that his associate was a government informant and that prosecutors would soon charge him with an array of cybercrimes, accusing him of using the hacked computers to commit fraud.

For nearly two decades, the charges against Wade would remain a secret. In an unusual move, the judge sealed the entire court docket, hiding all public records of Wade’s involvement in the case.

While it’s common for individual court documents to be sealed or partially redacted, Wade’s case was different.

Wade pleaded guilty to all the charges against him in July 2006. However, no reference to the case appeared in public federal court databases — even after he was sentenced in 2011 to time served.

The very fact that Wade had a criminal past was a secret — until Donald Trump pardoned him.

That left many wondering what would account for the curious court-sanctioned secrecy surrounding the case. One explanation, legal analysts say, is that Wade could have become a government informant himself.

A pardon for a secret crime

Years after the hacking charges, Wade went legit.

In 2011, he launched iEmu, a company that grew a cult following among developers by allowing them to emulate iPhone apps on Windows, Mac, and Android devices. In 2017, he cofounded Corellium and is its chief technology officer.

Corellium has carved out a prominent place in the software market, creating sophisticated tools for cybersecurity researchers. It fought, and ultimately settled, a protracted legal battle against Apple, which alleged Corellium violated copyright law by creating a virtual version of iOS that researchers could test for security vulnerabilities. Another one of its cofounders helped the FBI unlock the iPhone used by one of the suspects in the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting attack.

Trump granted Wade clemency near the end of 2020, with less than a month left in his first presidential term.

While Wade’s case was sealed, the pardon effectively made it public.

But Wade’s crimes, at the time, remained a mystery.

The White House’s announcement said only that Wade “served two years’ probation after pleading guilty to various cyber-crimes” and “has shown remorse and sought to make his community a safer place.”

It also said the pardon was supported by Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, the former Marvel executive and a Mar-a-Lago member who has supported Trump’s political campaigns; Mark Templeton, the former Citrix CEO who has since taken a seat on the board of Corellium; and “numerous current and former law-enforcement officials.”

The pardon itself is not much clearer. It says Wade is granted “a full and unconditional pardon” for his conviction “in sealed Docket No. 06-cr-394” and notes that “the offenses of conviction and sentence are also under seal.” The Justice Department’s website still says his offenses were “sealed” and that his sentence was “unknown.”

A representative for the DOJ pardon attorney’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The pardon was announced in a White House press release along with pardons and commutations for more than 20 other people, many of whom were businessmen charged with tax-related offenses. The list included Trump’s political allies Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who were criminally charged in the Mueller investigation, and Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, who Trump has since selected as his ambassador to France for his coming second term.

Wade, through his attorney Paul Kreiger, declined to comment.

In October, following legal action by The New York Times, a judge unsealed documents containing the charges against Wade and details about his sentence.

The criminal complaint said that Wade was arrested with the help of a confidential government informant who was assisting a unit in the US Secret Service’s New York field office investigating a spam email scheme.

The informant, whose identity remains unknown, had been convicted of unrelated cyber-fraud charges and was trying to leverage his connections in the hacking world to help law enforcement with the hope of receiving a lighter sentence, the complaint said.

The informant had helped authorities catch two other men, Adam Vitale and Todd Moeller. They had bypassed AOL’s spam filters and blasted out tens of thousands of emails a day promoting obscure stocks, which Vitale and Moeller then dumped for profit.

Vitale used “SpamsMVP” as one of his instant message nicknames. Moeller bragged that he was making $40,000 a month by selling the stock. Both pleaded guilty to the charges against them.

Wade was the “proxy guy” in the spam email operation. Wade routed the emails through the computers of hundreds of AOL users, who were hacked and unwittingly used to transmit spam, making them look legit to AOL’s filters. While he was waiting on the $2,500 payment from the informant, Wade bragged that he was able to control a “botnet” of 20,000 computers to launder spam emails, the court documents said.

