NYT:

President Trump has pardoned an imprisoned former Tennessee state senator who was two weeks into a 21-month sentence for his role in a campaign finance fraud scheme.

Inmate records show that the former lawmaker, Brian Kelsey, a Republican, was released from a minimum-security satellite camp at FCI Ashland in Kentucky on Tuesday, the same day, his lawyer said, that he received a clemency letter from the president. The lawyer, Joy​​​​ Longnecker, provided a copy of the letter to The New York Times on Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Kelsey in 2021 with five criminal counts that stemmed from his failed 2016 congressional bid, to which, they said, he had illegally funneled money. He pleaded guilty in 2022 in an arrangement with prosecutors, but he later tried to withdraw from it — a motion that was denied.

Federal prosecutors accused Mr. Kelsey of trying to hide the movement of $91,000 to support his congressional bid, $66,000 of which they said came from his State Senate campaign committee. They also said that he had illegally coordinated with an outside group to make independent political expenditures in support of his campaign.

Mr. Kelsey, 47, repeatedly blamed his legal predicament on what he said had been the weaponization of the Justice Department during the Biden administration, echoing a favorite line of Mr. Trump during his political comeback.

“God used Donald Trump to save me from the weaponized Biden DOJ,” Mr. Kelsey wrote Tuesday on X, announcing that he had received a pardon.

He continued: “May God bless America, despite the prosecutorial sins it committed against me, President Trump, and others the past four years.”

Mr. Kelsey said in an interview on Wednesday that three Republican members of Tennessee’s congressional delegation — Representatives Mark Green, Chuck Fleischmann and Andy Ogles — all wrote letters in support of his petition for a pardon that he submitted to the Trump administration in January. He said that his clemency request likely resonated with Mr. Trump, whom he called “victim No. 1” of political persecution.