Drug dealer commuted by Trump arrested on domestic violence charges

A drug dealer commuted by former President Donald Trump has been arrested again — this time on suspicion of domestic violence.

According to the Associated Press, Jonathan Braun, who was released by Trump after having served just 2.5 years of a 10-year prison sentence for smuggling and selling $1.72 billion in cannabis between 2007 and 2010, was arrested on Tuesday "on allegations he attacked his wife and her 75-year-old father."

The AP added that he was also charged with evading $160 worth of tolls by driving a car with no license plate.

Braun, who was also known to be a loan shark, was accused of a pattern of violence long before Trump commuted his sentence. Prosecutors once alleged that he flew to California to beat an associate with a belt.

His commutation posed other problems for federal law enforcement, who had been hoping to leverage his incarceration to get him to cooperate in a predatory lending investigation. And it raised questions about whether Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was reportedly involved in the decision to commute Braun, had been selling pardons.

Trump's pardon list was already deeply controversial, owing to his penchant for pardoning friends and close associates like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, often for offenses connected to the work they did for him.

Nor is this the only time someone Trump pardoned ended up arrested for another charge. Eli Weinstein, whom Trump commuted for his involvement in a real estate Ponzi scheme, was charged last year in an alleged $35 million fraud operation involving supplies that were intended to be sent to Ukraine.