Trump Pardons Rich Media Mogul Who Wrote a Nice Book About Him

President Trump has pardoned Conrad Black, a friend and former media mogul who was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in 2007 and served three years in prison, according to The Guardian.

Black is a Canadian who also has British citizenship. He is also known—and we are not making this up—as Lord Black of Crossharbour. Black formerly ran a company that included major newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Jerusalem Post. He was convicted in the U.S. of fraud for stealing millions of dollars from his own business, Hollinger International.

Black once described Trump as an “old friend.” At one point, it seemed that Trump was going to testify at Black’s trial as a character witness, according to the New York Times.

The former media mogul hardly needed to be pardoned—two of Black’s three fraud convictions were already voided, and he was released from prison after serving about half his sentence in May 2010. He was subsequently deported.

Not only was Black a friend of Trump’s, he also published an entire book on the president’s virtues in 2018. In the book, titled Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other, Black extolls Trump’s pure character. Black writes that a “great majority of anti-Trump activity in the first year of his administration was devoted to falsehoods, which were then justified by the selective and intentional misinterpretation of Trump’s careless and ambiguous statements.”

Trump is not, Black writes, “a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior. No opposition can continue on this name-calling basis alone for much longer than this one has.”

“Those who oppose Trump generally do not understand how desperate and disgusted almost half of Americans are at the most inept twenty-year streak of presidential misgovernment in American history that preceded the 2016 election,” he adds.