Trump’s Inaccurate Anecdote on ‘Right to Repair’ Cars

President Donald Trump waded into the contentious “right to repair” your own auto debate, but he recounted a wildly inaccurate anecdote to bolster his support for consumers.

According to Trump, in remarks on June 4, “They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.”

The following day, at a roundtable on agriculture in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, the president again referenced the case.

“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail,” Trump said. “You know that? Do you know that I pardoned a man last week who was sentenced to seven years in jail because he got caught fixing his car or his truck? I said — I like to always say, ‘What did he do?’ ‘Sir, he was fixing his truck.’ I said, ‘How long is he getting?’ ‘Seven years.’ I said, ‘Say it again.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever heard — like two weeks ago. I gave him a pardon because he had to go to jail because he was fixing his tractor or his truck. Can you believe it?”

The White House did not respond to our request for backup, but Trump appears to be referring to his Nov. 7 pardon of Troy Lake, a Wyoming diesel mechanic who served seven months of a one-year sentence — not seven years — after pleading guilty to violating the Clean Air Act by disabling emissions monitoring systems on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks. (No other pardon in Trump’s second term fits the description.)

According to a Dec. 9, 2024, news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, Lake and his company, Elite Diesel Service Inc., instructed company employees “to disable the computerized on-board diagnostic (OBD) systems on at least 344 heavy-duty commercial trucks. OBDs are required under the Clean Air Act to monitor emissions control hardware on vehicles to ensure that they are functioning properly.”

There were also eight co-conspirators, the release stated, who “hired Elite and Lake to manipulate the OBDs so that the OBDs would not detect the malfunctions.” Those co-conspirators, who cooperated with the investigators, were fined more than $500,000 in total.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Lake violated the Clean Air Act’s prohibition against tampering with monitoring devices.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, emissions control devices “are critical to maintaining air quality, and when these controls are disabled, the increase in excess tailpipe pollution is significant. A study of the effects of tampering with these 344 trucks showed that the conspirators in this case collectively caused an illegal increase in pollutants of at least 1,300 tons of excess nitrogen oxides, 30 tons of excess non-methane hydrocarbons, 600 tons of excess carbon monoxide, and 30 tons of excess particulate matter.”

“For years, the defendants led a large-scale conspiracy designed to violate the Clean Air Act by defeating emissions control equipment on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks,” Special Agent in Charge Lance Ehrig of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division in Colorado said at the time. “The actions by the defendants and their co-conspirators directly resulted in a significant increase in excess pollution, which diminished air quality and further placed vulnerable populations at risk of developing adverse health conditions.”

Lake maintained he was merely trying to spare small businesses from expensive and unnecessary repair bills.

“I didn’t want to be Robin Hood. I just felt that it was wrong for what the government was doing to American people that wanted to work,” Lake told Fox News on Oct. 27.

“All of us true Americans aren’t opposed against clean air. We want clean air,” Lake told Wyoming’s Oil City News in November. “But my problem with the deal was I just started seeing more and more — especially owner-operators or small companies — going out of business or struggling to keep this stuff running. It cost them $20,000 to fix it and I was charging them $2,500 or $2,800 to delete it and never have that problem again.”

Lake’s case caught the attention of Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who petitioned the president in October for a pardon, casting Lake’s conviction as an example of the Biden administration’s “overreach into the daily lives of hardworking Americans in communities across the west.”

That same month, Lummis introduced the Diesel Truck Liberation Act , which would prohibit the federal government from “requiring manufacturers to install or maintain emissions control devices or onboard diagnostic systems” and remove “EPA authority to enforce Clean Air Act requirements related to vehicle emissions controls.” It would also bar the civil or criminal prosecution of those who violate “federal law for tampering or improving emissions equipment.” The bill has not made it out of committee.

On Jan. 21, the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resource Division announced via X that it woul…