I thanked him for his call and again for the purpose of his call, and the conversation ended.

Well this goes back a ways and brings to closure an always muddled issue. From A Full Presidential Pardon by Conrad Black.

Conrad Black was a Canadian publisher who, at one point, assembled a media empire which included a number of newspapers or magazines which I enjoyed or in which authors whom I followed often wrote. Mark Steyn would be an example of the latter.

Hollinger International was at one point a $2 billion company. In general, the papers were a haven for independent, conservative, and libertarian voices of one stripe or another who otherwise were being squeezed out of radicalizing postmodernist mainstream media.

As a lone voice, other than the Murdochs, Black came under sustained attack in the mid-2000s, accused of all sorts of financial shenanigans. I never followed the cases too closely, it being clear all along that something was rotten in the state of Denmark but whether it was with Conrad Black's behaviors or the abhorrent misuse of prosecutorial authority for political or ideological purposes was not crystal clear. From the very beginning, it seemed as if there was a campaign to incite a mob mentality based on class envy. In any particular article, there was as much about Black's lifestyle as there was about the more pertinent facts of the cases.

It seemed that there were three plausible scenarios.

1. Conrad Black was a financial con man a la Madoff or any of the other legion of corporate raiders and Masters of the Universe types of the era.

2. Conrad Black was a man of opulent tastes and a canny capacity to skate close to the regulatory boundaries with only occasional accidental transgressions.

3. The legal system was manipulated by ideologues and rogue enforcement authorities in order to reign in a person with whom they disagreed.

All seemed conceivable. The complexity of purchases, lease-backs, property deals, etc. across multiple countries and jurisdictions laid down a cloud of argumentative obfuscation.

As things progressed, it was notable that over-charging was a real issue. The prosecutor would start with a laundry list of charges which created the impression of clear and repugnant misdeeds. Then, over the following months, one charge after another would be thrown out. It was aggravating to see overcharging being used so blatantly as a strategy.

It was also aggravating that it appeared that the process was the punishment. The fact Black fought back made the prosecutors even more desperate to pursue him.

Time and again during appeals, Black was upheld and the local courts admonished. Time and again the local courts got a second bite at the prosecutorial apple.

Ultimately, he was convicted of minor regulatory errors for which he spent time in jail. This looked very similar to what was simultaneously happening to Martha Stewart, charged with insider trading. She also was overcharged, had the list thinned down, finally convicted of things not much more than a technicality and spent time in jail.

In both cases, it seemed like the law was being used for ideological or mob purposes. They both seemed egregious attacks on rule of law and equality before the law. And in both cases, it appeared people were being arbitrarily prosecuted for common errors and misdeeds committed in bulk by others who were more politically protected. It seemed like the prosecutors were going after the easy to catch rather than the important to catch.

By the early teens, I had concluded that probably we were looking at some combination of scenarios two and three above. Having subsequently seen even more DA and Prosecutor misconduct, I am even more inclined towards scenario 3.

The additional tragedy was the clear destruction of national wealth. The court assigned administrators to Hollinger and they promptly ran it into the ground while enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders. This looked like the Mandarin Class preying on independent thinkers and using the opportunity to plunder. Similarly with Stewart, her company was wrung dry but it recovered once she was released.

Both cases struck me as examples of the arbitrariness of prosecution, overcharging, ignoring others with more blatant track records of the alleged crimes, and the deployment of the power of government against citizens based on whim.

There is no better system out there but when ours is corrupted, it can be egregious.

Where next for Black? A pardon only goes so far.

On May 7, 2012, I went directly from Miami Federal Prison to the airport and onto a chartered plane and returned to my home in Toronto after an absence of five years. It was seven years less a day after that that President Trump called me. I am now, at last, officially not guilty even in the conviction-mad United States. None of this would have been the subject of a criminal case in any other serious jurisdiction. It was for this fiction that I spent three years and two weeks in prisons and endured significant official persecution in Canada, and the great companies my associates and I built over more than thirty years were torn down, driven into bankruptcy and destroyed, while the trans-border corporate governance hypocrites stuffed a third of a billion dollars into their pockets in ill-gotten professional fees.

I did have the satisfaction of winning the greatest libel settlement in Canadian history ($5 million) from the egregious Richard Breeden, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the other authors of the infamous special committee report of 2004, which really poured gasoline on the fire and ignited the criminal charges. The American criminal justice system is frequently and largely evil; I was convicted for attempted obstruction of injustice. It was never anything but a smear job.

For my friends, no explanation was ever necessary; for my enemies, none would ever have sufficed. As I told the trial judge at resentencing: I always try to take success like a gentleman and reversals like a man. On to better things and brighter days.

We'll see.