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Former Tennessee Sen. Brian Kelsey, left, arrives at federal court, Nov. 22, 2022, in Nashville, Tenn. On Monday, July 8, 2024, a federal appeals panel ruled to keep a 21-month prison sentence in place for the former Tennessee state senator who tried to withdraw his guilty plea on campaign finance law violations.

Mark Humphrey | AP

President Donald Trump issued a pardon to former Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey, just 15 days after that Republican began serving a 21-month prison sentence for a campaign finance conspiracy criminal conviction.

“God used Donald Trump to save me,” Kelsey, 47, told CNBC in a phone interview Wednesday, a day after his release from a federal prison camp in Ashland, Kentucky.

“His election saved me from the Biden” Department of Justice, Kelsey said.

Kelsey, a lawyer who lives in Germantown, Tennessee, announced that Trump had given him “a full and unconditional pardon” in a tweet on the social media site X.

He told CNBC that three GOP congressmen from Tennessee, Mark Green, Andy Ogles and Chuck Fleischmann, were among the people working to obtain the pardon.

“I’m thrilled for Brian Kelsey, whose pardon is well-deserved!” Ogles said in a statement. “Biden’s DOJ weaponized justice to punish a principled conservative. Trump gets it; he’s been there. Time to end this abuse of power!”

Kelsey said, “There have been many friends and family who have provided prayers and outreach on my behalf.

The White House and the DOJ have not issued statements announcing Kelsey’s pardon or the reasons for it. CNBC has requested comment from the White House and DOJ.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons confirmed to CNBC that he was released Tuesday from the Ashland camp due to a pardon.

Presidential pardons void a person’s criminal convictions and any related sentence.

Kelsey entered the Ashland prison camp on Feb. 24, a month after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition to hear an appeal in his case, and about a month after he submitted a request for a pardon.

Kelsey said he was surprised that he had to report to prison because “I always felt like God was going to provide a miracle, and he had provided so many before.”

He had pleaded guilty in November 2022 to crimes connected to his moving money from his state senatorial campaign account to his ultimately unsuccessful 2016 campaign for Congress.

Months later, he tried to withdraw his guilty plea, but failed in that effort. Yet he remained free for nearly two years while appealing the case.

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On Tuesday afternoon, Kelsey said, he was exercising in the camp’s yard with other inmates, “just doing burpees,” when “the assistant warden called out my name, called me forward and told me the president had pardoned me.”

Asked what he planned to do now, Kelsey said, “I’m just going to take the day to thank President Trump and others who supported me, and hug on my wife and kids.” Kelsey has twin two-year-old boys, and a five-year-old daughter.

Trump on his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20 pardoned about 1,500 people charged or convicted of crimes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters.

Trump since then has issued pardons for Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving a life sentence from crimes related to his dark web marketplace Silk Road, and to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who previously served eight years in prison on charges relating to his attempt to sell former President Barack Obama’s Senate seat after Obama was elected to the White House.

But it is highly unusual for someone to receive a pardon or sentence commutation so early in their prison term, as Kelsey did.

Elizabeth Oyer, who had been the top pardon attorney at the DOJ, this week said she was fired on Friday after she opposed restoring actor Mel Gibson’s rights to carry a gun. Gibson, who is a Trump supporter, lost those rights after he was convicted in 2011 for a domestic violence misdemeanor.

On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the Trump administration was gutting the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption.

The Public Integrity Section had overseen the prosecution of Kelsey.

Kelsey said that he was targeted for prosecution by the “weaponized Biden DOJ.”

“Their real target in my case was to take down Matt Schlapp and the American Conservative Union,” Kelsey said.

Schlapp, who is a Trump supporter, is the chairman of the ACU, which sponsors the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC.

“They offered to cut me a deal if I would testify against Matt Schlapp and others at the ACU, and threatened me with a frivolous prosecution if I did not,” Kelsey said.

“I told them I did nothing wrong, and neither did anyone else at the ACU, and that’s when they brought charges,” he said.

Schlapp has never been criminally charged by the DOJ.

After CNBC requested comment from Schlapp, a spokeswoman for CPAC issued a statement that said, CPAC fully supports President Trump using his clemency powers to address politicized prosecutions of the past.”

“We are particularly pleased that former Tennessee Senator Brian Kelsey was pardoned yesterday,” the spokeswoman said. “Neither CPAC nor Matt Schlapp were ever a target of this investigation. Two people employed at the time were thoroughly investigated over years and not charged or convicted.”

“We continue to believe that under President Joe Biden the DOJ was used to persecute political opponents, and prosecutions against Republicans far outweighed those against members of his own party,” the statement said.

Kelsey’s lawyer Joy Longnecker told CNBC that in his pardon petition to Trump, Kelsey said, “I am innocent, and I need your help.”

Longnecker said, “Every day, in courtrooms all across the country, innocent people like Brian plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. That is an unfortunate but undeniable fact.”

“In its 2023 report, the [American Bar Association’s] Criminal Justice Section’s Plea Bargain Task Force acknowledged there was ‘substantial evidence’ that ‘defendants – including innocent defendants – are sometimes impermissibly coerced into taking pleas and surrendering their right to trial.’ “

“That is exactly what happened to Brian,” Longnecker said. “And that is why Brian’s pardon was an appropriate exercise of President Trump’s executive power.”

