A Full Presidential Pardon

May 16, 2019

Conrad Black


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The two counts for which I have just received a presidential pardon, and of which I was “convicted” in 2011, after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously vacated them, only to have a self-serving appellate judge reinstate them, were for wire fraud and obstruction of justice.

The alleged fraud was reception of $285,000 in my office in Toronto while I was in England, from our American company, which was approved by independent directors, referred to in public filings of the corporation, but which the company secretary had not completely formalized, in what the trial judge correctly regarded, in the secretary’s case, as a clerical error. The reinvention of this crime enabled the appellate panel — to whom the Supreme Court remanded the vacated counts “to assess the gravity of their own errors” — to resuscitate a count of obstruction of justice against me. This consisted of my removal of boxes of personal papers and material that already had been furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission — which I took out under security cameras I had had installed, with the approval of the acting president of the company and the principal member present of the court-appointed inspector — as I vacated my office of 27 years from a building I chiefly owned, on an unjust local court order of a publicity-seeking judge.



The local jurisdiction found no cause of action nor any violation of a document retention order. I was always presumptively innocent in the initial jurisdiction. It was nonsense, all of it; there was never a word of truth to any of it. And now it is over, after 16 years, including three years and two weeks in U.S. federal prisons.


Only once before, 18 years ago, had I received a telephone call from an incumbent president of the United States, prior to Monday of last week, and I had not spoken to the current president since he took office. When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said “Hello” and started to ask if this was a prank, (suspecting my friends in the British tabloid media), but the caller spoke politely over me: “Please hold for the president,” and two seconds later probably the best known voice in the world said “Is that the great Lord Black?” I said “Mr. President, you do me great honor telephoning me.”



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 you got.” He had followed the case closely and offered to come to give evidence at my trial in Chicago in 2007 on one of the counts that was later an acquittal. He said that there would be some controversy, “But you can handle that better than anyone.” I asked “Do you authorize me to say that your motivation is that it was an unjust verdict?” He checked with the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who was in the room, if this would be a problem legally, and was told and affirmed to me that I could say that was his motive and that he was reversing an unjust verdict. “We’ve known each other a long time, but that wasn’t any part of the reason. Nor was any of the supportive things you’ve said and written about me.” I suggested that he knew "better than anyone" the antics of some U.S. prosecutors. (I had had Robert Mueller as director of the FBI, which we caught installing illegal bugging devices in our home in New York and in many falsehoods; James Comey as deputy attorney general, and Patrick Fitzgerald, now Comey’s counsel, as U.S. attorney in Chicago. They were all, as my distinguished caller on Monday has described Comey, “bad cops.”) We moved briefly on to generalities, greetings to wives, I thanked him for his call and again for the purpose of his call, and the conversation ended.



It was never anything but a confluence of unlucky events, the belligerence of several corporate governance charlatans, and grandstanding local and American judges, all fanned by an unusually frenzied international media showing exceptional interest in the case because I was a media owner. The rock-slide began in 2003 when it came to light that some payments from our American to our Canadian company and to certain executives, including me, though fully revealed in public filings, had not been fully authorized.



As the controversy continued, Local Toronto judges and the Ontario Securities Commission prevented us from running the company, where there was no accounting fraud, hard profitable assets, and $2 billion of shareholder equity, all of which was squandered in poor administration and greedily consumed by court-appointed or sanctioned lawyers and accountants and the relentless intrusions of regulators seeking headlines and not the shareholders’ interest.



The vaporization of two billion dollars of shareholder value affected tens of thousands of families in all parts of Canada and the United States. With aching slowness the case against me disintegrated. Of the 17 counts in 2005, four, including money-laundering and perjury, were abandoned. Nine others were acquittals by a prodigiously un-Solomonic jury, many of whom slept through the proceedings. So, at times, did my infirm counsel, good men who because of age, poor health, and inexperience in commercial cases; one was a Canadian lawyer who had never pleaded in an American court before. They did not have the stamina for an eighteen-week, very complicated criminal trial. (Mark Steyn called them “the dream team,” a bit unfair but at such times one must get one’s laughs where they arise.)



