Boosie Badazz is now trying to claw back $300,000 from a Washington DC lobbying firm after a $600,000 push for a Donald Trump pardon failed to produce a result. The dispute has moved into arbitration, putting the fee he paid in 2025 under a microscope.
Boosie Badazz, whose legal name is Torence Hatch, paid JM Burkman & Associates to seek clemency over a federal gun conviction tied to a 2023 music video shooting. He is from Baton Rouge in Louisiana, and the pardon effort was aimed at wiping away a case that still hangs over him.
The amount at issue is not the full fee. Hatch is seeking half of it back, or $300,000, on the theory that the bargain called for a refund if no pardon materialized. The firm says it never agreed to return half the money, and the fight now turns on what the parties actually put in place when the upfront payment was made.
That argument sits on top of a strange sequence that unfolded in 2025. The lobbyists told Hatch’s attorneys that Trump had signed the pardon and that they were waiting for the White House to announce it. The announcement never came. When Hatch’s lawyer checked with the Trump White House, the answer was different: it said it had not received such a request.
Hatch’s underlying case was serious enough to put him at risk of prison. He had pleaded guilty with federal prosecutors after being found with a loaded pistol despite a prior 2011 drug-trafficking conviction. Police said that during a video shoot in San Diego in 2023, they saw him with the handgun in his waistband after monitoring an Instagram Live video for a member of the Neighborhood Crips street gang and tracing the location to a traffic stop that led them to the weapon. Under his plea deal, he received three years of supervised release, 300 hours of community service and a $50,000 fine.
The failed pardon bid was meant to spare him from serving that punishment. Instead, it has become its own legal fight, and the firm has said it was effectively bankrupt while also denying that any promise to refund half the fee was ever agreed to. That leaves arbitration to answer the narrow but expensive question at the center of the dispute: whether the paid clemency push came with a refund term, or whether Boosie Badazz is now chasing money that was never contractually due.
