Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, unrepentant in a Texas prison, may be angling for a pardon from President Donald Trump.

The convicted fraudster’s account on social media platform X has in recent months repeatedly claimed innocence, and posted a steady stream of comments and content aligned with Trump and his Make America Great Again movement.

Convicted of four counts of felony fraud in 2022 for bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars through her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup, Holmes lost an appeal earlier this year, closing off potential avenues for early release. Her remaining options include a review by the U.S. Supreme Court hearing — which experts say is unlikely — or a presidential pardon.

After perusing the posts on her X account, veteran Bay Area public relations and crisis-control consultant Sam Singer concluded it’s the latter.

“Elizabeth Holmes is openly seeking a pardon from President Trump, hoping that by a combination of sucking up and perhaps digital fawning that she will get it,” he said.

Holmes is not permitted access to the internet or social media from her minimum-security prison outside Houston, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said. Her X account describes its posts as “Mostly my words, posted by others.”

Questions sent to an email address Holmes provided as a contact point for this news organization did not elicit a response. A White House official declined to comment on “potential clemency requests that may or may not exist.” The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to questions about whether Holmes has sought a pardon through its Office of the Pardon Attorney.

One post from Holmes’ account, referencing an anti-abortion post featuring Trump, accused federal government prosecutors of suggesting she get an abortion after she told them a few months before her trial that she was pregnant. “But I knew it was God’s plan” to have her son, William, born in July 2021, the post said.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about Holmes’ claim about the prosecutors.

Another post refers to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s slogan Make America Healthy Again.

“I have been working to Make America Healthy Again since 2004,” the post said. “I don’t know if MAHA is embracing me but I support their cause, Healthier Americans.”

Holmes’ account reposted a right-wing influencer saying “God bless the Trump administration” for stepping in to help conservative “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams of Pleasanton who needed cancer care, and praised Trump-linked pastor Mark Burns. Another post took aim at Trump critic and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

A post appeared to back controversial, deadly Trump administration attacks on suspected drug boats, and another lauded Trump and suggested Democrats prioritize “foreign nationals over our citizens.”

Singer said he was “absolutely floored” by the posts, and was surprised by the focus on Trump-friendly topics, “things that I never associated with her or Theranos and come completely out of the blue.”

Trump has pardoned “a lot of white collar criminals, a lot of people for fraud,” noted Graham Dodds, a political science professor at Concordia University in Montreal who studies the U.S. presidency.

A U.S. Justice Department list shows Trump’s 69 second-term pardons so far include 19 people convicted of fraud. The president this term has also pardoned a number of allies accused or charged in alleged crimes or conduct related to attempts to subvert the 2020 election, including Sidney Powell, a former Trump attorney who spread conspiracy theories about ballot fraud after Trump lost the 2020 election.

While the degree of political alignment with a president has not played a major role in past presidents’ choices of whom to pardon, “emphatically it has been with Trump,” Dodds said. “He’s happy to pardon people who are politically simpatico.”

Holmes’ victims included the Walton family who control Walmart and invested $150 million in Theranos, and the family of Trump’s former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who invested $100 million. Both families are Republican mega-donors, data from Americans for Tax Fairness show.

Part of the calculus behind presidents’ pardon selections is “not doing wrong by the victims,” Dodds said. “But Trump is hard to predict.”

Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, but her term has been reduced, likely for good behavior and taking prison programming. She is currently scheduled to be released Dec. 30, 2031, according to federal prison authorities.

Holmes’ X account suddenly went live again in August — with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. about justice — after an apparent break from posts since late 2015, two months after the Wall Street Journal began a series of exposés on Theranos.

Before late 2015, her posts often concerned Theranos, promoted empowerment of women and girls, praised women, including Black activist Rosa Parks, medicine pioneer Marie Curie, philanthropist Melinda Gates, right-wing former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and tennis icon Billie Jean King.

Today, Holmes’ account follows a who’s-who of figures in the orbit of President Donald Trump, including top White House advisers Dan Scavino and Sriram Krishnan; White House communications director Steven Cheung; FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy; and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Singer said he didn’t think the X posts would necessarily help Holmes get a presidential pardon.

“It’s an interesting strategy,” Singer said. “But I think it also plays right into the narrative about Elizabeth Holmes that she’s a con woman.”

Holmes over the weekend rolled out another strategy, with her account posting “draft legislation” she’s been “working on in prison.” Her proposed federal “American Freedom Act” has 29 provisions, at least two of them highly relevant to her case.

One would “transfer first time, non-violent offenders with zero point criminal histories” — like Holmes — “to home confinement” from prison.

Another, under “sentencing reform,” would eliminate from federal sentencing guidelines the “dollar driven point system” for fraud and conspiracy charges like those Holmes was convicted for, a system that boosted her sentence because of losses pegged by her judge at $381 million.

That change, Holmes proposed in her draft bill, would be retroactive.

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(Staff writer Martha Ross contributed to this report.)

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