We should start with the fact that I am a huge advocate of pardoning anyone who was charged, arrested, and/or convicted of these emissions-related issues and fixing or changing the emissions-related crazy our country has found itself in. My previous article on diesel pardons is here, and my second, which touches on the Department of Defense and related emissions issues, is here. My website www.dieselmandate.com is here. While these pardons are news, this is a pet project of mine as a truck driver, fleet owner, and industry advocate, which grew after my recent calls with Kory Willis and his team.

The warrant runs two pages. The first is headed Executive Grant of Clemency and carries a case caption, United States v. Pure Addiction Diesel Performance, LLC, et al., 3:23-CR-189, with one name typed beneath it, Travis Turner. The second carries the Sharpie signature and the gold seal of the Department of Justice, and it’s dated the third day of September in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-six and of the Independence of the United States the Two Hundred and Fifty-first. The Office of the Pardon Attorney posted Turner’s warrant with 28 others from the same day: 23 pardons and six commutations. Eleven of the 23 pardons went to people convicted in Clean Air Act cases over deleted and tuned diesel vehicles.

Turner owned Pure Addiction Diesel Performance in Hillsboro, Oregon. From 2018 through 2020, the shop pulled emissions equipment and reprogrammed the onboard diagnostics on roughly 245 diesel vehicles, charging about $2,000 a truck and taking in more than $400,000, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon. Prosecutors filed a criminal information on June 1, 2023, and on June 20, the shop and Turner pleaded guilty and were sentenced the same day before U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon. Turner’s count was accessory after the fact to Clean Air Act tampering, built on 46 service invoices he gave investigators that read “parts only” when the work included deletes. He got six months in federal prison. The company pleaded to the tampering count itself and received three years’ probation, and the office announced it would pay $148,733 to EPA. Ethan Knight, then chief of the office’s Economic Crimes Unit, said the shop and its owner “favored their own financial interests above the health and safety of our community.”

The shop told its side in a fundraiser posted that July. It said other small shops had settled civil cases without publicity while Turner faced a felony, that the case “was made a spectacle and escalated to an absolutely unnecessary level,” and that Pure Addiction had stopped offering certain performance upgrades before the government charged it. It said a plea was presented as Turner’s only option after more than two years in limbo. A trial, the shop wrote, was more money and more risk than it could carry.

Turner’s warrant names Turner. The company in the caption, which pleaded to the tampering count itself, isn’t on the Sept. 3 list or any other. In the Western District of Michigan, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged 14 defendants in April 2023 in what it called one of the largest cases of its kind: Diesel Freak LLC of Gaylord, Accurate Truck Service LLC and Griffin Transportation Inc. of Grand Rapids, and 11 individuals. Diesel Freak did the tunes, Accurate pulled the hardware, and Griffin, a truckload carrier, brought them both in. On July 3, all three companies were pardoned, along with Diesel Freak owner Ryan LaLone and his brother Wade. On Sept. 3, Diesel Freak employees Dustin Rhine and James Sisson followed. Douglas Larsen, Craig Scholten, and Ryan Bos, who owned Accurate and Griffin, aren’t on either list.

Christopher Kaufman, owner of Diesel & Offroad Authority in Veneta, Oregon, was convicted of tampering with at least 184 vehicles between 2018 and 2022 and pardoned Sept. 3. His company, sentenced beside him on Sept. 4, 2024, to three years’ probation and a $150,000 fine, wasn’t. Kyle Offringa of Caledonia, Michigan, who reprogrammed the onboard diagnostics on heavy-duty trucks for a Fultonville, New York, operator between 2017 and 2019, was pardoned. Highway and Heavy Parts LLC, the parts supplier that billed $1,250 to $1,750 a truck for his work and paid a $25,000 fine, wasn’t. Ryan Milliken of Mary Esther, Florida, whose company Hardaway Solutions built custom delete tunes and sold them to Spokane trucking owner Pavel Turlak, was pardoned. Hardaway, which pleaded guilty with him, wasn’t, and neither was Turlak, whose plea also covered fraud on COVID relief money.

