President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned businessman Tim Leiweke, despite the fact that his own Department of Justice charged the stadium developer in July for allegedly rigging the bidding process for a $375 million multipurpose arena at the University of Texas at Austin.
Leiweke, a longtime entertainment executive and co-founder of the development group Oak View, is alleged to have “entered into an agreement with another potential bidder for the arena to drop a competing effort in exchange for lucrative subcontracts” during the 2018 bidding process for a development project at the university’s Moody Center, according to a press release issued by the DOJ when he was indicted on one count of breaking federal antitrust law.
As a result, Oak View Group was the only qualified bidder, winning the contract and, according to the indictment, continuing “to receive significant revenues from the project to date.”
Oak View Group and its competitor, Legends Hospitality, agreed to pay $15 million and $1.5 million in penalties, respectively, in connection with the conduct alleged in the indictment against Leiweke.
Leiweke has maintained his innocence, and was released on an unsecured $1 million bond after pleading not guilty. Following the indictment, he stepped down as CEO of the Oak View Group.
The time frame for Leiweke to plea expired in November. A jury trial had been scheduled for May 2026. If convicted, he faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and $1 million fine.
In a departure email to co-workers reviewed by Sports Business Journal, Leiweke said he was “confident that jurors in Austin will see this case for what it is — wrong on the facts and the law and a misguided attempt to criminalize the lawful, ethical, and procompetitive efforts of complementary businesses joining forces to deliver a compelling proposal.”
“OVG won the work on the merits of our qualifications and proposal,” he continued. “At a time when the current administration is trying to promote American enterprise and innovation, this prosecution is inexplicably trying to stifle them.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about why the administration saw this case as a priority.
Trump has issued more than 1,500 pardons so far in his second term, most of which have focused on those he believes were targeted unfairly by his presidential predecessor, Joe Biden.
“We pardoned the people that were treated unbelievably poorly,” Trump said at an artificial intelligence conference in January after he granted blanket pardons to virtually all Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants.
In addition to those pardoned in connection to the Capitol riot, Trump has made a number of other high-profile pardons and commutations.
In February, Trump pardoned Rod Blagojevich, his former “Celebrity Apprentice” guest and the former governor of Illinois, who was on year eight of his 14-year sentence for his role in a corruption scandal that centered around an attempt to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. He also commuted the sentence of former congressman and convicted fraudster George Santos in October, and later that month granted another pardon to cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to violating federal anti-money-laundering laws.
On Wednesday, Trump even surprised some in his own party by issuing a pardon for Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar — more than a year after Biden’s DOJ accused Cuellar and his wife of bribery and acting as a foreign agent.
Trump has talked openly about the similarities he sees between some of those cases and several of his own criminal probes during the Biden administration.
The list of indictments against Trump stretches back to a March 2023 indictment in New York, for which he faced 34 criminal charges of falsifying financial records in order to cover up payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The DOJ went on to indict Trump three more times for his mishandling of classified documents, attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his connection to an alleged racketeering conspiracy to subvert Georgia’s election results. Those cases have all been dismissed since Trump returned to the White House.
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