Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Ike Perlmutter, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Chris Wade, christopher wade, donald trump

Why Did Ike Perlmutter Get Donald Trump To Pardon Christopher Wade?

Why Did Marvel Comics' Ike Perlmutter Get Former President Donald Trump To Pardon Computer Programmer Christopher Wade?

In 2020, Bleeding Cool ran an article titled "Marvel's Ike Perlmutter Persuaded Trump To Pardon Christopher Wade". Yesterday, the article started getting significant traffic. Why? Well therein lies a tale.

Former President Donald Trump issued several Presidential pardons before the end of his presidency, including American mercenaries, political allies, family members and Christopher Wade. The White House stated that "President Trump granted a full pardon to Christopher Wade. Isaac Perlmutter, Mark Templeton, and numerous current and former law-enforcement officials supported Wade's pardon. Mr Wade served two years' probation after pleading guilty to various cyber crimes. Since his conviction, he has shown remorse and sought to make his community a safer place."

It was former Marvel chairman Ike Perlmutter's involvement that got Bleeding Cool's attention and justified the article. Ike is a personal friend of Trump and a local member of Trump's Palm Beach, Florida club, Mar-A-Lago. Ike Perlmutter and his wife Laura were two of Trump's biggest donors, with around $25 million of donations supporting Trump's unsuccessful 2020 campaign alone. Laura served on Trump's Inauguration Committee four years ago, and Trump appointed Ike to the Veterans Affairs Department.

But regarding Christopher Wade, his sentence was under seal, as were the offences under which he was convicted, leaving the White House to define them simply as "cyber-crimes". The New York Times has been trying to get the records unsealed, and as part of that effort, were ordered by the court to serve Christopher Wade. Eventually the NYT tracked him down to Boyton Beach, Florida.

Highly redacted court documents were released that show he was charged with conspiracy to commit spamming, spamming, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, attempted access device fraud, and unauthorized computer access in 2006 when he was 22 years old, along with two others, and that he was a computer programmer but that he had already served his sentence.

We now know that Christopher Wade is the Australian-born computer programmer Chris Wade, founder and CTO of the software company Correllium. On the same day he got the pardon from Trump, Correllium won a legal battle against Apple, which had claimed that they had copied the iPhone as part of a virtual testing kit for other programmers. Apple appealed, lost again, filed trademark infringement clauses, and eventually settled in 2023.

Why Ike Perlmutter showed such an interest, why Donald Trump agreed, why the details were kept private, why the court case was sealed, why it is still mostly redacted, and what, if anything, it has to do with Mar-A-Lago is still unknown. Bleeding Cool has now reached out to Wade to try and find out anything more.

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