President Donald Trump granted a full pardon to Emory Jones, a longtime associate of Jay-Z who now serves as head of Lifestyle at Roc Nation, clearing a federal drug conviction for which Jones was originally sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison. Alice Marie Johnson, who coordinates clemency recommendations for the White House and was herself pardoned by Trump in 2020 after receiving a life sentence on a nonviolent drug charge in 1996, confirmed the news on Instagram.
Jones pleaded guilty in 1999 to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and was sentenced the following year to 188 months, with five years of supervised release. His legal team filed for a reduction in 2009, submitting character letters including one from Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter. Carter wrote that he had known Jones for 15 years and intended to offer him an executive assistant position at Roc Apparel Group at a starting salary of $50,000, citing Jones' intelligence, interpersonal skills, and work ethic as significant assets to his organization. The resentencing reduced Jones' term by 37 months, to 151 months.
The White House clemency review
Johnson, working under the title "pardon czar," announced on Instagram that Trump had granted clemency and pardons to 30 individuals in total, cases she and her team had carefully reviewed. She credited the White House Counsel team, led by Will Scharf, with the work behind the decisions, and described Jones as someone who "came home determined to build a different life."
Jones submitted his own letter for the 2009 resentencing. He declined to offer excuses, writing: "Of all the excuses that I could have attributed my demise to, I chose not to use a single one. Excuses are tools of the incompetent and only build monuments to nothingness." He also wrote that the people who had supported him through incarceration were owed not money but "the privilege and opportunity to see you do something extremely positive with your life."
Since his release, Jones has held executive roles at Roc Nation and at Paper Planes, the fashion brand he co-founded with Jay-Z in 2014.