Trump signs full pardon for British media baron Conrad Black
President Donald Trump has signed a full pardon for Conrad Black, the Canadian-born media mogul who once controlled a media empire that included the Daily Telegraph.
Black, who has British citizenship and was made a British peer by the Queen in 2001, was convicted of both fraud and obstruction of justice in Chicago in 2007.
The US District Court there found him guilty of four counts of fraud, including embezzling $6m in funds from Hollinger International, the newspaper publisher which he controlled.
While two counts were later overturned, Black spent more than three years in prison before being released in 2012.
The White House described Black, who last year published a glowing biography of Trump entitled “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other”, as “entirely deserving” of the pardon.
In its statement, the White House called him an “entrepreneur and scholar,” and said he had made “tremendous contributions to business.”
It also said that many high-profile individuals had “vigorously vouched for his exceptional character,” including Elton John and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who served on the board of Hollinger International.
In addition to the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and Canada’s National Post were also part of Black’s media empire.
In an article published by the National Post on Wednesday, he said that Trump told him in a phone call that the “supportive things” that Black had written about the president were not part of the reasoning for the pardon.
According to the article, Trump told Black that he was expunging “the bad rap” that he got, and that Black could say that the motive for the pardon was “reversing an unjust verdict.”
“My long ordeal with the U.S. justice system was never anything but a confluence of unlucky events, the belligerence of several corporate governance charlatans, and grandstanding local and American judges,” Black wrote.
This was “all fanned by an unusually frenzied international media showing exceptional interest in the case because I was a media owner,” he said.
In his several decades as a media mogul, Black became arch-rivals with Rupert Murdoch.
In 2011, following the News of the World phone hacking scandal, Black wrote in the Financial Times that Murdoch was “a malicious myth-maker” and “an assassin of the dignity of others.”
“Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company,” he said.
Following his release from prison in 2012, Black called Murdoch a “psychopath.”
Black sat as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords until his 2007 conviction, and remains a non-affiliated peer.
Although Black renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 following a dispute with then-Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, who prevented him from obtaining his peerage, he now lives in Canada.
