Diana Harshbarger Corruption & Ethics Healthcare Tennessee

Trump Endorsed Diana Harshbarger on Monday. On Friday He Pardoned Her Husband.

Robert Harshbarger Jr. swapped a cheap unapproved Chinese ingredient into medicine for kidney dialysis patients and got 48 months. Four days after Trump endorsed his wife's re-election, he got a full and unconditional pardon — and his felony record erased, he filed to run for county commission.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 09, 2026

Trump Endorsed Diana Harshbarger on Monday. On Friday He Pardoned Her Husband.

On Monday, November 3, 2025, Donald Trump posted his endorsement of Rep. Diana Harshbarger on Truth Social. "A very successful Pharmacist and Businesswoman," he wrote. "Diana Harshbarger has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election — SHE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!"

Four days later, on Friday, November 7, he signed a document that reads: "BE IT KNOWN, THAT THIS DAY, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES… HAVE GRANTED UNTO THE INDIVIDUAL NAMED BELOW A FULL AND UNCONDITIONAL PARDON."

The case: United States v. Harshbarger, 5:12-CR-40119. The individual: ROBERT HARSHBARGER, JR. — Diana Harshbarger's husband.

What he did

Robert Harshbarger Jr. is a pharmacist. He ran a company called American Inhalation Medication Specialists in Kingsport, Tennessee.

From 2004 to 2009, according to the Justice Department, he substituted cheaper iron sucrose imported from China — bought from Qingdao Shenbang Chemical Company and Shanghai Rory Fine Chemicals — for Venofer, the FDA-approved drug that kidney dialysis patients were supposed to be getting. The patients were treated by Kansas Dialysis Services. Health care programs paid more than $848,000 for medicine that wasn't what it said it was.

There were no reports of patients being harmed. That matters, and it should be said plainly. But as U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom put it at sentencing, the crime "put patients at risk because the FDA cannot assure the safety and effectiveness of products that are not FDA approved."

Harshbarger pleaded guilty in 2013 to one count of distributing misbranded drugs and one count of health care fraud. On November 4, 2013 he was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison, ordered to pay $848,504 in restitution, a $25,000 criminal fine, and to forfeit $425,000 in cash.

What his wife said about it

Diana Harshbarger first ran for Congress in 2020. That spring she ran television ads attacking Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturing and American reliance on it.

When WJHL asked about her husband's case — which was, specifically, a case about passing off Chinese drug ingredients as the approved American product — she answered through her campaign:

"I had nothing to do with it. My husband had a company that made medications. I had no role or involvement in that company whatsoever."

WJHL then pulled the records from the Tennessee Secretary of State.

She was AIMS's secretary and one of only two officers and two directors — her husband being the other — from at least 2000 through 2012. She personally signed the company's 2002, 2006 and 2008 annual reports. When Robert Harshbarger went to prison in 2013, she became the company's president, and kept filing its reports through 2017. A 2000 court motion in a personal-injury suit described both Harshbargers as "the shareholders" of AIMS and said she was driving an AIMS company car.

Her campaign chairman called the whole subject a "baseless attack" about a "company Diana had zero involvement in. Zero."

To be fair to her: being a corporate secretary is not the same as running the fraud. University of Tennessee law professor Brian Krumm told WJHL that in small businesses a spouse is routinely made secretary because state law requires two officers, and that without evidence she knew or benefited, "the possibility remains that in practical terms she was barely involved."

But he added that a pharmacy is not an ordinary small business. "When you have two professionals, understanding the regulatory issues involved with compounding drugs — let's put it this way, if I was their lawyer I wouldn't recommend a passive position like that. For either of them."

The claim under scrutiny was never "she committed the fraud." It was "no role or involvement whatsoever." That one is contradicted by a decade of her own signatures.

The pardon

Trump issued six pardons that Friday. Two of the others went to former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his chief of staff Cade Cothren, both convicted on federal corruption charges — and both, unlike Harshbarger, still facing prison.

Robert Harshbarger had long since served his time and paid his money. So the pardon didn't get him out of anything. What it did was erase the conviction's legal consequences.

Diana Harshbarger's statement to WJHL:

"My husband paid his debt both personally and financially to society… We are thrilled and grateful that the President looked kindly upon Bob's application."

What the pardon was for

Three months later, the practical effect showed up.

On February 19, 2026, Bob Harshbarger Jr. filed a petition to run for one of three District 6 seats on the Sullivan County Commission. WJHL's account of why that was possible is a single sentence:

"Harshbarger, a former pharmacist, was convicted of felony charges more than a decade ago but became eligible to run for office when he was pardoned by President Donald Trump last November."

The Harshbargers now hold or seek office at three levels at once: Diana in Congress, their son Bobby in the Tennessee Senate, and Bob Jr. on the county commission — the last of those made possible by a presidential pardon issued four days after the president endorsed his wife.

The family's run-ins haven't all been old, either. In 2024, Bob Harshbarger Jr. was accused of stealing and vandalizing campaign signs belonging to his son's opponent, state Sen. Jon Lundberg. That case was dismissed.

Why this is a story about her

A spouse's crime is not the member's crime, and nobody should be judged for who they married.

But this isn't that. It's a member of Congress who ran ads about dangerous Chinese pharmaceuticals while denying any involvement in a company convicted of importing dangerous Chinese pharmaceuticals; whose own state filings show she was its secretary for twelve years and its president for four more; and who received, four days after a presidential endorsement of her campaign, a full pardon for the husband at the center of it.

Harshbarger sits on the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, where she serves as vice chair — the panel that oversees the FDA, the agency whose approval process her husband's company circumvented. In November 2025 she wrote to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking the FDA to stop enforcing its restrictions on compounded peptides. That letter is dated November 10, 2025 — three days after the pardon.

We deserve better.