Five days after France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzling millions of euros from the European Parliament, President Donald Trump is suddenly decrying the verdict.
Le Pen, 56, was sentenced to four years in prison, two of them suspended, and issued a five-year ban on running for office, effective immediately. That would preclude her from France’s 2027 presidential election—which she had been tipped to win—unless she can get the conviction overturned on appeal.
“The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going to so far as to put that Opponent in prison,” Trump wrote in a late-night social media post.
“It is the same ‘playbook’ that was used against me by a group of Lunatics and Losers,” he added.
Much of the MAGAverse had already raged against the conviction soon after it was handed down on Monday. But Trump waited until late Thursday—the same day global stock markets plummeted in response to his universal tariff declaration—to finally take up Le Pen’s cause.
“I don’t know Marine Le Pen, but do appreciate how hard she worked for so many years,” he wrote in his post. “She suffered losses, but kept going, and now, just before what would be a Big Victory, they get her on a minor charge that she probably knew nothing about—Sounds like a ‘bookkeeping’ error to me.”
In fact, the court found Le Pen and two dozen co-defendants had used the European Parliament as a “cash cow,” diverting nearly $5 million in parliamentary funds over an 11-year period when her party’s coffers were precariously low.
Trump’s megadonor and government cost-cutting adviser Elon Musk shared the president’s post on his own social media platform X and expressed his agreement.
Musk had been a near-constant White House fixture since Trump took office in January, but he was conspicuously absent from the president’s tariff announcement. A day earlier, the candidate he’d backed in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race suffered a crushing electoral defeat.
Monday’s decision came as a shock to Le Pen, who was expecting a guilty verdict but didn’t think a court would “dare” to ban her from office, according to the BBC.
But the judge found that Le Pen and her co-defendants had refused to acknowledge the facts, and she felt compelled to treat them like any other defendant that refuses to take responsibility, The New York Times reported.
The court has to “ensure that elected officials, like any citizen, do not benefit from any favorable treatment,” the judge said when announcing the verdict.
“No one is on trial for engaging in politics,” she added.
When Trump was convicted in May 2024 in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records with the intent to violate federal campaign finance laws, unlawfully influence the 2016 election, and commit tax fraud, the judge in his case faced a similar dilemma.
During the trial, Trump routinely attacked Judge Juan Merchan and his family, and violated his orders not to attack witnesses and the jury. He refused a plea deal and was ultimately held in contempt of court, which would have made him a strong candidate for jail time, according to a New York Times analysis of similar cases.
Ultimately his re-election victory rendered the issue moot for now thanks to a Justice Department policy of not prosecuting sitting presidents—a policy that state courts generally follow as well.
Le Pen was apparently hoping for a similar outcome.
“FREE MARINE LE PEN!” Trump wrote on Thursday night.
