Blacks Justice

Conrad Black’s unconventional path to a pardon boosted by one of Trump’s biggest on-air defenders/ Susan Berger and Toluse Olorunnipa Washington Post

 

 

 

READ STORY HERE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/conrad-blacks-unconventional-path-to-a-pardon-boosted-by-one-of-trumps-biggest-on-air-defenders/2019/05/23/3b276f8e-7cd3-11e9-a5b3-34f3edf1351e_story.html

Trump pardons John Boultbee and Peter Atkinson/ 12/23/2020

John Boultbee and Peter Atkinson — President Trump granted a full pardon to John Boultbee and Peter Atkinson. Mr. Boultbee is the former chief financial officer and Mr. Atkinson is the former vice president of Hollinger International.  Both men were convicted as part of an alleged fraud scheme involving Lord Conrad Black, and both served nearly a year in prison for mail fraud. President Trump previously pardoned Lord Black, and for similar reasons and with the support of Lord Black, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Safer, and David Nathanson, he has now granted a full pardon to Messrs. Boultbee and Atkinson.

Susan Berger on CBC radio/ Winnipeg discussing Conrad Black’s pardon

Click here to listen: https://soundcloud.com/msjournalist/conrad-black-radio-winnipegmp3

Conrad Black: The President of the United States called. I was being pardoned, at last

READ STORY HERE: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-president-of-the-united-states-called-i-was-being-pardoned-at-last

U.S. President Donald Trump has fully pardoned former newspaper publisher Conrad Black, calling him “entirely deserving” of the gesture.

READ STORY HERE: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/trump-issues-full-pardon-to-conrad-black-1.4424348

Inside the courtroom/ Susan Berger’s coverage of Conrad Black trial for CBC

Susan Berger’s coverage from inside the courtroom for CBC/ https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/black_conrad/from-the-inside070518.html

Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other Hardcover – May 14, 2018

https://www.amazon.com/Donald-J-Trump-President-Other/dp/1621577872

Conrad Black’s mansion sells for bargain price — relatively/ Dan Taekema March 22, 2016

READ STORY HERE:http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/03/22/conrad-blacks-mansion-sells-for-bargain-price-relatively.html

'I'm just another guy': Conrad Black/OwensSound 11/11/2014

 

READ STORY HERE

Ontario regulator allows Conrad Black to testify on activities at Hollinger/The Canadian Press

READ STORY HERE

SEC bars Conrad Black from U.S. directorships/Reuters August 15. 2013

SEC bars Conrad Black from U.S. directorships

Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel leave federal court in Chicago last June. Black could be released from a U.S. federal prison in Miami as early as Friday.   (John Gress/Reuters)

Now, Conrad Black faces OSC hearing. But why?/ Joseph Hall

read story here

Conrad Black tells Margaret Wente what he finds irritating about himself /The Globe and Mail 5/17/13

read here

Conrad Black Loses Bid to Void Hollinger Fraud Conviction/ 2/19/2013

read here

Conrad Black Getting Own TV Talk Show in Canada

read here

Conrad Black: 'I don't care' about US pardon/ BBC Hardtalk

 

watch here

Conrad Black to BBC Interviewer: You Are a Gullible Fool/David Frum

 

Conrad Black asks court to force Order of Canada hearing

read here

Barbara Amiel on getting Conrad home

read more here

#Conrad Black gives exclusive interview to CBC

 

Welcome back #Conrad Black/ National Post editorial board

read here

#Conrad Black arrives in Toronto after release from prison

read more here

Ottawa approves #Conrad Black’s request to live in Canada

Ottawa approves Conrad Black’s request to live in Canada

Marni Soupcoff: #Conrad Black gets out on Friday. Can he come back home?

read here

#Conrad Black nominated for book award

read here

#Conrad Black’s return to Canada a long shot, experts say

read here

#Conrad Black slated for release from prison this week

read here

#Conrad Black's lawyer Edward Greenspan rebuts allegations made by Black in his book/ some are stunning

Read story here

Conrad #Black speaks - and writes

 Conrad Black speaks — and writes

#Conrad Black sues former partner David Radler

read here

Ex-media mogul #Conrad Black goes back to jail

Ex-media mogul Conrad Black goes back to jail

Conrad Black, Still in Prison, Finds Publisher for Memoir

Conrad Black to publish new memoir

#Conrad Black's statement (in its entirety) at his resentencing hearing before Judge Amy St. Eve

Conrad Black's statement:

 

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, the fact that the counts that had survived the trial were under appeal spoke for itself, and I didn't think it appropriate to say much more. As we are now back, one last time, in your court, at the weary end of this very long and fiercely contested proceeding, there are a few things that I think should be said.

The prosecutors have never ceased to accuse me of being defiant of the law, of disrespecting the courts, and of being an antagonistic critic of the American justice system. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have obeyed every order of this and other courts, every requirement of the United States Probation Office, in this and other cities, and while I was its guest, every rule and regulation of the BOP, no matter how authoritarian. I have been and remain completely and unwaveringly submissive to legal authority, yours in particular.

What I have done is exercise my absolute right to legal self-defence, a right guaranteed to everyone who is drawn into the court system of this and every other civilized country. All my adult life I have been a member of the moderate section of what is commonly called the law and order community, and I shall remain in it, whatever sentence you impose on me today. I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

Your Honour, many years ago when I was a student and licensee in law in Quebec, I read a large number of cases from British and French courts, including the principle established by the eminent British jurist, Lord Denning, that "Parties coming to court must be prepared to practise what they are asking the court to approve." The prosecutors have never ceased in this case to advocate respect for the law, and to accuse me of lacking it.

