Trump commutes the sentence of Ozy Media co-founder Carlos Watson in financial conspiracy case

Trump has aggressively used his presidential power to commute sentences and issue pardons for people who he believes were treated unfairly by the justice system. The president himself was convicted last year in a case involving hush money payments, part of what he has described as a politically motivated witch hunt against him.

Watson's commutation was among a string of other acts of clemency revealed by the White House on Friday. They included Trevor Milton, the founder of electric vehicle company Nikola, who had been sentenced to four years for fraudulently exaggerating the potential of his technology and was pardoned; and three entrepreneurs who founded and helped run the cryptocurrency exchange BITMEX, which was ordered to pay a $100 million fine earlier this year after prosecutors said it “willfully flouted U.S. anti-money laundering laws to boost revenue.” They had been sentenced to probation and were also pardoned.

Ozy was founded in 2012 on a premise of providing a fresh, sophisticated-but-not-stuffy take on politics, culture and more — billed as “the new and the next” — while amplifying minority and marginalized voices.

It announced it was shutting down in fall 2021 less than a week after a New York Times column raised questions about the media organization’s claims of millions of viewers and readers while also pointing out a potential case of securities fraud.

Watson was arrested in February 2023 after two of the company’s top executives pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

Prosecutors said Watson deceived investors and lenders by inflating revenue numbers and suggesting deals were final when they were not. At one point, Watson's co-founder pretended to be a YouTube executive on a phone call with potential investors, according to prosecutors.

After Watson's sentencing, then-Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said the jury had determined that “Watson was a con man who told lie upon lie upon lie to deceive investors into buying stock in his company.”

Ozy Media “collapsed under the weight of Watson’s dishonest schemes,” Peace said.

But Watson, who is Black, called the case “a modern lynching" and argued that he was the victim of “selective prosecution."

“I made mistakes. I’m very, very sorry that people are hurt, myself included,” Watson said, but “I don’t think it’s fair.”

U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee, a Trump appointee, said during sentencing that the “quantum of dishonesty in this case is exceptional.”

Watson held degrees from Harvard University and Stanford Law School, worked on Wall Street, had on-air gigs at CNN and MSNBC, and boasted entrepreneurial chops. Ozy Media was his second startup, coming a decade after he sold a test-prep company that he had founded in his 20s.

Mountain View, California-based Ozy produced TV shows, newsletters, podcasts and a music-and-ideas festival. Watson hosted several of the TV programs, including the Emmy-winning “Black Women OWN the Conversation,” which appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Ozy snagged big advertisers, clients and grants. But beneath the outward signs of success was an overextended company that struggled — and dissembled — to stay afloat after 2017, according to insiders’ testimony.

The company strained to make payroll, ran late on rent and took out pricey cash advances to pay bills, former finance vice president Janeen Poutre told jurors. Meanwhile, Ozy gave prospective investors much bigger revenue numbers than those it reported to accountants, according to testimony and documents.

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Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.