President Trump has pardoned an imprisoned former Tennessee state senator who was two weeks into a 21-month sentence for his role in a campaign finance fraud scheme.
Inmate records show that the former lawmaker, Brian Kelsey, a Republican, was released from a minimum-security satellite camp at FCI Ashland in Kentucky on Tuesday, the same day, his lawyer said, that he received a clemency letter from the president. The lawyer, Joy Longnecker, provided a copy of the letter to The New York Times on Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Kelsey in 2021 with five criminal counts that stemmed from his failed 2016 congressional bid, to which, they said, he had illegally funneled money. He pleaded guilty in 2022 in an arrangement with prosecutors, but he later tried to withdraw from it — a motion that was denied.
Federal prosecutors accused Mr. Kelsey of trying to hide the movement of $91,000 to support his congressional bid, $66,000 of which they said came from his State Senate campaign committee. They also said that he had illegally coordinated with an outside group to make independent political expenditures in support of his campaign.
Mr. Kelsey, 47, repeatedly blamed his legal predicament on what he said had been the weaponization of the Justice Department during the Biden administration, echoing a favorite line of Mr. Trump during his political comeback.
“God used Donald Trump to save me from the weaponized Biden DOJ,” Mr. Kelsey wrote Tuesday on X, announcing that he had received a pardon.
He continued: “May God bless America, despite the prosecutorial sins it committed against me, President Trump, and others the past four years.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Neither did a spokesman for the United States Attorney’s Office in Nashville, where the case was prosecuted.
The Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that urged the Justice Department in 2017 to investigate Mr. Kelsey over the financing of his congressional bid, criticized the pardon.
Saurav Ghosh, the center’s director of federal campaign finance reform, said in a statement on Wednesday that the pardon “demonstrates an open hostility and contempt for accountability and the rule of law.”
“Kelsey’s actions, which included coordinating with special-interest-funded outside groups, using straw donors, and funneling soft money to bolster his federal campaign, violated laws designed to combat corruption and maintain transparency in our elections,” said Mr. Ghosh, a former enforcement lawyer for the Federal Election Commission. “His pardon sends a message that there will be no consequences for such brazen misconduct.”
Mr. Kelsey, who represented the Memphis area in the Tennessee Legislature, joins a contingent of both notable and obscure offenders who have secured pardons from Mr. Trump in his first weeks back in the White House. A number of them have leaned into common grievances shared by the president, casting themselves as victims of political witch hunts and prosecutorial misconduct.
Some of the more notable figures who have been granted clemency by Mr. Trump include nearly all of the 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Last month, he signed a full pardon for Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of corruption in 2011 in a scheme to sell a Senate seat being vacated by Barack Obama to become the president.
In 2022, Mr. Kelsey pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, one count each of making and accepting excessive campaign contributions and two counts of violating federal regulations for political money.
A co-defendant, Joshua Smith, a Nashville social club owner, was sentenced to five years of probation after pleading guilty to one criminal count in the case.
But Mr. Kelsey tried to withdraw his guilty plea in 2023, claiming that a lawyer who had previously represented him had given him the impression that he would receive probation. A lawyer himself and a former chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Kelsey claimed that his “inexperience with the criminal justice system” had contributed to his decision. He also said that he had been under emotional duress, dealing with his terminally ill father, newborn twins and a 3-year-old daughter.
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