President Donald Trump was in Wasilla, Alaska, Tuesday night to campaign for incumbent GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan. While there, Trump signed two pardons onstage. The recipients were Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming, Alaska diesel mechanics who had been convicted of felony Clean Air Act violations by the Biden Justice Department. Their offense: modifying diesel engines so the trucks would start and keep running in Alaska winters.
Felonies. Probation. Roughly $66,000 in fines. For working on trucks.
? IT’S OFFICIAL: By stroke of pen, President Trump PERSONALLY and FULLY pardons Alaskan truckers who were criminally charged for simply fixing trucks
The trucker dropped this line: “We’re not criminals…we want to help people!”
“This means the world to me. It really did destroy us.” ??
Their lives were turned upside down over truck repairs and GREEN NEW SCAM BS
Now their records are wiped clean! LET’S GO
No more treating hardworking Americans like criminals!
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 14, 2026
Now, here is the part Biden’s EPA never addressed. The emissions systems mandated under the Obama-era rules — the regeneration cycles, the exhaust fluid, the particulate filters — were engineered in laboratories and modeled for conditions that look nothing like the Alaska Interior in January. In deep cold, those systems fail. The fluid gels. The truck derates, loses power, or shuts down entirely. In the Lower 48 that’s an expensive inconvenience and a tow. On a highway outside Fairbanks at forty below, a dead truck is a survival problem, and the driver inside it is counting minutes.
Sullivan has been making this argument for years, and he’s put it in legislation — the Cold Weather Diesel Reliability Act, which cleared the Environment and Public Works Committee and is heading to the Senate floor. His framing is exactly right: one-size-fits-all policy written for Virginia, imposed on a state where the weather can kill you, enforced against the local mechanics trying to keep drivers alive.
For years, Obama-era diesel regulations that cause trucks to stop working in extreme cold have put Alaskans in danger. The EPA even criminalized local mechanics who were simply trying to keep drivers safe. I worked with these mechanics to get them presidential pardons, but we must fix the system for good. That is why I introduced the Cold Weather Diesel Reliability Act, which recently passed the EPW committee and is heading to the Senate floor! This bill will finally stop these dangerous, one-size-fits-all policies from being forced on Alaska.
— Sen. Dan Sullivan (@SenDanSullivan) September 21, 2026
That’s what makes these prosecutions so revealing. Nobody at the EPA could seriously claim that two shops in Alaska were moving the needle on global emissions. The environmental benefit of destroying these men was indistinguishable from zero. But the regulation existed, the regulation had been violated, and the regulatory state does not possess the capacity to ask whether a prosecution makes any sense. It only asks whether a box went unchecked.
The human cost came out in Fleming’s and Czubak’s own words. “It really did destroy us,” one of them said. “It destroyed friendships. It destroyed families.” That is what a federal felony conviction does to a working man in a small community — the legal bills, the lost customers, the neighbors who start wondering, the years of your life consumed by lawyers.
Trump put it in his own characteristic terms at the rally, asking why a man who undoes an inefficient, expensive emissions system should go to jail, then telling the mechanics their records were now clean as a newborn baby’s backside.
He also noted, while signing, that this was something Joe Biden would have had trouble with, on account of being unable to produce his own signature.
Then from the president: “What an honor, I love doing this stuff.” Believe him. There is no political constituency being served here — two diesel mechanics in Wasilla do not swing an election. This was simply a wrong that could be undone with a pen, and he undid it.
Now pass Sullivan’s bill so the next two don’t need a pardon.
