
Washington (CNN) - It was presented as a bipartisan slam dunk; that rarest of moments when President Donald Trump was apparently swayed by letters of support from over 30 members of Congress, including his nemesis, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as dozens of legal experts. Now-Attorney General William Barr was on board with the decision. Pugnacious pundit and defense attorney Alan Dershowitz publicly took credit for persuading the President.
That was the tenor of the official story the White House rolled out in December 2017, announcing the Presidential commutation of the sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of America's largest kosher meat processing plant who was convicted in 2009 of a series of fraud charges. Rubashkin's legal troubles began in 2008, when a federal immigration raid, similar to the one just completed across Mississippi, discovered nearly 400 undocumented workers at his plant in Iowa.