But since that is an unfounded complaint, the real source of their irritation must be that as chief defendant, I have led the destruction of most of their case, and have successfully protested my innocence of charges of which I have, in fact, been found not to have been guilty. I understand their disconcertion that of the 17 counts they originally threatened or actually launched against me, all were either not proceeded with, abandoned, rejected by the jurors or vacated by a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States. But the problem is not my lawlessness; it is the weakness of their case. I have done nothing but uphold and respect the rule of law and the system of justice, in which my faith has never flagged.

This entire prosecution and a number of civil suits as well, were based on the report of the Special Committee of the board of Hollinger International, directed by its counsel, Richard Breeden, and published in September 2004. That report accused me of having led a "$500-million corporate kleptocracy." The non-competition payments almost entirely legitimized in this case were described as "thefts." And the authors of the report promised to lead the company back to unheard of levels of profitability. They did but not in the direction indicated. I launched the largest libel suit in Canadian history against Breeden and the others responsible for writing and publishing this infamous report.

My libel suit, and several other lawsuits around this case, are being settled, including a sizeable payment to me on the libel claim. This is the ultimate collapse of the Breeden Special Committee report, whatever other interpretation the defendants in the case may, consistent with their notions of accuracy throughout these proceedings, seek to place on it.

The authors of the report were not prepared to defend it where they would not have an immunity for perjury as most of the government witnesses did here. Nor were they prepared to defend their selfdirected largesse of $300-million, as they drove the company into bankruptcy, taking down $2-billion of shareholder value with it.

Over 80% of that value belonged to ordinary people throughout the U.S. and Canada, the type of people Mr. Cramer spoke about at the opening of the trial when he likened us to masked and violent bank robbers who stole depositors' money at gunpoint, because we had supposedly rifled the shareholders' family college funds. And Breeden's original action of January 2004, containing the false charge that I had threatened the Special Committee, repeated just last month by the government in its presentence filings on May 27, has also been abandoned.

Mark Twain famously said that "A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on." It is very late in this case, Your Honour, but the truth has almost caught up with the original allegations.

I have at times expressed concern about the ethics of some of the prosecutors in this case, Your Honour, but never of the role of prosecutors, or of the necessity to convict criminals and protect society. But I must emphasize that I consider that the prosecutors, too, are victims. If they had not believed Breeden's lies, now effectively abandoned in the face of my libel suit, the U.S. Attorney would surely not have launched such a fantastic assault on us.

And I can assure the assistant U.S. attorney that I did not say on Canadian television that I was like the person checking his own expense account. I said that for the appellate panel that had been excoriated by Madame Justice Ginsburg on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court, when assigned the task of assessing the gravity of its own errors, to resurrect these two counts after a gymnastic distortion, suppression and fabrication of evidence, was like someone reviewing his own expense account.

Your Honour, these are, in any case, very threadbare counts. Is it really conceivable to you that if I were inexplicably seized with the ambition to embezzle $285,000, I would have it ratified by a committee and then, after what the minutes of the meeting described as "extensive discussion," by the whole board? I would have to have been mad.

And obstruction: It is clear from the evidence that I had nothing to do with selecting or packing the contents of the boxes, had no knowledge of any SEC interest in them after complying with five of its subpoenas, and after being assured by Mrs. Maida that it did not violate the Canadian document retention order, and checking with the acting president of the company, whose letter you have, I helped to carry out the boxes under the gaze of security cameras that I had installed. When these boxes arrived here, they were very full, so if I had taken anything out of them, why would I not have put them at any time over many weeks in my pockets or a brief case? Your Honour, again, to remove documents improperly in this way, I would have had to be barking, raving mad, and insanity is almost the only failing of which the prosecutors have not accused me.

I would like to express here my gratitude to you, Your Honour, for sending me to a prison with email access, where I was able to stay in touch with supporters and with readers of my newspaper and magazine columns. And I must also express my gratitude to the originally small but distinguished and often intellectually brave group of friends, but also of total strangers, who never believed I was guilty, when that was a less fashionable position than it has become. Their numbers grew to be an army that now includes many people in every American state and Canadian province, and region of the United Kingdom, and people in many other countries.

And my gratitude to the many friends I made, inmates and correctional personnel, at the Coleman Low Security Prison, whom I shall not forget, is beyond my ability to express today.

I am of the tradition that tends not to speak publicly of personal matters, but Your Honour, I hope it is acceptable to you if I vary that practice slightly, and briefly, in concluding, today. As you would know, or could surmise from many letters that have been sent to you qualified to comment, and as is mentioned in the presentencing submissions, I believe in the confession and repentance of misconduct and in the punishment of crime. I don't believe in false or opportunistic confessions.

It is not the case, as has been endlessly alleged by the prosecutors, that I have no remorse. I regret that my skepticism about corporate governance zealotry, though it was objectively correct and has been demonstrated to have been so in the destruction of these companies, became so identified with the companies themselves that the shareholders all suffered from it.

I regret that I was too trusting of the honesty of one associate and the thoroughness of some others, and the buck has stopped with me. I repent those and other tactical errors and mistakes of attitude, Your Honour, and I do not resent paying for those errors, because it is right, and in any case inevitable, that people should pay for their mistakes.

I concluded many years ago in my brief stint as a candidate psychoanalyst that it is practically impossible to repress conscientious remorse. And I concluded some years later in reading some of the works of the recently beatified Cardinal Newman, that our consciences are a divine impulse speaking within us, as Newman wrote, "powerful, peremptory and definitive." My conscience functions like that of other people, and I respond to it, if not precisely as my accusers would wish. But they are prosecutors, not custodians of the consciences of those whom they accuse.

