President Trump issued a full pardon to Troy Lake and his business Elite Diesel Service after being convicted last December for disabling emissions systems in hundreds of commercial diesel trucks. Lake served seven months in federal prison before being released to house arrest to complete his one-year and one-day sentence, reports Cowboy State Daily. Lake and his business had also paid fines totaling $52,500. All that, plus his felony conviction, is now behind him.
According to the Department of Justice, Lake pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by disabling emission control devices in at least 344 heavy-duty commercial trucks. The DOJ placed Lake at the center of “a widespread conspiracy to tamper with emission controls on diesel trucks across the country,” naming eight co-conspirators. These businesses paid fines, but no one else was imprisoned as Lake was.
Lake and his supporters tell a rather different story of his deeds. Another Cowboy State Daily article describes Lake and his company as simply helping customers keep their trucks on the road, from older ones that weren’t running well to new trucks that had problems straight off the dealer lot. The company spent over $1 million on development and equipment not only to bypass on-board diagnostic systems, but also to tune the engines to run cleaner than they originally did. However, the government does not look kindly on shops that bypass federally mandated emission controls, regardless of their intentions.
U.S. Attorney’s Office staffer Rebecca Weber, the federal prosecutor who secured Troy’s prison sentence six years later, characterized it as a fruitful operation.
“And what that search warrant revealed and later investigation revealed was that Elite Diesel was really the epicenter in this region for heavy-duty emissions tampering,” said Weber.
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She reasoned that the court should make an example of Troy Lake.
Cause and effect
Lake’s supporters rallied behind him, asking Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis to push for a pardon from President Trump. That effort was ultimately successful. But the bigger story is still unfolding, and may have greater consequences than one man receiving a Presidential pardon.
With Lake receiving his, the eight other businesses that the DOJ cited as co-conspirators may come looking for pardons as well. After all, if Lake was allegedly the center of this vast conspiracy and he got pardoned, they may well wonder why they shouldn’t receive the same treatment, especially after cooperating with the DOJ investigation. Then there are all the smaller players performing similar deletes on personal pickups. Some of them get busted, but by this reasoning, since Lake was pardoned, shouldn’t they be, too? It opens a potential avenue for bypassing the Clean Air Act through Presidential pardons without changing or repealing the actual law, a task that should be the responsibility of Congress.
However, the same Senator Lummis who advocated for Lake’s pardon has also introduced the Diesel Truck Liberation Act of 2025, “A bill to prohibit the enforcement of laws relating to the installation, certification, and maintenance of emissions control devices under the Clean Air Act, and for other purposes.” Not only would it outlaw emission regulation enforcement, but it would also expunge all previous convictions and free anyone currently in prison for such violations. Although the bill’s name specifies “diesel,” that word does not appear anywhere else in the bill. As currently written, it would also apply to gas engines, overturning cases like Cobb Tuning’s alleged tampering with emission controls as well.
Normally, I would say it’s unlikely that such a far-reaching bill would have a chance of passing and reaching the President’s desk for a signature. But these are not normal times. Given Trump’s previous statements that emission standards don’t “mean a damn bit of difference for the environment” and “make it impossible for people to build cars,” it sounds like exactly the sort of bill he might get behind.
