Donald Trump has issued another controversial pardon, this time to entertainment company executive Tim Leiweke, who was charged by the president’s own Department of Justice in July.
Leiweke, co-founder of the Oak View Group, a live entertainment brand, received a federal grand jury indictment this summer for “orchestrating a conspiracy to rig the bidding process for an arena at a public university in Austin, Texas.”
“The defendant rigged a bidding process to benefit his own company and deprived a public university and taxpayers of the benefits of competitive bidding,” Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater said in a statement at the time.
Leiweke had pleaded not guilty to the charge, which could have resulted in a 10-year jail sentence and a $1 million fine, but has now received a “full and unconditional pardon” from the president, according to a clemency certificate posted online.
The executive, who resigned from OVG after the charges were brought, was represented by former lawyer and South Carolina congressman turned current Fox News personality Trey Gowdy, who had lobbied the DOJ to drop the case, according to CNN.
“This has been a long and difficult journey for my wife, my daughter, and me,” Leiweke said in a statement Wednesday. “ The president has given us a new lease on life with which we will be grateful and good stewards.”
The executive has not always been so positive about Trump and previously criticized him in a now-deleted tweet as the “single greatest Con man,” CNN reports.
The clemency order is just the latest to be issued by the president in a flurry of activity over the past few weeks. On Wednesday, he issued full pardons to Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and his wife Imelda, absolving them of the bribery and conspiracy charges on which they had been indicted by his predecessor Joe Biden’s DOJ last year.
In announcing the move, Trump attacked Biden once again, accusing him of going after Cuellar because of his hawkish stance on immigration issues.
“For years, the Biden Administration weaponized the Justice System against their Political Opponents, and anyone who disagreed with them,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
“One of the clearest examples of this was when Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders, and the Biden Border ‘Catastrophe.’”
That followed his pardoning of Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, sentenced to 45 years behind bars for drug trafficking, an apparent contradiction given that Trump is currently threatening war against Venezuela over precisely that issue, which he likewise said had been a “Biden set-up” he wanted to address.
There have also been pardons for Arkansas nursing home operator Joseph Schwartz, accused of Medicaid fraud and tax evasion, and for David Gentile, a New York private equity executive who was accused of defrauding victims of $1.6 billion.
In November, Trump issued a second pardon to Capitol rioter and former Oath Keepers member Dan Edwin Wilson, one of the almost 1,600 people he granted clemency to in his first days in office for their conduct on January 6 2021, who was this time excused over two charges related to the possession of unregistered firearms.
The president also pardoned his former lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney “The Kraken” Powell, and Kenneth Chesebro over their involvement in a scheme to alter the slates of electors chosen by states that voted against the Republican nominee in the 2020 presidential election and ex-New York City cop Michael McMahon, who was convicted of assisting China in a bid to coerce an expat official into returning to Beijing.