Your Honour, please do not doubt that even though I don't much speak of it, my family and I have suffered deeply from the onslaught of these eight years. I agree with the late pope who said "Life is cruciform." All people suffer. It is a stern message, but need not be a grim one. We rarely know why we suffer, and only those who have faith even believe there is a reason. No one can plausibly explain in moral terms a natural disaster, or a personal tragedy. I see life as a privilege and almost all challenges as opportunities, and have always tried to take success like a gentleman, and disappointment like a man.

Whatever the reason my family and I have had to endure this ordeal, for our purposes today, in these personal questions, I only ask that you take into account the messages you have received about collateral medical problems in my family. I do not worry about myself, and I will not speak further in open court of the worries I do have for my family. But I most earnestly request, Your Honour, as someone who has shown and expressed family sensibilities several times in this case, that they too be taken into account in your sentence.

And I believe that even if a reasonable person still concludes that I am guilty of these two surviving, resurrected, counts, tortuously arrived at and threadbare though their evidentiary basis now is, that the same reasonable person would conclude that I have been adequately punished. I only ask you to recall the criterion you eloquently invoked near the end of the trial that the justice system not be brought into disrepute by an unjust sentence.

I conclude by quoting parts of a famous poem by Kipling, with which I'm sure many in the court are familiar, and which I had known too, but not as well as I knew it after it was sent to me by well-wishers from every continent except Antarctica. And to the extent I was able, I tried to keep in mind throughout these difficult years, what Kipling wrote, which was, in part and as memory serves:

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust your own counsel though all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, If you wait but are not tired of waiting, Are lied about, but don't deal in lies, If some men hate you but you don't stoop to hating; And don't look too good or talk too wise; If you can talk but don't make words your master, Can think but don't make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with triumph and disaster, But treat both those imposters just the same.

And I address this directly to the prosecutors and some of the media:

If you can bear to hear the truths you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, And see the work you gave your life to broken, And stoop to fix it up with worn-out tools.

If you can make a pile of all your winnings, And risk it on a turn of pitch and toss, And lose and start again at your beginning, And never say a word about your loss.

And Kipling goes on to say that the reader will then be a man. Your Honour, when I first appeared in your court six years ago and you asked me my age, it was 61. If I'm not a man now, I never will be.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it. It is now too late to ask for justice. But with undimmed respect for this country, this court, and if I may say so, for you personally, I do ask you now to avoid injustice, which it is now in your gift alone to do. I apologize for the length of my remarks, and thank you, for hearing me out, Your Honour.

#Conrad Black's statement (in its entirety) at his resentencing hearing before Judge Amy St. Eve

Conrad Black's statement:

 

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, the fact that the counts that had survived the trial were under appeal spoke for itself, and I didn't think it appropriate to say much more. As we are now back, one last time, in your court, at the weary end of this very long and fiercely contested proceeding, there are a few things that I think should be said.

The prosecutors have never ceased to accuse me of being defiant of the law, of disrespecting the courts, and of being an antagonistic critic of the American justice system. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have obeyed every order of this and other courts, every requirement of the United States Probation Office, in this and other cities, and while I was its guest, every rule and regulation of the BOP, no matter how authoritarian. I have been and remain completely and unwaveringly submissive to legal authority, yours in particular.

What I have done is exercise my absolute right to legal self-defence, a right guaranteed to everyone who is drawn into the court system of this and every other civilized country. All my adult life I have been a member of the moderate section of what is commonly called the law and order community, and I shall remain in it, whatever sentence you impose on me today. I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

Your Honour, many years ago when I was a student and licensee in law in Quebec, I read a large number of cases from British and French courts, including the principle established by the eminent British jurist, Lord Denning, that "Parties coming to court must be prepared to practise what they are asking the court to approve." The prosecutors have never ceased in this case to advocate respect for the law, and to accuse me of lacking it.

But since that is an unfounded complaint, the real source of their irritation must be that as chief defendant, I have led the destruction of most of their case, and have successfully protested my innocence of charges of which I have, in fact, been found not to have been guilty. I understand their disconcertion that of the 17 counts they originally threatened or actually launched against me, all were either not proceeded with, abandoned, rejected by the jurors or vacated by a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States. But the problem is not my lawlessness; it is the weakness of their case. I have done nothing but uphold and respect the rule of law and the system of justice, in which my faith has never flagged.

This entire prosecution and a number of civil suits as well, were based on the report of the Special Committee of the board of Hollinger International, directed by its counsel, Richard Breeden, and published in September 2004. That report accused me of having led a "$500-million corporate kleptocracy." The non-competition payments almost entirely legitimized in this case were described as "thefts." And the authors of the report promised to lead the company back to unheard of levels of profitability. They did but not in the direction indicated. I launched the largest libel suit in Canadian history against Breeden and the others responsible for writing and publishing this infamous report.

My libel suit, and several other lawsuits around this case, are being settled, including a sizeable payment to me on the libel claim. This is the ultimate collapse of the Breeden Special Committee report, whatever other interpretation the defendants in the case may, consistent with their notions of accuracy throughout these proceedings, seek to place on it.

The authors of the report were not prepared to defend it where they would not have an immunity for perjury as most of the government witnesses did here. Nor were they prepared to defend their selfdirected largesse of $300-million, as they drove the company into bankruptcy, taking down $2-billion of shareholder value with it.

