Lord Black given pardon for fraud from ‘gracious’ Trump
CONRAD BLACK, the former owner of The Daily Telegraph, has received a full pardon from Donald Trump, months after writing a flattering biography of the US president.
Lord Black, a Canadian-born British citizen, served three and a half years in prison after being convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in 2007.
The former media mogul revealed that Mr Trump called him last week to personally deliver the news, but he had initially believed it was a prank by “friends in the British tabloid media”.
Writing about the pardon in the National Post, Lord Black said: “He could not have been more gracious and quickly got to his point, that he was granting me a full pardon, that would ‘Expunge the bad wrap [sic] you got’.
“The American criminal justice system is frequently and largely evil; I was convicted for attempted obstruction of injustice. It was a smear job.”
Lord Black, 74, published a book last year titled Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other, in which he enumerated the president’s successes.
The White House called him “entirely deserving” of the pardon.
Lord Black, born in Montreal, Canada, was the former head of the Hollinger International media group.
He renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 to receive a Conservative peerage but was found guilty in a US court in 2007 of scheming to siphon off millions of dollars from the sale of newspapers owned by Hollinger.
Two of his three fraud convictions were later voided. He was released from prison in May 2012.
He has long been associated with Mr Trump who was reportedly prepared to testify in Lord Black’s defence at his trial in 2007 but was not called.
The president has also pardoned Patrick Nolan, an advocate for criminal justice reform who spent more than two years in prison in the Nineties.