The heaviest counts were among those rejected, such as the preposterous charge of racketeering. I was convicted on three fraud counts, and one of obstruction of justice. I reported to low security prison and had an interesting time tutoring inmates who had failed in the attempts the Bureau of Prisons requires of all inmates who have not matriculated from high school to get over that hurdle. I recruited a tutor for science (a former commander of the torpedo room of a nuclear submarine), and one for mathematics, (a mathematics teacher from a high school in Arkansas), and all of our 204 candidates while I was there, graduated. While it was an outrage that I was there at all, I got on well with everyone, found many of the people there interesting and often memorable characters, and the graduation ceremonies for our students moving occasions. My wife came to visit me every week, even when she had to come directly from the Olympics in Beijing. We went to the Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, where I was represented by the former deputy solicitor general of the United States, Andrew Frey. But the presiding judge, Richard Posner, levitating in his megalomania, obviously had not even read the filings and interrupted my lawyer in 32 of the 45 sentences he began. Posner was just part of the prosecution.



The eminent barrister Miguel Estrada appealed for me to the Supreme Court of the United States, which only agrees to hear about 2 percent of the applications it receives. The court accepted our petition and unanimously vacated the four remaining counts, declared the Honest Services Statute that had been the basis of the convictions to be unconstitutional, and rewrote it, requiring evidence that a bribe had taken place, which was never alleged in our case. In the peculiar American practice, it sent the case back to Posner and the two silent judges on his appellate panel, I was released on two million dollars bail, (down from $38 million during the trial), but could not leave the United States.



Even Posner, who was on the losing end of public acerbities with a couple of the Supreme Court justices at the time, dropped two of the counts, but resurrected the clerical error of the company secretary as a crime of the co-defendants, enabling Posner to cling like a drowning man to the rubbish about obstruction, which Andy Frey told him was “in 45 years of practice, the feeblest case of obstruction of justice I have seen.” This was a flimsy fig-leaf to maintain the absurd pretense that there had ever been the slightest justification for the lengthy and expensive prosecution in the first place. And the trial judge, equally spuriously, sent me back to prison for a seven-month victory lap, congratulating me on “being a better person” because of my imprisonment and the extensive evidence the U.S. Probation Office presented of my exemplary performance as a tutor. “The court wishes you well, Mr. Black” were her parting words. They were unrequited.



On May 7, 2012, I went directly from Miami Federal Prison to the airport and onto a chartered plane and returned to my home in Toronto after an absence of five years. It was seven years less a day after that that President Trump called me. I am now, at last, officially not guilty even in the conviction-mad United States. None of this would have been the subject of a criminal case in any other serious jurisdiction. It was for this fiction that I spent three years and two weeks in prisons and endured significant official persecution in Canada, and the great companies my associates and I built over more than thirty years were torn down, driven into bankruptcy and destroyed, while the trans-border corporate governance hypocrites stuffed a third of a billion dollars into their pockets in ill-gotten professional fees.



I did have the satisfaction of winning the greatest libel settlement in Canadian history ($5 million) from the egregious Richard Breeden, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the other authors of the infamous special committee report of 2004, which really poured gasoline on the fire and ignited the criminal charges. The American criminal justice system is frequently and largely evil; I was convicted for attempted obstruction of injustice. It was never anything but a smear job.



For my friends, no explanation was ever necessary; for my enemies, none would ever have sufficed. As I told the trial judge at resentencing: I always try to take success like a gentleman and reversals like a man. On to better things and brighter days.



This article origninally appeared inAmerican Greatness.



Conrad Black is a financier, author and columnist. He was the publisher of the London (UK) Telegraph newspapers and Spectator from 1987 to 2004, and has authored biographies on Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard M. Nixon. He is honorary chairman of Conrad Black Capital Corporation and has been a member of the British House of Lords since 2001, and is a Knight of the Holy See. He is the author of "Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other" and "Rise to Greatness, the History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present."

For more of his reports, Go Here Now.

