President Trump on Wednesday pardoned Michael G. Grimm, a former New York representative who pleaded guilty in 2014 to felony tax evasion, according to a White House official.
Mr. Grimm, a Republican, represented Staten Island and part of Brooklyn in the House of Representatives from 2011 until he resigned in 2015. On Wednesday, a White House spokesman compared Mr. Grimm’s prosecution to the president’s own legal troubles, which Mr. Trump has long derided as a witch hunt.
“President Trump knows firsthand the impact of a weaponized justice system,” said the spokesman, Harrison Fields. He said the president was “using his constitutional authority to right the wrongs of Americans who’ve been impacted by this corrupt system.”
Mr. Grimm was indicted in 2014 after he failed to report nearly $1 million in gross receipts and hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee wages from a Manhattan restaurant he had owned, prosecutors said. After pleading guilty to one felony charge of tax fraud, he was sentenced to eight months in prison, serving seven.
Reporting by The New York Times indicated that Mr. Grimm also engaged in a range of other potential crimes, including campaign finance and other possible fraud. He was not charged in connection with any of that activity.
In recent years, he has worked as an on-air personality at the right-wing television network Newsmax, and has been an enthusiastic public supporter of Mr. Trump’s.
But he has been off the air since a horseback riding accident at a polo tournament last September that left him paralyzed.
In a statement posted online earlier this month, he said he had been in a physical therapy rehabilitation center and that he hoped to be released at the end of May and return to his job at Newsmax. Mr. Grimm did not respond to a message seeking comment on Wednesday.
After his release from prison, Mr. Grimm tried to mount a political comeback on Staten Island, which has for years been a reliably Republican district in New York City.
Mr. Grimm ran in a Republican congressional primary in 2018 to retake his old seat, but Mr. Trump endorsed his opponent, Representative Dan Donovan, and his comeback attempt fell short.
During that campaign, Mr. Grimm argued that his prosecution — which began as a campaign finance inquiry but evolved into a 20-count indictment related to his former management of a restaurant called Healthalicious — had been politically motivated.
That is an argument that Mr. Trump himself has used when seeking to minimize the criminal investigations he faced before his re-election last year and his criminal conviction last May.
Mr. Trump on Wednesday also pardoned John G. Rowland, who served as the governor of Connecticut from 1995 to 2004, when he resigned to avoid impeachment during an investigation into corrupt government practices.
He pleaded guilty later that year and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. Ten years later, Mr. Rowland was convicted again of public corruption, including obstructing justice, conspiracy, falsifying documents relied on by federal regulators and other violations of campaign finance laws. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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