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 would no longer criminally prosecute cases such as Lake’s.
“Today, [the Justice Department] is exercising its enforcement discretion to no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act based on allegations of tampering with onboard diagnostic devices in motor vehicles,” the post said. “DOJ is committed to sound enforcement principles, efficient use of government resources, and avoiding overcriminalization of federal environmental law.”
The post noted, however, that DOJ would “still pursue civil enforcement for these violations when appropriate.”
The same day as that DOJ announcement, the government dropped its case against Tracy Coiteux, a Washington woman who had appealed a 2024 conviction for tampering with diesel trucks’ emissions monitoring systems.
On Feb. 12 — two weeks before Lake was Lummis’ guest at the State of the Union Address — Trump also pardoned Lake’s company, Elite Diesel Services Inc., which was sentenced to five years of probation at the same time Lake was sentenced. Trump’s pardon forgives $50,000 worth of fines levied against the company.
No matter what one thinks about Lake’s case, he was not sentenced to “seven years in jail … because he fixed his own car,” as Trump framed it.
Right to Repair
Moreover, the case is only tangentially related to the so-called “right to repair” debate to which Trump tied it.
“We had the auto industry in yesterday,” Trump said in remarks on June 4 about a meeting he had that included the heads of Ford, General Motors and Penske Corporation. “They don’t want people to fix their car. I said, that’s strange, I’ve never heard of that. They have a thing to — nobody’s allowed to fix their car. They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.
“Can you believe it?” Trump asked. “They want a bill that prohibits people from fixing. So if you’re mechanically inclined — you know, I grew up. I went to school with some guys; they were, in some cases, horrible students, but they could fix an engine blindfolded. … But they were great. And so there’s a move on to stop people from fixing their car. I didn’t understand it.”
The following day in Wisconsin, Trump asked local farmers at a roundtable, “Do you like it, the right to repair?
“It was a little strange,” Trump said. “I mean, some of you are better mechanics than the people at John Deere. … Let’s say you have a tractor, it’s broken and you know exactly how to fix it. You wouldn’t be too happy about being mandated to bring the tractor back to John Deere or wherever you got it, right? You’d like to fix it.
“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail. 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?”
Again, Lake was not prosecuted for simply “fixing his car or his truck.”
The issue of “right to repair” is contentious and also more complicated than Trump’s description suggests.
As the National Conference of State Legislatures explains, “Right to repair legislation is directed at the ability of consumers to repair their own products instead of going back to the original manufacturer for service.”
“In the context of the aftermarket, it refers to consumers’ ability to select who repairs and/or maintains their motor vehicles,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2024 report on the subject.
While, broadly, car buyers have the right to fix their own autos, or to take them to a repair shop of their choice (rather than to the dealer), a political debate has arisen over the “telematics” inside cars, “the wireless transmission of data to and from vehicles and data centers hosted by the vehicle manufacturers,” the CRS report said.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing most of the major auto manufacturers, argued in 2023 that public access to telematics would “create privacy and cybersecurity risks.”
As Todd Spangler, Washington correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, wrote on June 8, “The conflict comes down to who has the proprietary right to all that know-how, intellectual property and access: the manufacturer, whose business model may rely on it, or the owner, who buys it.”
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