The current US President Donald Trump has signed a decree pardoning former Google engineer Anthony Lewandowski, convicted of stealing technology from a former employer, writes CNBC.
Trump’s decree was signed on the last full day of his tenure – ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, scheduled for August 20. In addition to Lewandowski, the head of state pardoned several dozen other people.
Lewandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison in August last year. The prosecution managed to prove that in 2017, before leaving Google, he copied data related to the technology of an unmanned vehicle, which is being developed by Google’s subsidiary Waymo, onto a removable medium.
Subsequently, the engineer founded his own startup Otto, which was bought by the taxi aggregator Uber. Waymo was suing Uber over the use of technology transferred to Lewandowski, but in 2018 the companies entered into a settlement.
The judge in the Lewandowski case called the charges against the engineer “the most serious case of theft of trade secrets” in his life. Commenting on the signing of the pardon decree, Trump called Lewandowski “the American entrepreneur who led Google’s efforts to create self-driving technology.”
Several well-known businessmen vouched for Lewandowski, including the venture capitalist and founder of the PayPal payment system Peter Thiel, and the founder of the virtual reality glasses company Oculus Palmer Luckey.