The informant tried to get in on the operation. He also cut a side deal with Wade at the expected price of $2,500 a week to take advantage of his botnet. Wade took Western Union wire transfers or cash, the documents said.

The informant didn’t actually bring the cash to Wade at that Las Vegas casino. But he’d collected enough evidence for the Secret Service to bring criminal charges. According to the charging document, AOL determined that Wade, Moeller, and Vitale spammed 1,277,401 different AOL email addresses.

‘You’re not supposed to have a case that never existed’

In January, a lawyer for The New York Times asked a federal judge to unseal the case, noting the bizarre circumstances of the “blanket sealing.”

“The presidential pardon power is virtually unchecked. As a result, the public’s need to know how the power is being used and who is benefiting is at its pinnacle,” David E. McCraw, the lawyer for the Times, wrote.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted Wade, agreed to unseal certain key documents.

But other ones, prosecutors said, should remain secret. The reasons for keeping them sealed have also been withheld from the public record, with the Justice Department arguing that “would, in effect, risk disclosing the very information that warrants ongoing protection.”

Wade’s lawyers, in arguments that remain sealed, have also asked the judge to keep certain filings private.

It remains to be seen whether more court documents from Wade’s criminal case will become public in the future. The Times has not published a story on Wade and his pardon in the months since the documents were unsealed. The judge’s deadline for additional unsealing requests has passed. A representative for the Times declined to comment.

While Moeller and Vitale were charged as codefendants in 2006, prosecutors severed Wade’s case from theirs and sealed it.

Prosecutors may agree to seal a case when a defendant cooperates and prosecutors want to keep the relationship a secret.

“The government will want to conceal the entire thing because they don’t want other related bad guys to know that this investigation is ongoing,” said John Kucera, a former federal prosecutor who investigated complex financial crimes and now works as a defense attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner.

But even when there’s a secret cooperator, the court docket normally becomes public once the defendant is sentenced. That didn’t happen in Wade’s case.

The yearslong secrecy across multiple administrations — and the fact that the Justice Department still wants to keep portions of the case sealed — is unusual. One possible explanation, said Dan Boyle, a former federal prosecutor and US military intelligence professional, is that Wade helped the government on some kind of sensitive matter.

Boyle told BI that sealing the case indefinitely could indicate that the Justice Department didn’t want anyone to know Wade had interacted with law enforcement.

“You’re not supposed to have a case that never existed,” said Boyle, also a Boies Schiller Flexner defense lawyer. “It happens, but it’s an extraordinary circumstance.”

Jason Brown, the Secret Service agent who wrote the criminal complaint against Wade, declined to answer questions about the case beyond what is available in public court records, citing laws regarding grand jury secrecy. Representatives for the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Thomas G.A. Brown, who later oversaw the office’s unit investigating complex fraud and cybercrime, was the prosecutor in the Wade, Vitale, and Moeller investigations. Court records show he was involved in numerous high-profile cases, including the prosecution of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, the leadership of the hacking group LulzSec, and numerous digital currency cases. (Trump has vowed to commute Ulbricht’s sentence on “day one” of his second term.)

Brown, who left the Justice Department in 2014, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Wade’s pardon could make it easier for Corellium to seek contracts with government agencies and security companies, Adam Scott Wandt, an associate professor of technology at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, told BI. Without a pardon, Wade would likely have difficulty obtaining security clearance or getting approval for funding from federal agencies, he said. And with the case fully sealed, Corellium may have been in a tight spot if it was asked to disclose whether its executives had criminal records.

Wandt also said the pardon would make disclosures less awkward if Corellium seeks an initial public offering in the future.

“If they’re going to go public at some point, they’d have to disclose a lot about their C-suite personnel, about their leadership,” Wandt said. “They might want to pardon him so they don’t have to disclose that a former felon is their CTO.”

Considering the success of Corellium and the technical sophistication required to run the spamming operation two decades ago, Wade may have had skills the FBI found useful.

“He probably has a lot of techniques that became useful to the bureau, and maybe that’s how he worked his time off,” Boyle said.

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