Over 80% of that value belonged to ordinary people throughout the U.S. and Canada, the type of people Mr. Cramer spoke about at the opening of the trial when he likened us to masked and violent bank robbers who stole depositors' money at gunpoint, because we had supposedly rifled the shareholders' family college funds. And Breeden's original action of January 2004, containing the false charge that I had threatened the Special Committee, repeated just last month by the government in its presentence filings on May 27, has also been abandoned.

Mark Twain famously said that "A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on." It is very late in this case, Your Honour, but the truth has almost caught up with the original allegations.

I have at times expressed concern about the ethics of some of the prosecutors in this case, Your Honour, but never of the role of prosecutors, or of the necessity to convict criminals and protect society. But I must emphasize that I consider that the prosecutors, too, are victims. If they had not believed Breeden's lies, now effectively abandoned in the face of my libel suit, the U.S. Attorney would surely not have launched such a fantastic assault on us.

And I can assure the assistant U.S. attorney that I did not say on Canadian television that I was like the person checking his own expense account. I said that for the appellate panel that had been excoriated by Madame Justice Ginsburg on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court, when assigned the task of assessing the gravity of its own errors, to resurrect these two counts after a gymnastic distortion, suppression and fabrication of evidence, was like someone reviewing his own expense account.

Your Honour, these are, in any case, very threadbare counts. Is it really conceivable to you that if I were inexplicably seized with the ambition to embezzle $285,000, I would have it ratified by a committee and then, after what the minutes of the meeting described as "extensive discussion," by the whole board? I would have to have been mad.

And obstruction: It is clear from the evidence that I had nothing to do with selecting or packing the contents of the boxes, had no knowledge of any SEC interest in them after complying with five of its subpoenas, and after being assured by Mrs. Maida that it did not violate the Canadian document retention order, and checking with the acting president of the company, whose letter you have, I helped to carry out the boxes under the gaze of security cameras that I had installed. When these boxes arrived here, they were very full, so if I had taken anything out of them, why would I not have put them at any time over many weeks in my pockets or a brief case? Your Honour, again, to remove documents improperly in this way, I would have had to be barking, raving mad, and insanity is almost the only failing of which the prosecutors have not accused me.

I would like to express here my gratitude to you, Your Honour, for sending me to a prison with email access, where I was able to stay in touch with supporters and with readers of my newspaper and magazine columns. And I must also express my gratitude to the originally small but distinguished and often intellectually brave group of friends, but also of total strangers, who never believed I was guilty, when that was a less fashionable position than it has become. Their numbers grew to be an army that now includes many people in every American state and Canadian province, and region of the United Kingdom, and people in many other countries.

And my gratitude to the many friends I made, inmates and correctional personnel, at the Coleman Low Security Prison, whom I shall not forget, is beyond my ability to express today.

I am of the tradition that tends not to speak publicly of personal matters, but Your Honour, I hope it is acceptable to you if I vary that practice slightly, and briefly, in concluding, today. As you would know, or could surmise from many letters that have been sent to you qualified to comment, and as is mentioned in the presentencing submissions, I believe in the confession and repentance of misconduct and in the punishment of crime. I don't believe in false or opportunistic confessions.

It is not the case, as has been endlessly alleged by the prosecutors, that I have no remorse. I regret that my skepticism about corporate governance zealotry, though it was objectively correct and has been demonstrated to have been so in the destruction of these companies, became so identified with the companies themselves that the shareholders all suffered from it.

I regret that I was too trusting of the honesty of one associate and the thoroughness of some others, and the buck has stopped with me. I repent those and other tactical errors and mistakes of attitude, Your Honour, and I do not resent paying for those errors, because it is right, and in any case inevitable, that people should pay for their mistakes.

I concluded many years ago in my brief stint as a candidate psychoanalyst that it is practically impossible to repress conscientious remorse. And I concluded some years later in reading some of the works of the recently beatified Cardinal Newman, that our consciences are a divine impulse speaking within us, as Newman wrote, "powerful, peremptory and definitive." My conscience functions like that of other people, and I respond to it, if not precisely as my accusers would wish. But they are prosecutors, not custodians of the consciences of those whom they accuse.

Your Honour, please do not doubt that even though I don't much speak of it, my family and I have suffered deeply from the onslaught of these eight years. I agree with the late pope who said "Life is cruciform." All people suffer. It is a stern message, but need not be a grim one. We rarely know why we suffer, and only those who have faith even believe there is a reason. No one can plausibly explain in moral terms a natural disaster, or a personal tragedy. I see life as a privilege and almost all challenges as opportunities, and have always tried to take success like a gentleman, and disappointment like a man.

Whatever the reason my family and I have had to endure this ordeal, for our purposes today, in these personal questions, I only ask that you take into account the messages you have received about collateral medical problems in my family. I do not worry about myself, and I will not speak further in open court of the worries I do have for my family. But I most earnestly request, Your Honour, as someone who has shown and expressed family sensibilities several times in this case, that they too be taken into account in your sentence.

And I believe that even if a reasonable person still concludes that I am guilty of these two surviving, resurrected, counts, tortuously arrived at and threadbare though their evidentiary basis now is, that the same reasonable person would conclude that I have been adequately punished. I only ask you to recall the criterion you eloquently invoked near the end of the trial that the justice system not be brought into disrepute by an unjust sentence.

I conclude by quoting parts of a famous poem by Kipling, with which I'm sure many in the court are familiar, and which I had known too, but not as well as I knew it after it was sent to me by well-wishers from every continent except Antarctica. And to the extent I was able, I tried to keep in mind throughout these difficult years, what Kipling wrote, which was, in part and as memory serves:

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust your own counsel though all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, If you wait but are not tired of waiting, Are lied about, but don't deal in lies, If some men hate you but you don't stoop to hating; And don't look too good or talk too wise; If you can talk but don't make words your master, Can think but don't make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with triumph and disaster, But treat both those imposters just the same.

