Shark-hating Trump pardons two divers convicted of freeing 19 predators

President Donald Trump has pardoned two divers previously convicted of freeing 19 sharks.

It’s somewhat surprising, as capricious Trump has a noted dislike of the aquatic beasts. He’s previously said Lake Michigan is preferable to the Pacific or Atlantic oceans because: “You don’t have sharks. That’s a big advantage. I’ll take the one without the sharks,” and, posting on X), “Sharks are last on my list — other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!”

And who can forget his dilemma about being electrocuted by a sinking boat’s battery, or getting eaten by a shark? (See below for a round-up of shark-based insights from Trump.)

Nevertheless, the pardon was signed last Wednesday, overturning the 2020 conviction of Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr. They had been convicted of theft of property within special maritime jurisdiction. “We all thought we were uncovering a crime and we ended up being charged as criminals for it,” says Mansell.

“It was an ordinary day,” he told the BBC World Service. “I’d been running and operating shark charters out of Jupiter, Florida, for years and off in the distance I spotted something red. I didn’t know what it was. I thought maybe it was a diver. The captain of the boat and I decide to go and investigate. We get to the spot and discover it was a longline, and the first thing we did was to call law enforcement.”

At the time, Mansell was a crew member on Moore’s shark-diving charter boat (the latter being the captain). They’d spotted the longline about three miles off Jupiter Inlet in August 2020.

They both believed that the line was illegal.

“It was killing sharks right over our dive site,” Mansell continues. “The very sharks we take people out to see, this line was killing them.”

Mansell and Moore then proceeded to cut off the sharks from the line. And while they were doing it, they had “regular phone calls back and forth to law enforcement, basically explaining what we were doing in real time. We thought we were uncovering a crime.

“I didn’t know there was a possibility you could kill not only endangered species, but protected species and at that volume.”

Dive charter had law enforcement onboard

The added irony to how their endeavours played out was that the family onboard the dive charter with Mansell that day was embedded in law enforcement. “We had the chief of police of Kansas City, his son, who is SWAT, his daughter, who is a first responder. It was so ironic. We all thought we were uncovering a crime, and we ended up being charged as criminals for it.”

Mansell says he went home feeling good. That is, until he got a call from somebody who saw a Facebook post. “The fisherman who owned the gear posted that we were going to be incarcerated because it was a legal line, and there was a permit for that line.

“My heart fell to the bottom of my stomach. There was no way that line was legal, I thought. There was no way that we were going to go to jail, let alone be tried by a grand jury and convicted of a felony offence.”

But Mansell was wrong.

Federal prosecutors charged the men with theft. Officials said the line actually belonged to a fisherman licensed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to catch sharks for research. While the two avoided prison time, they were ordered to pay $3,343.72 in restitution, and the felony convictions prevented them from voting in Florida, owning firearms and travelling freely outside the United States, says NBC News.

Convicted for freeing nineteen sharks

The conviction “put a halt to all my trips, on all my income. I had to max out three or four credit cards on lawyer bills, and I started spiralling into debt.

“You can only imagine the implications of that and being labelled a criminal, all for trying to do the right thing. It was very difficult.”

But things moved relatively swiftly. Mansell had a government-appointed appellant lawyer. The lawyer got the case in front of three judges in the Eleventh Circuit (appeals court). Although the conviction was not overturned, one of the judges spoke out against the prosecutor and “ripped him a new one” saying it should never seen trial. “It was government overreach and abuse of power,” Mansell says.

After the case received media coverage, Mansell was stunned when the White House reached out to his lawyer to say the case was being looked into. And a while later, he received the news that Trump had pardoned the pair.

“I’d love to take him diving if he wanted to, and show him the beauty of sharks,” Mansell concludes, though judging by the comments from Trump in the video below, that is unlikely to happen.

The main image of a basking shark at St Kilda is for illustrative purposes only. Image courtesy of Craig Nisbet.