U.S. President Donald Trump issued a pardon for Eddie DeBartolo Jr., the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers football team, a White House spokesman told reporters on Tuesday
DeBartolo Jr. pleaded guilty in 1998 to a felony charge of failing to report that Louisiana’s former governor, Edwin Edwards, had extorted $400,000 from him to win a license for his riverboat casino, the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time.
He avoided prison in the case, but agreed to pay penalties of $1 million dollars, serve two years of probation and testify in the trials against the former governor and the former governor’s son, the Chronicle reported.
Trump has also raised eyebrows by saying he could pardon himself and declining to publicly rule out pardons for some of his associates who have been sentenced to prison for charges stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The president also commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old African American woman whose case was championed by reality television star Kim Kardashian West. Trump brought Johnson to his annual State of the Union address to Congress last year and featured her in a 30-second campaign ad that was played during the Super Bowl.