And I address this directly to the prosecutors and some of the media:

If you can bear to hear the truths you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, And see the work you gave your life to broken, And stoop to fix it up with worn-out tools.

If you can make a pile of all your winnings, And risk it on a turn of pitch and toss, And lose and start again at your beginning, And never say a word about your loss.

And Kipling goes on to say that the reader will then be a man. Your Honour, when I first appeared in your court six years ago and you asked me my age, it was 61. If I'm not a man now, I never will be.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it. It is now too late to ask for justice. But with undimmed respect for this country, this court, and if I may say so, for you personally, I do ask you now to avoid injustice, which it is now in your gift alone to do. I apologize for the length of my remarks, and thank you, for hearing me out, Your Honour.

#Conrad Black's statement (in its entirety) at his resentencing hearing before Judge Amy St. Eve

Conrad Black's statement:

 

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, the fact that the counts that had survived the trial were under appeal spoke for itself, and I didn't think it appropriate to say much more. As we are now back, one last time, in your court, at the weary end of this very long and fiercely contested proceeding, there are a few things that I think should be said.

The prosecutors have never ceased to accuse me of being defiant of the law, of disrespecting the courts, and of being an antagonistic critic of the American justice system. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have obeyed every order of this and other courts, every requirement of the United States Probation Office, in this and other cities, and while I was its guest, every rule and regulation of the BOP, no matter how authoritarian. I have been and remain completely and unwaveringly submissive to legal authority, yours in particular.

What I have done is exercise my absolute right to legal self-defence, a right guaranteed to everyone who is drawn into the court system of this and every other civilized country. All my adult life I have been a member of the moderate section of what is commonly called the law and order community, and I shall remain in it, whatever sentence you impose on me today. I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

Your Honour, many years ago when I was a student and licensee in law in Quebec, I read a large number of cases from British and French courts, including the principle established by the eminent British jurist, Lord Denning, that "Parties coming to court must be prepared to practise what they are asking the court to approve." The prosecutors have never ceased in this case to advocate respect for the law, and to accuse me of lacking it.

But since that is an unfounded complaint, the real source of their irritation must be that as chief defendant, I have led the destruction of most of their case, and have successfully protested my innocence of charges of which I have, in fact, been found not to have been guilty. I understand their disconcertion that of the 17 counts they originally threatened or actually launched against me, all were either not proceeded with, abandoned, rejected by the jurors or vacated by a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States. But the problem is not my lawlessness; it is the weakness of their case. I have done nothing but uphold and respect the rule of law and the system of justice, in which my faith has never flagged.

This entire prosecution and a number of civil suits as well, were based on the report of the Special Committee of the board of Hollinger International, directed by its counsel, Richard Breeden, and published in September 2004. That report accused me of having led a "$500-million corporate kleptocracy." The non-competition payments almost entirely legitimized in this case were described as "thefts." And the authors of the report promised to lead the company back to unheard of levels of profitability. They did but not in the direction indicated. I launched the largest libel suit in Canadian history against Breeden and the others responsible for writing and publishing this infamous report.

My libel suit, and several other lawsuits around this case, are being settled, including a sizeable payment to me on the libel claim. This is the ultimate collapse of the Breeden Special Committee report, whatever other interpretation the defendants in the case may, consistent with their notions of accuracy throughout these proceedings, seek to place on it.

The authors of the report were not prepared to defend it where they would not have an immunity for perjury as most of the government witnesses did here. Nor were they prepared to defend their selfdirected largesse of $300-million, as they drove the company into bankruptcy, taking down $2-billion of shareholder value with it.

Over 80% of that value belonged to ordinary people throughout the U.S. and Canada, the type of people Mr. Cramer spoke about at the opening of the trial when he likened us to masked and violent bank robbers who stole depositors' money at gunpoint, because we had supposedly rifled the shareholders' family college funds. And Breeden's original action of January 2004, containing the false charge that I had threatened the Special Committee, repeated just last month by the government in its presentence filings on May 27, has also been abandoned.

Mark Twain famously said that "A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on." It is very late in this case, Your Honour, but the truth has almost caught up with the original allegations.

I have at times expressed concern about the ethics of some of the prosecutors in this case, Your Honour, but never of the role of prosecutors, or of the necessity to convict criminals and protect society. But I must emphasize that I consider that the prosecutors, too, are victims. If they had not believed Breeden's lies, now effectively abandoned in the face of my libel suit, the U.S. Attorney would surely not have launched such a fantastic assault on us.

And I can assure the assistant U.S. attorney that I did not say on Canadian television that I was like the person checking his own expense account. I said that for the appellate panel that had been excoriated by Madame Justice Ginsburg on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court, when assigned the task of assessing the gravity of its own errors, to resurrect these two counts after a gymnastic distortion, suppression and fabrication of evidence, was like someone reviewing his own expense account.

Your Honour, these are, in any case, very threadbare counts. Is it really conceivable to you that if I were inexplicably seized with the ambition to embezzle $285,000, I would have it ratified by a committee and then, after what the minutes of the meeting described as "extensive discussion," by the whole board? I would have to have been mad.

And obstruction: It is clear from the evidence that I had nothing to do with selecting or packing the contents of the boxes, had no knowledge of any SEC interest in them after complying with five of its subpoenas, and after being assured by Mrs. Maida that it did not violate the Canadian document retention order, and checking with the acting president of the company, whose letter you have, I helped to carry out the boxes under the gaze of security cameras that I had installed. When these boxes arrived here, they were very full, so if I had taken anything out of them, why would I not have put them at any time over many weeks in my pockets or a brief case? Your Honour, again, to remove documents improperly in this way, I would have had to be barking, raving mad, and insanity is almost the only failing of which the prosecutors have not accused me.

