United States | News & Politics

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Months earlier, the Federal Trade Commission and the New York State attorney general had filed suits against Mr. Braun saying he swindled and intimidated borrowers who had taken money from a network of predatory lenders he ran, charging usurious interest rates and making violent threats.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York imposed $20 million in fines on Mr. Braun after finding him liable for the accusations made by the trade commission.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan excoriated Mr. Braun in the ruling, depicting him as a hardened, craven man who “gleefully, with little remorse,” boasted about his illegal conduct and treated it as a “laughing matter” as he threatened the business owners he gouged.

The New York Times reported in November that Mr. Trump’s commutation of Mr. Braun’s 10-year sentence in an unrelated drug case dealt a significant blow to an ambitious criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Mr. Braun’s defense lawyer and prosecutors had been in negotiations for a cooperation deal that would have let him out of prison in exchange for turning on those he worked alongside and even secretly recording their conversations.

Mr. Trump commuted the 24-year prison sentence of a former used-car salesman named Eliyahu Weinstein who had been convicted of investment fraud, including a $200 million Ponzi-style scheme that preyed upon his tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community.

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