My first thought is that this entire article reads like a camouflaged press release from Meta.
The source for the article seems to be an anonymous, internal leak, but those “leaks” are often from the company itself as a way to send a message while maintaining plausible deniability.
My second thought is that they are grouping together wildly different types of infractions without saying how many people were guilty of each one. It’s possible that one person was committing outright fraud while everyone else was just accused of a minor technicality.
Finally, the accusation of “pooling” funds seems like a big tell. That’s what you should want the employees to do to save the company money. Without specific details about why that was wrong this sounds more like a gotcha than a legitimate reason to fire someone.
All of these together make this article seem like a way of scaring employees into resigning so they can cut the workforce without being subject to WARN act requirements.
@athairmor@lemmy.world is right; presidents cannot pardon state level crimes: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3-1/ALDE_00013316/
Specifically, the offense must be “against the United States”, and state level offenses are only against the respective state, not the United States.