I would like to express here my gratitude to you, Your Honour, for sending me to a prison with email access, where I was able to stay in touch with supporters and with readers of my newspaper and magazine columns. And I must also express my gratitude to the originally small but distinguished and often intellectually brave group of friends, but also of total strangers, who never believed I was guilty, when that was a less fashionable position than it has become. Their numbers grew to be an army that now includes many people in every American state and Canadian province, and region of the United Kingdom, and people in many other countries.

And my gratitude to the many friends I made, inmates and correctional personnel, at the Coleman Low Security Prison, whom I shall not forget, is beyond my ability to express today.

I am of the tradition that tends not to speak publicly of personal matters, but Your Honour, I hope it is acceptable to you if I vary that practice slightly, and briefly, in concluding, today. As you would know, or could surmise from many letters that have been sent to you qualified to comment, and as is mentioned in the presentencing submissions, I believe in the confession and repentance of misconduct and in the punishment of crime. I don't believe in false or opportunistic confessions.

It is not the case, as has been endlessly alleged by the prosecutors, that I have no remorse. I regret that my skepticism about corporate governance zealotry, though it was objectively correct and has been demonstrated to have been so in the destruction of these companies, became so identified with the companies themselves that the shareholders all suffered from it.

I regret that I was too trusting of the honesty of one associate and the thoroughness of some others, and the buck has stopped with me. I repent those and other tactical errors and mistakes of attitude, Your Honour, and I do not resent paying for those errors, because it is right, and in any case inevitable, that people should pay for their mistakes.

I concluded many years ago in my brief stint as a candidate psychoanalyst that it is practically impossible to repress conscientious remorse. And I concluded some years later in reading some of the works of the recently beatified Cardinal Newman, that our consciences are a divine impulse speaking within us, as Newman wrote, "powerful, peremptory and definitive." My conscience functions like that of other people, and I respond to it, if not precisely as my accusers would wish. But they are prosecutors, not custodians of the consciences of those whom they accuse.

Your Honour, please do not doubt that even though I don't much speak of it, my family and I have suffered deeply from the onslaught of these eight years. I agree with the late pope who said "Life is cruciform." All people suffer. It is a stern message, but need not be a grim one. We rarely know why we suffer, and only those who have faith even believe there is a reason. No one can plausibly explain in moral terms a natural disaster, or a personal tragedy. I see life as a privilege and almost all challenges as opportunities, and have always tried to take success like a gentleman, and disappointment like a man.

Whatever the reason my family and I have had to endure this ordeal, for our purposes today, in these personal questions, I only ask that you take into account the messages you have received about collateral medical problems in my family. I do not worry about myself, and I will not speak further in open court of the worries I do have for my family. But I most earnestly request, Your Honour, as someone who has shown and expressed family sensibilities several times in this case, that they too be taken into account in your sentence.

And I believe that even if a reasonable person still concludes that I am guilty of these two surviving, resurrected, counts, tortuously arrived at and threadbare though their evidentiary basis now is, that the same reasonable person would conclude that I have been adequately punished. I only ask you to recall the criterion you eloquently invoked near the end of the trial that the justice system not be brought into disrepute by an unjust sentence.

I conclude by quoting parts of a famous poem by Kipling, with which I'm sure many in the court are familiar, and which I had known too, but not as well as I knew it after it was sent to me by well-wishers from every continent except Antarctica. And to the extent I was able, I tried to keep in mind throughout these difficult years, what Kipling wrote, which was, in part and as memory serves:

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust your own counsel though all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, If you wait but are not tired of waiting, Are lied about, but don't deal in lies, If some men hate you but you don't stoop to hating; And don't look too good or talk too wise; If you can talk but don't make words your master, Can think but don't make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with triumph and disaster, But treat both those imposters just the same.

And I address this directly to the prosecutors and some of the media:

If you can bear to hear the truths you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, And see the work you gave your life to broken, And stoop to fix it up with worn-out tools.

If you can make a pile of all your winnings, And risk it on a turn of pitch and toss, And lose and start again at your beginning, And never say a word about your loss.

And Kipling goes on to say that the reader will then be a man. Your Honour, when I first appeared in your court six years ago and you asked me my age, it was 61. If I'm not a man now, I never will be.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it. It is now too late to ask for justice. But with undimmed respect for this country, this court, and if I may say so, for you personally, I do ask you now to avoid injustice, which it is now in your gift alone to do. I apologize for the length of my remarks, and thank you, for hearing me out, Your Honour.

#Conrad Black's statement (in its entirety) at his resentencing hearing before Judge Amy St. Eve

Conrad Black's statement:

 

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, the fact that the counts that had survived the trial were under appeal spoke for itself, and I didn't think it appropriate to say much more. As we are now back, one last time, in your court, at the weary end of this very long and fiercely contested proceeding, there are a few things that I think should be said.

The prosecutors have never ceased to accuse me of being defiant of the law, of disrespecting the courts, and of being an antagonistic critic of the American justice system. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have obeyed every order of this and other courts, every requirement of the United States Probation Office, in this and other cities, and while I was its guest, every rule and regulation of the BOP, no matter how authoritarian. I have been and remain completely and unwaveringly submissive to legal authority, yours in particular.