The Anchorage shop Arm Rippin Toys had three co-owners who each pleaded guilty in 2022 in a case over at least 37 deleted and tuned vehicles. Michael Hanzuk II got a pardon on Sept. 3. Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming haven’t. Matt Geouge’s case in the Western District of North Carolina involved four men. Geouge and Joshua Davis were pardoned July 3, Spade Bailly of Hendersonville was pardoned Sept. 3; and John Slagel of Fairbury, Illinois, is on neither list. Kory Willis of PPEI in Lake Charles, Louisiana, still hasn’t been pardoned, and his civil consent decree in the Western District of Louisiana is out of a pardon’s reach regardless.

Daniel Chase co-owned DC 907 Diesels in Wasilla, Alaska, and was sentenced in November 2023 to three years’ probation and a $50,000 fine for deleting and tuning at least 144 trucks over five years. Isaac Allen owned Red Barn Diesel Performance in Windham, Maine, and his pardon covers two counts: the tampering conspiracy and obstruction, for underreporting to the EPA how many vehicles his shop had tuned when the agency sent him an information request in June 2022. Jonathan Long is an active-duty Navy diesel technician stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. His company, Open Wide Performance, sold delete kits, pipes, cables, and tunes in 2019 and 2020, and in May 2025 a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia sentenced him to 12 months’ probation, 91 days of home confinement, and an $88,514 fine.

The count since the first diesel pardon, Troy Lake of Elite Diesel Service in Wyoming on Nov. 7, 2025, now stands at 28 Clean Air Act grants on the Pardon Attorney’s list, 21 people and seven companies. Elite Diesel’s own pardon came on Feb. 12, 2026, three months after its owner’s, so a company left off one batch can turn up in a later one, and Bailly, left off in July, turned up in September. Clemency can move on a petition or on the president’s own initiative, and the warrants don’t say which. On Jan. 21, 2026, the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division announced it would no longer bring criminal charges for tampering with onboard diagnostics in motor vehicles, while leaving civil penalties in place.

A pardon covers the federal crime of the person or company named in the warrant. It doesn’t reach a civil proceeding. The $148,733 is the penalty in an EPA Region 10 consent agreement and final order against Pure Addiction, docket CAA-10-2023-0085, signed June 20 and June 22, 2023. It alleges the shop sold at least 351 defeat parts between January 2019 and April 2021, including 253 tuning products, and tampered with at least 139 vehicles; EPA says it reduced the shop’s penalty, showing it couldn’t pay more and stay in business. The shop neither admitted nor denied the facts, agreed to six installments, and certified compliance with the Act. The U.S. Attorney in Alaska won a False Claims Act judgment against Hanzuk in February 2024 for more than $350,000 over an Economic Injury Disaster Loan application on which he certified that his shop wasn’t engaged in illegal activity while the delete work was underway. For a company that stays convicted, Section 306 of the Clean Air Act, 42 U.S.C. 7606, bars federal agencies from contracting with it for work performed at the facility where the violation happened until EPA certifies the condition is corrected. Removing emissions equipment or installing a defeat device on a highway truck is still a Clean Air Act violation, with EPA civil penalties of up to $4,527 per tampering event or defeat device sale.

On July 14, 2026, EPA published a proposal, docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2026-0728, to replace the engine derates and speed reductions that follow a diesel exhaust fluid or SCR fault with audible and visible warnings on newly built highway and nonroad diesel engines, and to consider guidance letting manufacturers carry the same change to trucks already on the road. The comment period closed Aug. 29. The Environmental Protection Network filed comments on Aug. 27 arguing that warnings in place of derates would make NOx compliance voluntary in practice, and as of Sept. 8 EPA still listed the rule as proposed. In Congress, Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia introduced H.R. 8079, the Diesel Truck Liberation Act, in March 2026 as the House companion to a bill Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming filed in October 2025. It would bar federal requirements to install or maintain emissions controls and onboard diagnostics and wipe out civil and criminal liability for trucks without them. The House Energy and Commerce Committee referred it.

For a shop owner, the Sept. 3 list settles one thing: the name on the warrant is the only name cleared, whether that’s the owner, the company, or the employee. For a fleet running deleted trucks today, the Justice Department’s January policy takes the criminal case off the table and leaves the civil penalty, state enforcement, and EPA’s pending rule exactly where they were. The Office of the Pardon Attorney takes petitions at USPardon.Attorney@usdoj.gov and posts every grant on one public page. Travis Turner’s warrant is on that page under Sept. 3, 2026, and Pure Addiction Diesel Performance LLC isn’t.