Trump Pardons Conrad Black

by Joel B. Pollak

President Donald Trump granted a full pardon Wednesday to former publisher Conrad Black, a Canadian who embraced the U.S., only to find himself the target of what many observers considered a wrongful prosecution and conviction in 2007.

In a column celebrating his pardon Wednesday evening, Black recalled that his prosecution was the result of a clerical error, and that the law under which he was convicted was later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Black, an admirer of the U.S. and the author of several noted biographies of American presidents, including Richard Nixon and FDR, became a bitter critic of the country’s legal system, calling it a “rotting carcass” in 2016, after serving over three years in federal prison.

He had been a friend of Donald Trump for many years, and was one of the few pundits who understood, throughout the 2016 election, that Trump could win the presidency.

As Black wrote in April 2016:

Donald Trump has entered a vortex and made it wider and deeper. It is clear from voting patterns that his assault on political correctness and his specific attacks on illegal immigration and trade deals that seem to have resulted in the exportation of unemployment to the U.S. — and on a feeble foreign policy that has effectively invited America’s traditional friends and adversaries to change places — have pulled in very large numbers of Democrats and independents who had often not bothered to vote, so disgusted are they with current politics. It is unlikely that any other Republican could keep this harvest of voters, often called Reagan Democrats and essentially the working-class Democrats who, for varying reasons, crossed over to Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.

full story at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/15/justice-trump-pardons-conrad-black/