What I have done is exercise my absolute right to legal self-defence, a right guaranteed to everyone who is drawn into the court system of this and every other civilized country. All my adult life I have been a member of the moderate section of what is commonly called the law and order community, and I shall remain in it, whatever sentence you impose on me today. I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

Your Honour, many years ago when I was a student and licensee in law in Quebec, I read a large number of cases from British and French courts, including the principle established by the eminent British jurist, Lord Denning, that "Parties coming to court must be prepared to practise what they are asking the court to approve." The prosecutors have never ceased in this case to advocate respect for the law, and to accuse me of lacking it.

But since that is an unfounded complaint, the real source of their irritation must be that as chief defendant, I have led the destruction of most of their case, and have successfully protested my innocence of charges of which I have, in fact, been found not to have been guilty. I understand their disconcertion that of the 17 counts they originally threatened or actually launched against me, all were either not proceeded with, abandoned, rejected by the jurors or vacated by a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States. But the problem is not my lawlessness; it is the weakness of their case. I have done nothing but uphold and respect the rule of law and the system of justice, in which my faith has never flagged.

This entire prosecution and a number of civil suits as well, were based on the report of the Special Committee of the board of Hollinger International, directed by its counsel, Richard Breeden, and published in September 2004. That report accused me of having led a "$500-million corporate kleptocracy." The non-competition payments almost entirely legitimized in this case were described as "thefts." And the authors of the report promised to lead the company back to unheard of levels of profitability. They did but not in the direction indicated. I launched the largest libel suit in Canadian history against Breeden and the others responsible for writing and publishing this infamous report.

My libel suit, and several other lawsuits around this case, are being settled, including a sizeable payment to me on the libel claim. This is the ultimate collapse of the Breeden Special Committee report, whatever other interpretation the defendants in the case may, consistent with their notions of accuracy throughout these proceedings, seek to place on it.

The authors of the report were not prepared to defend it where they would not have an immunity for perjury as most of the government witnesses did here. Nor were they prepared to defend their selfdirected largesse of $300-million, as they drove the company into bankruptcy, taking down $2-billion of shareholder value with it.

Over 80% of that value belonged to ordinary people throughout the U.S. and Canada, the type of people Mr. Cramer spoke about at the opening of the trial when he likened us to masked and violent bank robbers who stole depositors' money at gunpoint, because we had supposedly rifled the shareholders' family college funds. And Breeden's original action of January 2004, containing the false charge that I had threatened the Special Committee, repeated just last month by the government in its presentence filings on May 27, has also been abandoned.

Mark Twain famously said that "A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on." It is very late in this case, Your Honour, but the truth has almost caught up with the original allegations.

I have at times expressed concern about the ethics of some of the prosecutors in this case, Your Honour, but never of the role of prosecutors, or of the necessity to convict criminals and protect society. But I must emphasize that I consider that the prosecutors, too, are victims. If they had not believed Breeden's lies, now effectively abandoned in the face of my libel suit, the U.S. Attorney would surely not have launched such a fantastic assault on us.

And I can assure the assistant U.S. attorney that I did not say on Canadian television that I was like the person checking his own expense account. I said that for the appellate panel that had been excoriated by Madame Justice Ginsburg on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court, when assigned the task of assessing the gravity of its own errors, to resurrect these two counts after a gymnastic distortion, suppression and fabrication of evidence, was like someone reviewing his own expense account.

Your Honour, these are, in any case, very threadbare counts. Is it really conceivable to you that if I were inexplicably seized with the ambition to embezzle $285,000, I would have it ratified by a committee and then, after what the minutes of the meeting described as "extensive discussion," by the whole board? I would have to have been mad.

And obstruction: It is clear from the evidence that I had nothing to do with selecting or packing the contents of the boxes, had no knowledge of any SEC interest in them after complying with five of its subpoenas, and after being assured by Mrs. Maida that it did not violate the Canadian document retention order, and checking with the acting president of the company, whose letter you have, I helped to carry out the boxes under the gaze of security cameras that I had installed. When these boxes arrived here, they were very full, so if I had taken anything out of them, why would I not have put them at any time over many weeks in my pockets or a brief case? Your Honour, again, to remove documents improperly in this way, I would have had to be barking, raving mad, and insanity is almost the only failing of which the prosecutors have not accused me.

I would like to express here my gratitude to you, Your Honour, for sending me to a prison with email access, where I was able to stay in touch with supporters and with readers of my newspaper and magazine columns. And I must also express my gratitude to the originally small but distinguished and often intellectually brave group of friends, but also of total strangers, who never believed I was guilty, when that was a less fashionable position than it has become. Their numbers grew to be an army that now includes many people in every American state and Canadian province, and region of the United Kingdom, and people in many other countries.

And my gratitude to the many friends I made, inmates and correctional personnel, at the Coleman Low Security Prison, whom I shall not forget, is beyond my ability to express today.

I am of the tradition that tends not to speak publicly of personal matters, but Your Honour, I hope it is acceptable to you if I vary that practice slightly, and briefly, in concluding, today. As you would know, or could surmise from many letters that have been sent to you qualified to comment, and as is mentioned in the presentencing submissions, I believe in the confession and repentance of misconduct and in the punishment of crime. I don't believe in false or opportunistic confessions.

It is not the case, as has been endlessly alleged by the prosecutors, that I have no remorse. I regret that my skepticism about corporate governance zealotry, though it was objectively correct and has been demonstrated to have been so in the destruction of these companies, became so identified with the companies themselves that the shareholders all suffered from it.

I regret that I was too trusting of the honesty of one associate and the thoroughness of some others, and the buck has stopped with me. I repent those and other tactical errors and mistakes of attitude, Your Honour, and I do not resent paying for those errors, because it is right, and in any case inevitable, that people should pay for their mistakes.

