Exclusive jailhouse interview: ‘Tiger King’ outlines plan for central role at Trump's side

In the final hours before President-elect Donald Trump left office in January 2021, “Joe Exotic” of “Tiger King” fame prepared for a presidential pardon from his two-decade federal prison sentence — with a limo and fans awaiting his release from confinement.

Trump didn’t come through with a pardon for the “Tiger King” — real name Joseph Maldonado. But as Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office in January, the star of the hit Netflix show is hopeful he will be a free man by April 2025, at the latest.

“Sean Hannity and a lot of people told me that I was on the pardon list, that they've seen the pardon list, and January 6 happened, and everything got screwed up, and then I got left behind,” Maldonado told Raw Story in a phone interview from Federal Medical Center, Fort Worth in Texas.

This time will be different because Trump has a “good start already,” Maldonado said, noting that not only has Trump been in executive office previously, but he’s also wasted no time in naming his cabinet picks.

So far, Trump has nominated eight picks for his cabinet from his group of high-profile MAGA supporters, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as attorney general, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as ambassador to the United Nations and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Maldonado said he wishes Trump would give him a cabinet position, too, as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“I think I could save the taxpayers billions of dollars and get a little more honesty within that service,” Maldonado said. “We're spending billions of dollars on vehicles, staff, everything to regulate animals that are already regulated by international treaties.”

Maldonado said in the more than 20 years he ran the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma at the center of the 2020 Netflix documentary series, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” he never heard from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Rather, he was licensed under the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Animal Welfare Act, he said.

“In 23 years of owning that zoo, I bred, I sold, I euthanized, I exhibited, and I let people play with baby tigers. 23 years,” Maldonado said. “Federal Fish and Wildlife never one time asked me how many I had, where the babies that are born went to, where any of the dead bodies went to, or what we've done with the dead bodies when one dies and we had to euthanize one, or anything. They never wanted to know how many tigers I had.”

Trump's spokespeople did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.

Maldonado is serving a 21-year sentence for two counts of murder-for-hire related to alleged plans to kill his big cat rescue foe, Carole Baskin, along with 19 other counts of wildlife crime related to the alleged killing of five tigers and the illegal sale of tiger cubs, violating the Lacey Act, prohibiting illegal wildlife trade, and the Endangered Species Act, according to the Department of Justice.

Maldonado maintains his innocence and is awaiting a response from an appeals court in Denver, he said. Maldonado said he expects to hear a decision by March or April 2025, so even if Trump or President Joe Biden don’t pardon him — and he said “they let me down four years ago" — Maldonado is hopeful to be out of prison at least through the appeals process.

Presidential aspirations

The “Tiger King” ran for president himself this year as a Democrat, suspending his campaign fundraising in May, Raw Story reported. He previously ran for president and governor of Oklahoma as a libertarian but switched parties due to too much party in-fighting, he said.

He also wanted to run as a Democrat in order to debate Biden about the economy and get answers about not following through on “campaign promises about justice reform and prison reform,” Maldonado said.

“I'm running as a Democrat because first someone has to become a new style of Democrat that meets in the middle like pro choice and pro 2nd amendment and tuff [sic] on violent crime but not so harsh on nonviolent offenders except sex offenders. Our prisons are over full of small time drug offenders while sex offenders and violent criminals go home first,” wrote Maldonado to Raw Story in a September 2023 letter on lined notebook paper with erratic capitalization.

Maldonado said despite running as a Democrat he ultimately endorsed Trump because “he was the strongest of all of them to keep us out of World War III and get the economy back on track, so I would have voted for him if I’d had the right to vote.”

Still, Trump's sweep of all swing states surprised Maldonado, along with the fact that Trump was the first convicted felon elected president.

“Now that Trump is a convicted felon, even if they drop his charges, he still got convicted. That will never leave an American citizen's mind. He was convicted, and America still loves him. They voted him in overwhelmingly,” Maldonado said. “I think people nowadays can look past the broken system and see through the smoke screens, and that's what I'm hoping President Biden or President Trump will do sooner than later is look through the BS and the smoke screens in my case.”