Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States today, the last day of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Instead of waiting to leave office on the last day of his presidency, Mr Trump has spent the last few hours exercising his powers as president. He has issued 143 pardons and commutations for a number of criminals. Among those pardoned was an engineer who passed Google self-driving secrets to Uber.
Levandowski allegedly transferred 14,000 files related to Google self-driving technology to his laptop and leaked them to the company when he was about to jump ship to the company. The White House also issued a statement as to why Lewandowski was pardoned, saying he led the development of Google autonomous driving technology.
In June 2017, Anthony Lewandowski was charged with stealing trade secrets and resisting an internal investigation. Federal prosecutors in San Francisco filed criminal charges against Anthony Lewandowski. Anthony Lewandowski was charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. But he pleaded guilty to only one count of downloading a file on his personal computer that tracked the technical targets of the Google autonomous driving program.
At the time, the judge who ruled on the case, William Alsup, said: “This is the biggest trade secrets crime I have ever seen.”
August 2019 Former Google engineer Anthony Lewandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing Google commercial diseases. But because of the severity of the epidemic in the United States, he was not sent to prison. Today, Anthony Lewandowski was pardoned by Trump again, so he actually never spent a day in jail.
In addition to Lewandowski, Trump has pardoned 72 people and commuted the sentences of 70 others. Those pardoned also include Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager and chief strategist, and Elliot Brody, who served as Trump’s top fundraiser.
It’s not the first time Trump has proposed pardoning criminals before he leaves office, which is a common practice in the U.S. government. His predecessor, 44th President Barack Obama, pardoned more than 200 people when he left office.