I concluded many years ago in my brief stint as a candidate psychoanalyst that it is practically impossible to repress conscientious remorse. And I concluded some years later in reading some of the works of the recently beatified Cardinal Newman, that our consciences are a divine impulse speaking within us, as Newman wrote, "powerful, peremptory and definitive." My conscience functions like that of other people, and I respond to it, if not precisely as my accusers would wish. But they are prosecutors, not custodians of the consciences of those whom they accuse.

Your Honour, please do not doubt that even though I don't much speak of it, my family and I have suffered deeply from the onslaught of these eight years. I agree with the late pope who said "Life is cruciform." All people suffer. It is a stern message, but need not be a grim one. We rarely know why we suffer, and only those who have faith even believe there is a reason. No one can plausibly explain in moral terms a natural disaster, or a personal tragedy. I see life as a privilege and almost all challenges as opportunities, and have always tried to take success like a gentleman, and disappointment like a man.

Whatever the reason my family and I have had to endure this ordeal, for our purposes today, in these personal questions, I only ask that you take into account the messages you have received about collateral medical problems in my family. I do not worry about myself, and I will not speak further in open court of the worries I do have for my family. But I most earnestly request, Your Honour, as someone who has shown and expressed family sensibilities several times in this case, that they too be taken into account in your sentence.

And I believe that even if a reasonable person still concludes that I am guilty of these two surviving, resurrected, counts, tortuously arrived at and threadbare though their evidentiary basis now is, that the same reasonable person would conclude that I have been adequately punished. I only ask you to recall the criterion you eloquently invoked near the end of the trial that the justice system not be brought into disrepute by an unjust sentence.

I conclude by quoting parts of a famous poem by Kipling, with which I'm sure many in the court are familiar, and which I had known too, but not as well as I knew it after it was sent to me by well-wishers from every continent except Antarctica. And to the extent I was able, I tried to keep in mind throughout these difficult years, what Kipling wrote, which was, in part and as memory serves:

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust your own counsel though all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, If you wait but are not tired of waiting, Are lied about, but don't deal in lies, If some men hate you but you don't stoop to hating; And don't look too good or talk too wise; If you can talk but don't make words your master, Can think but don't make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with triumph and disaster, But treat both those imposters just the same.

And I address this directly to the prosecutors and some of the media:

If you can bear to hear the truths you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, And see the work you gave your life to broken, And stoop to fix it up with worn-out tools.

If you can make a pile of all your winnings, And risk it on a turn of pitch and toss, And lose and start again at your beginning, And never say a word about your loss.

And Kipling goes on to say that the reader will then be a man. Your Honour, when I first appeared in your court six years ago and you asked me my age, it was 61. If I'm not a man now, I never will be.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it. It is now too late to ask for justice. But with undimmed respect for this country, this court, and if I may say so, for you personally, I do ask you now to avoid injustice, which it is now in your gift alone to do. I apologize for the length of my remarks, and thank you, for hearing me out, Your Honour.

Six lessons gleaned from the #Conrad Black case

Six lessons gleaned from the Conrad Black case

Conrad Black going back to prison/Theresa Tedesco, National Post

Conrad Black going back to prison

Back to prison for Conrad Black

Former media mogul's sentence cut in half following appeals Back to prison for Conrad Black

#Conrad Black's sentencing not a surprise, says Peter Worthington

Sentence not a surprise, Peter Worthington says

#Conrad Black sent back to prison

Ex-media mogul Conrad Black sent back to prison

Conrad Black's wife, Barbara Amiel faints when his sentence is announced

 Sketch by Cheryl Cook

Conrad Black's wife distraught during proceedings

 

Sketch by Cheryl Cook

Conrad Black appears before Judge Amy St. Eve

 

Sketch by Cheryl Cook

Transcript: The resentencing of Conrad Black

read here

#Conrad Black denies allegations made by two prison workers

Conrad Black's response to government's filing regarding sentencing read document filed by Conrad Black's lawyer here

Conrad Black a prima donna, prosecutors say in document preparing for sentencing

The government filed a sentencing memoranda on Thursday that claims Conrad Black, while tutoring at Coleman  FCI prison, did not go above and beyond what was expected.  In fact,  according to Carrie DeLaGarza, an education  specialist, he was often late and sat outside the class reading or writing.  He also elected to take a piano class which caused him to miss parts of the GED class. Based on DeLaGarza's interactions, Black "projected the attitude that he was better than others in the class, both faculty and students.

A unit manager at Coleman FCI by the name of Tammy Padgett states that she observed that Black "gathered a following of inmates who performed services for him, acting like servants.  These inmates cooked for Black, cleaned for him, mopped his floor, ironed his clothes, and similar tasks.  This is not at all frequent at Coleman."

In addition, a Ms. Carbone, Black's assigned case manager reported that she met with Black in 2010, the day before he was to released on bond.  Black told Carbone words to the effect of, "I believe I should be addressed as Lord Black from this point forward."  Ms. Carbone informed Black that she would address him as she addressed other inmates.

See document below:

Download 8478354703_110605_397922888

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

　

　

　

　

　

 

 

　

　

　

　

　

 

A tale of two mansions: Conrad Black and Osama bin Laden

A tale of two mansions

Conrad Black sells Palm Beach home

Conrad Black sells Palm Beach home: report

#Conrad Black's Palm Beach home sells for $26.4 milliion

Oceanfront home, site of Conrad Black, Izzy Asper ‘Canterbury Tale’ deal, sells for $26.4M