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Trump pardons fraudster Conrad Black after glowing biography



Former media mogul who owned Daily Telegraph spent more than three years in prison



Jim Waterson Media editor
Thu 16 May 2019 03.59 EDT First published on Wed 15 May 2019 21.09 EDT

Conrad Black leaving a bail hearing in Chicago with his wife, Barbara Amiel, in 2010. Photograph: John Gress/REUTERS Donald Trump has pardoned Conrad Black, the former media mogul who owned the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator before being jailed for fraud, shortly after he wrote a book praising the US president.

Black, a Canadian-born British citizen, was once known for his extravagant lifestyle as he ran an international newspaper empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. But he ended up serving three and a half years in prison after he was convicted in 2007 of siphoning off millions of dollars from the sale of newspapers owned by the company he controlled.

Since leaving jail Black, who is a British peer, has been on a quest to clear his name. Last year he published a book entitled Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other, writing that Trump “is not, in fact, a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior”. He suggested the president had been misunderstood.
Quick guide Conrad Black on Donald Trump

Trump called Black personally to deliver the news that he was to receive a full presidential pardon, dubbing him “the great Lord Black”.

Donald Trump and Conrad Black: their mutual admiration in five clips – video report A White House spokesperson said the decision had been made because of Black’s “tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought”, as well as the work he had done supporting fellow prisoners while inside.

Trump’s spokesperson said lobbying from people such as the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the conservative talkshow host Rush Limbaugh and the singer Sir Elton John had also contributed to the decision. US presidents have the absolute right to pardon individuals convicted of federal offences under the constitution.
Timeline The rise and fall of Conrad Black

Black, who bought the Daily Telegraph in 1986, became a member of the House of Lords in 2001 after being put forward for a peerage by the then Conservative leader, William Hague. He renounced his Canadian citizenship to take the honour, becoming Lord Black of Crossharbour, and sat on the Tory benches until his fraud conviction.



He is currently on a leave of absence from the British parliament but has previously suggested he could return. A House of Lords spokesperson confirmed Black could vote on British laws again if he gave three months’ notice of his intention to return.

‘He’s done quite well’: why Conrad Black thinks Trump is what the US needs

Black has had previous dealings with Trump. Two decades ago he agreed to work with the future president to build a skyscraper on the site of an old Chicago newspaper office. Trump was considered as a potential witness at Black’s fraud trail.

In 2005 – at a time when Trump was still an unlikely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination – Black wrote a piece entitled”: “Trump is the good guy”. Trump responded by praising Black as “one of the truly great intellects and my friend”, promising not to forget the article.

Black’s record of lavish spending includes a $42,000 birthday party for his wife. And he is said to have told potential investors who asked why he needed a corporate jet: “I can have a 747 if I want.”

Black was jailed after being found guilty of conspiring with fellow executives to siphon off funds from the sale of media businesses. Two of Black’s three fraud convictions were later voided, and his sentence was shortened. Black was released from a Florida prison in May 2012 and deported.

He said he thought it was a prank by British tabloid journalists when he received the call from the White House informing him that he was about to be pardoned.

Writing after the pardon in the Canadian National Post newspaper, which Black founded, he said Trump “could not have been more gracious and quickly got to the point: he was granting me a full pardon that would ‘expunge the bad rap you got’”.

The latest major Trump resignations and firings

Black said Trump had followed his case closely and offered to give evidence at the 2007 trial in Chicago. The president told Black that there would be some controversy over the pardon, “but you can handle that better than anyone”.

While running the Telegraph, Black jetted around the world between his multiple homes, threw expensive dinner parties, and once attended a fancy-dress event at Kensington Palace with his wife, Barbara Amiel, dressed as Cardinal Richelieu and Marie Antoinette respectively. He no longer controls his media assets, and the Daily Telegraph and Spectator were later sold to the Barclay brothers.

The White House said Black’s case had attracted “broad support from many high-profile individuals who have vigorously vouched for his exceptional character”.

“Formerly the owner of the world’s then third largest newspaper, he is also the author of several notable biographies and works of history,” the White House said in a statement announcing the decision. “These include comprehensive biographies of Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Richard M Nixon, a complete history of Canada, and an impressive essay evaluating how the world would have been different had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbour.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business...ex-media-mogul