President Trump has commuted the sentence of top political donor Imaad Zuberi, who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2021 after giving illegal campaign contributions to former President Biden and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
A White House official confirmed Trump commuted his sentence to The Hill’s sister network NewsNation on Wednesday.
Zuberi had pleaded guilty in 2019 and 2020 to tax evasion, lobbying top U.S. officials while working as a foreign agent, campaign finance violations and obstruction of justice. Alongside the 12-year sentence, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ordered Zuberi to pay close to $16 million in restitution and a nearly $2 million fine.
“I’m deeply sorry and, of course, humiliated,” Zuberi previously told Phillips. “I have no excuse for what I’ve done.”
Zuberi has also been accused of putting together meetings with U.S. and foreign politicians as well as being behind a straw donor plot.
“Everyone wants to come to Washington to meet people,” Zuberi said in a decade-old email in which he was attempting to put together a meeting between the president of Guinea and a congressman, according to the AP.
“We get request(s) for meeting(s) from all scumbag of the world, warlords, kings, queens, presidents for life, military dictators, clan chiefs, tribal chiefs and etc.”
The New York Times previously reported that Zuberi donated over $1.1 million in the three months following Trump’s first election to committees linked with the president and the GOP after previously backing former President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her 2016 bid for the presidency.