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Trump Pardons Disgraced NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik
By
Sydney Pereira
Published Feb 18, 2020
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By
Sydney Pereira
Published Feb 18, 2020
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President Donald Trump pardoned disgraced NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik of his conviction for lying to the government and tax fraud, the White House announced Tuesday.
Trump called Kerik "a man who had many recommendations from a lot of good people," NBC New York reported. In a Tuesday statement released about a string of clemencies, the White House said Kerik "courageously led the New York Police Department’s heroic response to the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001."
Kerik, who was sentenced to four years in prison in 2010, pleaded guilty to lying to the White House while he was under consideration to become the head of Homeland Security under the Bush administration. The former police commissioner under then-mayor Rudy Giuliani had taken up blogging about terrorism while under house arrest after he was released from prison in 2013.
After his release, he made various television appearance at the height of protests against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri after the killing of Michael Brown, in which he endorsed police using military-grade equipment during protests and suggested protesters were acting like "savages" and "animals."
The White House statement said Kerik had become an advocate for criminal justice and prisoner reentry reform. While locked up, he discovered: "Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open," Kerik said in a statement Tuesday.
"There are no words to express my appreciation and gratitude to President Trump," Kerik said in a statement on Twitter.
Kerik's pardoning comes days after the best man in his wedding, Lawrence Ray, was arrested for extortion and sex trafficking of college students at Sarah Lawrence College following a New York Magazine report detailing Ray's tactics to allegedly force women into unpaid labor and prostitution. Ray ultimately helped send Kerik to prison.
Trump also commuted the sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, the Chicago Democrat who tried to sell the Senate seat vacated by then President-elect Barack Obama.
Blagojevich was impeached from the governor's seat and sentenced to 14 years in prison on corruption charges, according to the Chicago Tribune, which noted the state's Republican congressmembers urged the president not to commute Blagojevich's sentence. "It's important that we take a strong stand against pay-to-play politics, especially in Illinois where four of our last eight governors have gone to federal prison for pubic corruption," they said in August.
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president donald trump
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