Judge jails Trump clemency recipient Jonathan Braun after arrest

A New York federal judge on Friday ordered the jailing of convicted drug dealer and predatory lender Jonathan Braun, whose 10-year prison sentence was commuted in 2021 by President Donald Trump, after a string of arrests over the past seven months.

Braun was arrested last weekend on Long Island on state charges of assaulting an acquaintance and that man’s three-year-old child, The New York Times revealed Tuesday.

Before that, he was arrested four other times on state charges, including for allegedly assaulting his wife and his 75-year-old father-in-law, groping a nanny’s breast, menacing health-care workers with an IV pole at a Long Island hospital, and petty larceny, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn.

Those arrests led the U.S. Probation Office to charge Braun with seven violations of his supervised release, which continued after his release from prison in 2021. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is prosecuting him in the case, where he faces up to five years in prison if convicted.

Brooklyn U.S. District Court Judge Kiyo Matsumoto ordered Braun detained during an arraignment hearing Friday, ruling that he is a danger to the community and a flight risk. Braun pleaded not guilty at a hearing.

“The behavior is erratic,” Matsumoto said at the arraignment, The Times reported. “There’s the potential someone could really get hurt.”

The judge scheduled a hearing on the violations for next Thursday.

Braun had served more than five years in federal prison for a conviction of conspiracy to import marijuana and commit money laundering when Trump commuted his criminal sentence on Jan. 20, 2021, hours before leaving the White House.

That act of executive clemency left Braun on supervised release in his federal criminal case.

The New York Times previously reported that Trump’s commutation thwarted an ongoing effort by prosecutors to negotiate a cooperation deal with Braun that would have freed him from prison in exchange for his offering information about other predatory lenders for a criminal investigation.

The Times also reported that Braun’s family used connections it had to the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was a senior White House aide at the time, to set in motion the clemency.

Braun was fined $20 million in February 2024 by Manhattan federal court Judge Jed Rakoff in a civil case where the Federal Trade Commission had sued Braun for predatory lending practices.

“The evidence … shows that Mr. Braun not only personally participated in this illegal conduct, but did so gleefully, with little remorse,” Rakoff wrote in a ruling.