SAN DIEGO — For the second time in five years, President Donald Trump has granted clemency to twice-convicted San Diego businesswoman Adriana Isabel Camberos, this time issuing her and her brother full and unconditional pardons of their fraud convictions after commuting her previous fraud sentence in 2021.

Camberos, 55, was first convicted in 2016 of taking part in a fraud scheme with her husband and others that involved selling counterfeit 5-Hour Energy drinks. She was about halfway through her 26-month prison term in that case when Trump commuted her sentence on the last day of his first term. Unlike a full pardon, that action set her free from prison but didn’t wipe out her conviction.

But in 2023, federal prosecutors in San Diego alleged that Camberos and her brother, Andres “Andy” Enrique Camberos, were operating a new fraud scheme that netted them tens of millions of dollars by selling discounted products meant to be sold in Mexico in the more lucrative U.S. market.

A San Diego federal jury later convicted the siblings on eight fraud counts. Among the jury’s findings was that the siblings committed wire fraud just 42 days after Trump first granted Adriana Camberos clemency.

Last year, a San Diego federal judge sentenced Adriana Camberos to about 14 months in federal prison, and court records showed she began serving that sentence in August. Andy Camberos, 46, was sentenced to one year of house detention.

On Thursday, Trump issued full and unconditional pardons to the siblings. Federal prison records showed Adriana Camberos was released from custody Thursday.

“With immense gratitude to the President, Ms. Camberos and Mr. Camberos accept the pardons issued to them,” attorneys for the siblings wrote in a joint court filing late Thursday.

Marcus Bourassa, an attorney for Adriana Camberos, said in a short statement that his client had been wrongfully convicted.

“She’s home now and very grateful to the President, the White House, and Alice Johnson for their support,” Bourassa said. Trump pardoned Johnson in 2020 and appointed her his “pardon czar” early last year.

Dan Goldman, an attorney for Andy Camberos, also claimed that his client was wrongfully convicted.

“Mr. Camberos is profoundly grateful to President Trump and he and his family look forward to moving to the next chapter of their lives together free of the weight of a wrongful conviction,” Goldman said in a statement.

The U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego, which prosecuted the pair, declined to comment.

Trump on Thursday also pardoned a third San Diego-area defendant, Arie Eric De Jong III, the owner of the San Marcos-based portable toilet company Diamond Environmental Services. De Jong, his chief operating officer and the company pleaded guilty in 2017 to illegally disposing of sludge in cities across Southern California.

De Jong, 59, was sentenced in 2018 to five months in custody. Prison records showed he was released from custody in late 2018. He and his company were indicted again in 2019 on charges that they skirted clean-air rules, but that case was dropped by prosecutors about 18 months later, and Trump’s full and unconditional pardon of De Jong only mentions the 2017 case.

Trump’s two-page “Executive Grant of Clemency” for the Camberos siblings did not offer a reason for granting the pardons, and records from the Office of the Pardon Attorney showed the siblings had not sought clemency through that official channel. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about why Trump pardoned the siblings or how the pardons came about.

The New York Times reported that Trump this week also pardoned a man whose daughter donated millions of dollars to a Trump-backed super PAC, a former governor of Puerto Rico and a former FBI agent convicted in a political corruption scheme. The Times reported that the pardons for Adriana Camberos and those other individuals “were supported by people with close ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit, including lawyers who had previously worked for him.”

The Times reported that a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the pardons on the record said that the actions rectified excessive sentences or prosecutions that were politically motivated.

For the Camberos siblings, it appears that one of the most significant benefits will be the dismissal of the restitution and criminal forfeiture that a judge ordered last year.

In addition to their liquid assets, Chief U.S. District Judge Cynthia Bashant had ordered the siblings to forfeit the Otay Mesa warehouse from which they ran their businesses, multimillion-dollar homes in El Cajon and Eastlake, three additional properties in San Diego and Chula Vista, a condo in Coronado, a 2014 Ferrari F12 Berlinetta and three 2019 Range Rover SUVs.

Attorneys for the siblings were in the process of challenging the most recent forfeiture order when Trump pardoned them. Bashant signed an order Friday, finding those challenges moot now that the duo has been pardoned.

According to prosecutors, the siblings used several businesses they owned in the Otay Mesa area to illegally purchase wholesale groceries and other consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount on the promise that they would be marketed in Mexico, but they instead turned around and sold the products in the more lucrative U.S. market, undercutting business rivals.

Goldman, the defense attorney for Andy Camberos, acknowledged at trial that the siblings “engaged in product diversion,” but argued that selling Mexico-bound products in the U.S. was not an illegal conspiracy, as prosecutors contended, but rather a “sharp business practice.”

Goldman told the jury during opening statements that the siblings should also be legally shielded because they had been acting on the advice of several lawyers who greenlit their business practices.

The jury sided with the government, convicting both siblings on one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and seven counts of wire fraud. The jury acquitted them on three counts of mail fraud. The siblings were in the process of appealing their convictions to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when they were pardoned Thursday.

Among the jury’s findings was that Adriana Camberos committed wire fraud just 42 days after Trump first granted her clemency on Jan. 20, 2021.

She was in prison at that time for her role in a scheme to sell counterfeit 5-Hour Energy drinks along with her ex-husband, Joseph Shayota, and several other business associates. Federal prosecutors in that case, which was prosecuted in Northern California, said the defendants first made counterfeit English labels so they could resell 350,000 bottles of Spanish-label 5-Hour Energy drinks that didn’t sell as well as expected in Mexico. Once those drinks sold, Joseph Shayota and others came up with a new scheme to make use of the high-quality counterfeit labels by concocting their own beverage that they packaged and sold as 5-Hour Energy, according to trial evidence.

Nine people charged in that case pleaded guilty, while Shayota and Camberos were convicted at trial in 2016. Camberos spent years appealing her conviction and sentence before reporting to prison in 2019.

At sentencing in the more recent San Diego case last April, Bashant said the Camberos siblings made tens of millions of dollars based on “a series of lies … (and) elaborate schemes.” But she said the conduct was less egregious than the counterfeit energy drink scheme that first landed Camberos in prison.

The judge sentenced Adriana Camberos to one year and one day in federal prison in the new case, plus an additional two months in custody for violating her supervised release in her previous case. The judge sentenced Andy Camberos to one year of home detention.

In addition to the companies that Andy Camberos ran with his sister, he was the founder and CEO of Grasshopper Dispensary, Chula Vista’s first legal cannabis shop. In late 2023, Chula Vista city officials demanded that he divest himself of his interest in the dispensary or face the business being closed.

The siblings’ saga also became a political issue last year in the county Board of Supervisors race in which Chula Vista Mayor John McCann lost to Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre.

McCann had supported Adriana Camberos’ first clemency petition when he was a City Council member by writing a letter on her behalf. He told the Union-Tribune in 2021 that he did so at the behest of Andy Camberos. In 2023, McCann explained that he knew Andy Camberos because they attended the same high school, albeit 10 years apart, and that they met while touring the marijuana store.

After her sentence was commuted, inewsource reported, Adriana Camberos and her brother each contributed $360, the maximum allowed under city law, to McCann’s 2022 mayoral campaign. The news site also reported that Adriana Camberos contributed $20,000 to a Republican-aligned political action committee that spent more than $100,000 opposing McCann’s rival in the 2022 mayoral election.

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