Kent Wicker, another attorney for Kelsey, said DOJ prosecutors targeted him for political reasons, “withheld exculpatory evidence, and coerced him into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit.”

“Its own star witness recanted his testimony,” said Wicker, who called Kelsey “the ideal pardon candidate.”

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When MSNBC pulled the plug on The Reid Out, it was strange because there was no warning that such a change could be coming for viewers. There was reportedly tension between Reid and her corporate bosses, who did not like her outspoken criticism and progressive stances. The thing that seemed to make them uncomfortable was Reid’s comfort in bluntly and truthfully discussing issues like racism and sexism as they relate to Trump and the current Republican Party.

Reid was beloved by her most powerful colleagues like Rachel Maddow on the network. Maddow defended Reid and called her firing, along with other non-white anchors like Katie Phang, a mistake.

Even more bees should start buzzing when the ratings data for The Reid Out is looked at.

According to The Daily Beast, Reid’s audience was increasing when she was canceled:

But the Beast has obtained the audience ratings compiled by Nielsen which are used by news networks to assess the success of their shows and the people appearing on them—and they show no signs that Reid was experiencing an audience plunge out of line with her MSNBC co-stars. In fact she and all the other primetime line-up were on an upswing in February.

…

Ratings for every MSNBC primetime host declined in the period after the election, but Reid’s drops do not appear substantially more than her peers. Melber’s total-viewer ratings were down 42 percent (1.552 million vs. 903,000) between Nov. 6 and the end of February from their 2024 pre-election ratings—as were Reid’s (1.421 million vs. 825,000). Hayes saw a 45 percent decline in that same period (1.496 million vs. 820,000).

Chris Hayes’s All In is regularly one of the lowest-rated shows on the network, yet he is allowed to keep chugging along.

MSNBC will soon be spun off into its own company, and it is reasonable to ask if the decision to get rid of so many progressive, non-white Trump critics on the network had something to do with appeasing the administration so that any future matters that may come before the Trump administration will be viewed more favorably.

Trump called Reid a racist and celebrated her firing on Truth Social.

With so much of the mainstream media bending their knees and catering to Trump, any viewer who invests their time watching MSNBC’s programming deserves an explanation.

Reid’s contract had ended with the network, but MSNBC execs seem to have chosen the path of least resistance by getting rid of strong progressive voices of color, which may have been done to please Donald Trump.

Do you think MSNBC got rid of Joy Reid to make Trump happy? Share your opinion in the comments below.

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Soldiers escort a man who authorities identified as Omar Trevino Morales, alias “Z-42,” leader of the Zetas drug cartel, as he is moved from a military plane to a military vehicle at the Attorney General’s Office hangar in Mexico City, March 4, 2015.

Eduardo Verdugo | AP

Mexico extradited 29 drug cartel members to the United States amid a looming promise by President Donald Trump to impose stiff tariffs on Mexican imports.

The people extradited Thursday included Rafael Caro Quintero, a cartel kingpin who is charged in the U.S. with the 1985 slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.

“The group of cartel members … includes one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world,” the White House said in a statement.

In the same statement, the White House said Trump had “directed the Department of Justice and the Department of State to make this happen, and Attorney General [Pam] Bondi and Secretary of State [Marco] Rubio did a tremendous job in getting this done.”

The DEA’s former chief of operations, Ray Donovan, said, “For those of us who have investigated Mexican cartels for many generations, this is truly an historical moment.”

“We have never seen this many sent from Mexico to the U.S. in one day,” Donovan said, according to NBC News.

The extraditions came on the heels of promises by Trump to impose tariffs of 25% on goods imported from Mexico and Canada if those countries do not take steps to halt the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl and other narcotics across their borders with the U.S.

Those tariffs were suspended until next week after Mexico and Canada both took steps to address Trump’s concerns.

But questions remain whether Trump will follow through on his promise to impose the tariffs, and both Mexico and Canada are trying to convince the Trump administration not to do so.

The extraditions occurred on the same day that Rubio, Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met in Washington, D.C., with a delegation of high-level Mexico security officials, including Foreign Secretary Juan Ramon de la Fuente.

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The Department of Justice said the other cartel leaders and managers extradited by Mexico face charges in the U.S. that include murder, money laundering, racketeering and drug trafficking.

The people extradited are members of cartels recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Noreste, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, and Cártel de Golfo, the DOJ said in a statement.

“These defendants are collectively alleged to have been responsible for the importation into the United States of massive quantities of poison, including cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and heroin, as well as associated acts of violence,” the DOJ statement said.

A State Department spokesperson, in a statement about Rubio’s meeting Thursday with Mexican officials, said, “Secretary Rubio expressed appreciation for Mexico’s actions to secure our common border, including deploying 10,000 National Guard troops, as well as major seizures of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals, and the expulsion of 29 major cartel figures to stand trial for their crimes, making both our nations safer.”

“Both parties agreed upon the importance of making sure there was continued action beyond meetings and suggested the implementation of a timetable and touchbacks to target clear goals and sustainable results,” the spokesperson said.