Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes asks Trump to commute prison sentence | US news
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes asked Donald Trump to commute her sentence after she was found guilty of defrauding investors in a now-defunct blood-testing startup once valued at $9 billion, according to a notice on the U.S. Department of Justice website.
The Justice Department’s pardon attorney lists the status of the commutation request he filed last year as pending.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Holmes, 37, founder of collapsed blood-testing company Theranos, was found guilty of four counts of defrauding investors and was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison in November 2022.
Holmes, who dropped out of college without studying medicine, deceived regulators and the world’s richest people, including Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger and Larry Ellison, into believing he had found a way to test for a variety of health conditions with just a needle of blood.
It has applied for a patent for the technology, which aims to perform a wide range of tests on small amounts of blood; This was a development that would eliminate the need for large blood samples for diagnosis.
The collapse started in 2015 article Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou’s article revealing that Theranos’ revolutionary technology is not exactly what it seems. In the following months, Carreyrou revealed that the testing devices that Holmes said could perform various medical tests with just a drop of blood were not actually used to perform most of the analyses.
Following regulators’ investigations, Theranos began withdrawing its tests and recalling its machines. Holmes stepped down as CEO in June 2018 and the company disbanded soon after. That same year, the U.S. government accused Holmes and co-executive director Sunny Balwani of defrauding both investors and patients and making false claims about the effectiveness of the company’s technology.
Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,600 people since he began his second term; many of them for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In his first term, he issued only 237 amnesty and commutation decisions.
