Trump critic 'stunned' by pardon from president: 'Didn't know it was coming'

A disgraced Democratic politician says he was as surprised as anyone by his recent pardon by president Donald Trump.

P.G. Sittenfeld, a former Cincinnati city councilman who served four-and-a-half months in federal prison on federal corruption charges, sent a Fathers Day letter to friends and family to explain how he got a reprieve from the president he had criticized throughout his political career, reported the Business Courier.

“I did not know this pardon was coming. And when I first heard the news, I was as stunned as I suspect you were,” Sittenfeld wrote in a letter obtained by the publication. “Our family is overjoyed, deeply relieved and profoundly grateful that my freedom is secure and that we are and will remain together.”

The 40-year-old Sittenfeld, who had been the youngest person elected to city council at 27 and lost a Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate in 2016 to former Ohio governor Ted Strickland, said in the letter that his appellate attorneys at the Washington-based firm Jones Day was preparing a U.S. Supreme Court petition when the pardon came.

“When you’re seeking to keep your family intact, you understandably think through every possibility for doing so, but the prospect of a pardon always seemed very remote," Sittenfeld wrote. "As I now understand it, my case came on the radar of the White House counsel’s office and it was advanced for a pardon.”

James Burnham and Yaakov Roth, two now-former Jones Day lawyers who made oral arguments for Sittenfeld after his conviction, either worked for Trump in the past or joined his second administration, and the former councilman told friends family his lawyers are still looking to appeal his case to the high court.

“Simply put, I don’t want what happened to me to ever happen to other people who go into public service for good reasons,” he wrote. “If the misguided charging theory of this prosecution – that lawful campaign donations between donors and candidates who share the same policy objectives can be construed as bribery – isn’t halted, how many qualified people will be too afraid to ever run for office?”

Sittenfeld was convicted in 2022 on one count of bribery and one count of extortion after with accepting $20,000 in campaign contributions from undercover FBI agents posing as developers seeking support for a project planned for a former downtown Cincinnati mall.

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that conviction earlier this year, although those judges expressed skepticism about the case, and Sittenfeld, who said he has no plans to run for office again, maintains his innocence in spite of the pardon.

“I want to keep growing as a Christian," he wrote in the letter. "I’ve recently given talks at various law schools. One of the things I’ve shared with law students is how this experience has shown me – more vividly and up close than I ever would have wanted – that to make our country better and more fair and more just, individuals need to have the patience, determination and resolve to fight the good fight."