President Donald Trump has issued a full pardon to Tim Leiweke, a media executive who co-founded the Oak View Group, according to CNN on Wednesday.
The move is notable as, unlike many other controversial Trump clemencies for rich and well-connected people, this pardon is for a charge brought by his own Justice Department earlier this year.
“A federal grand jury indicted Leiweke, then the CEO of the live entertainment group, in July for ‘orchestrating a conspiracy to rig the bidding process for an arena at a public university in Austin, Texas,’ according to a press release from the Justice Department announcing the charge,” noted the report. Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater proclaimed at that time, “As outlined in the indictment, the Defendant rigged a bidding process to benefit his own company and deprived a public university and taxpayers of the benefits of competitive bidding.”
Ironically, according to the report, Leiweke has a history of criticizing Trump on social media, posting that he was the “single greatest Con man” and lauding former Vice President Mike Pence for standing up to Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Leiweke was represented in his quest for a pardon by former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), a former ally of the president.
This comes just hours after Trump sent House Republicans into chaos by pardoning conservative Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar, who was charged alongside his wife with a $600,000 bribery scheme on behalf of an oil and gas company tied to foreign entities. GOP lawmakers had hoped to leverage his criminal charges to unseat him in his South Texas district.
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