Felon Freed by Trump Is Sent Back to Prison After Child Assault Charge

A violent felon whose sentence was commuted by President Trump was arrested Friday and charged with violating the terms of his supervised release after he was accused of a string of crimes that included assaulting a 3-year-old child.

The man, Jonathan Braun, was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn before Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto.

Prosecutors asked Judge Matsumoto that Mr. Braun be held indefinitely without bail. The judge, noting the violent nature of Mr. Braun’s accused repeated offenses, ordered that he not be released.

“The behavior is erratic,” Judge Matsumoto said at the arraignment. “There’s the potential someone could really get hurt.”

Mr. Braun, wearing a beige hooded sweatshirt, appeared agitated throughout the proceeding. He complained about his legal representation and gave the middle finger to people sitting in the courtroom.

“I could’ve gone to law school myself,” he told Judge Matsumoto. “I chose not to.”

It was the fifth time that Mr. Braun had been arrested since Mr. Trump commuted his 10-year sentence just before leaving office in 2021, which was among a raft of last-minute clemencies granted to those with ties to the president. Mr. Braun’s sentence was commuted after his family used a connection with Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law who was a senior White House adviser, to get the matter before Mr. Trump.

That episode highlighted Mr. Trump’s ad hoc process for granting clemency, favoring defendants who have gained access to the White House, often with scant vetting of their criminal histories. At the end of his first term, Mr. Trump granted clemency to a number of allies and well-connected people, including his longtime strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Elliott Broidy, a top fund-raiser.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, the formal process for reviewing and granting clemency has diminished further. The Office of the Pardon Attorney, which reviews clemency applications before making official recommendations to the president, has been shunted aside as the White House has consolidated control.

In March, Mr. Trump dismissed the pardon attorney, Elizabeth G. Oyer, after she opposed restoring the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump’s.

Mr. Braun has a troubled history. He was originally indicted in 2010 on charges of smuggling and distributing marijuana. But while out on bail, he engaged in a predatory lending scheme, threatening small-business owners who had trouble repaying high-interest loans, according to suits filed by New York’s attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission.

In 2019, Judge Matsumoto sentenced him to 10 years on the drug charges after a plea deal. The next year, while in prison, Mr. Braun began discussing a deal with federal investigators in which he would be released in exchange for providing information about the cash-advance business.

The commutation removed the government’s leverage over Mr. Braun, damaging a criminal investigation that the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan was conducting into predatory lenders. Because Mr. Braun’s sentence was commuted — he was not pardoned — he was released on terms that included not committing more federal or state crimes.

But Mr. Braun went back to making predatory loans, eventually being banned from the cash-advance business by a New York State judge. In 2024, a judge ordered him to pay a fine of $20 million in the F.T.C. case.

Mr. Braun has also been accused of crimes that include swinging a pole that contained intravenous bags at a nurse; threatening a synagogue congregant who had asked him to stop talking during services; punching his wife and 75-year-old father-in-law; and grabbing a nanny’s breast as he touched himself.

Mr. Braun’s lawyer, Kathryn Wozencroft of the Federal Defenders of New York, on Friday asked for Mr. Braun to be released on home detention.

Judge Matsumoto said that Mr. Braun presented both a risk to the community and a risk of flight, noting that he had once fled while under investigation in the drug-trafficking case.

In 2009, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration raided a Staten Island house that Mr. Braun’s trafficking network had used to stash drugs. After learning of the raid, Mr. Braun drove 25 hours from Florida to Canada, staying there for several months before eventually fleeing to Israel. Later that year, he returned to the United States and was arrested.