North Carolina’s insurance commissioner has heard nothing from the White House, three weeks after he sent a letter urging the president to refrain from pardoning twice-convicted insurance entrepreneur Greg Lindberg.
“Mr. Lindberg’s criminal conduct was not incidental, technical, or victimless. It was deliberate, sustained, and directly aimed at corrupting a state regulat
ory system charged with protecting the public in order to enrich himself,” reads the letter from Commissioner Mike Causey, who wore a wire and recorded a conversation that led to Lindberg’s bribery conviction in 2020 and again in a retrial in 2024.
North Carolina’s U.S. Senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, both Republicans, have agreed with Causey that Lindberg should not be pardoned, said a spokesman for the NC Department of Insurance.
A pardon for Lindberg, a reported billionaire who has engaged in extensive litigation over his criminal charges and intertwined insurance enterprises in the last six
years, was not on most North Carolina officials’ radar until recently. President Donald Trump
has now pardoned so many convicted felons, including a former Illinois governor, a former Tennessee state senator, a Virginia sheriff convicted of
accepting bribes, the former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking, as well as a Lindberg co-defendant, that the probability of a free pass for Lindberg now seems more likely.
And Lindberg, once a heavy donor to Republican candidates, has engaged in an extensive public relations and lobbying effort to sway Trump. In October, Lindberg hired Trump’s former bodyguard to lobby for a pardon, according to news reports.
Trump has blamed his predecessor’s Department of Justice, in part, for what he has called overzealous and partisan prosecutions for the more than 1,600 convictions and arrests that Trump has overturned since taking office a year ago. B
ut Causey, a Republican and former insurance agent, said Lindberg’s arrest and trials were based on extensive proof of illegal actions and financial improprieties.
“The evidence presented was not speculative. It was contemporaneously recor
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ded, exhaustively investigated, and ultimately proven in federal court,” Causey’s letter reads. “Mr. Lindberg’s actions were a calculated attempt to undermine regulatory oversight, evade accountability, and silence
those whose duty it was to safeguard policyholders, retirees, and working families.”
The harm that Lindberg created for policyholders of his troubled life insurance companies continues to play out, the commissioner noted.