President Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson, a co-founder of the now-defunct digital media company Ozy Media, on the day he was set to surrender to prison, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Watson was sentenced in December to almost 10 years in prison for trying to defraud investors and lenders by lying about the company’s finances. He was sentenced after a federal jury last summer convicted Mr. Watson and Ozy Media of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. The jury also convicted Mr. Watson of identity theft, after a two-month trial during which witnesses detailed an impersonated phone call, fabricated contracts and misleading claims about Ozy’s earnings from 2018 to 2021.

A federal judge had also ordered Mr. Watson and Ozy to pay $96 million in restitution and forfeiture. Mr. Watson and Ozy also no longer have to pay those financial penalties, the people said.

Mr. Watson had pleaded not guilty and continued to assert his innocence up until he was sentenced to 116 months. His commutation was reported earlier by CNBC.

Mr. Watson said in a statement that he was “profoundly grateful to President Trump for correcting this grave injustice.”

Mr. Watson started Ozy in 2013, publishing news articles and newsletters before venturing into podcasts and television productions. The start-up secured commitments from prominent investors at a time when digital publishers, like BuzzFeed and Vice, attracted billions of dollars in investments that largely didn’t pan out.

Throughout the legal proceedings, Mr. Watson denied the fraud allegations. In court, his lawyers argued that his representations to investors had been based on good-faith assessments of Ozy’s finances, and they shifted the blame for any fraudulent activity onto other former Ozy employees. When he took the stand at his trial, Mr. Watson said he had not intentionally inflated revenue estimates, but rather had presented the types of service-based income typical of a “scrappy young company” in its early years.

Mr. Watson, at his sentencing hearing in December, reiterated his stance that the government selectively prosecuted him because he is a Black man.

Samir Rao, the other founder of Ozy, and Suzee Han, a former Ozy chief of staff, pleaded guilty in 2023 to fraud charges and testified against Mr. Watson.

At the heart of the case was a 2021 fund-raising call during which Mr. Rao misled Goldman Sachs employees by impersonating a YouTube executive, as first reported by The New York Times. Prosecutors contended that Mr. Watson had helped set up the call, citing text messages he sent to Mr. Rao that, they claimed, amounted to a script for what to say. Mr. Watson denied any responsibility.

Witnesses also testified that Mr. Watson had misrepresented Ozy’s finances to secure investments, inflating revenue figures and presenting misleading claims of commitments from Oprah Winfrey and Live Nation Entertainment.

Mr. Trump also this week pardoned the three founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violations of the bank secrecy act, one of the people familiar with the matter said, as well as Trevor Milton, who was convicted by a federal jury in 2022 of defrauding investors in the electric truck maker Nikola.

The nation’s legal profession is being split between those that want to fight back against President Trump’s attacks on the industry and those that prefer to engage in the art of the deal.

Two big firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to stop executive orders that could impair their ability to represent clients. The lawsuits filed by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale highlight how some elite firms are willing to fight Mr. Trump’s campaign targeting those he doesn’t like, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have cut deals to appease the president.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has issued similarly styled executive orders against firms that he perceives as enemies and threats to national security. The orders could create an existential crisis for firms because they would strip lawyers of security clearances, bar them from entering federal buildings and discourage federal officials from interacting with the firms.

“I am heartened by the fact that Jenner and Wilmer are joining Perkins in pushing back on these illegal executive orders. It shows that capitulation is not the only route,” said Matthew Diller, a law professor and former dean of Fordham University School of Law. “In the long run, it will strengthen their reputations in the market as forceful advocates who stand up for principle, a quality that many clients will value.”

Jenner & Block said in a statement that its suit was intended to “stop an unconstitutional executive order that has already been declared unlawful by a federal court.” A third firm, Perkins Coie, has also sued the Trump administration over the same matter, and had some early success in stopping the executive order.

Jenner & Block also created a website — Jenner Stands Firm — to publicize its filing and to highlight newspaper editorials criticizing the executive orders and comments from law school professors questioning the legality of Mr. Trump’s actions.

On Friday evening, Judge John Bates of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from punishing Jenner & Block. The judge called the portion of the executive order that criticizes the pro bono legal work the firm does for organizations “disturbing” and “troubling.”

Later Friday, another federal judge in Washington, Richard Leon, issued a temporary restraining order granting WilmerHale most of the relief the firm sought from the executive order against it.

The effort to fight back in a public manner stands in contrast with the way other firms have handled Mr. Trump’s campaign against them.

Also on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that the White House had reached a deal with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom that would require the firm to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes he supports. Skadden and Mr. Trump reached a deal after the law firm had reached out behind the scenes to head off the filing of an executive order against it.

“We very much appreciate their coming to the table,” Mr. Trump said.

In a statement, Skadden said, “We engaged proactively with the president and his team in working together constructively to reach this agreement.” The firm added that the agreement “is in the best interests of our clients, our people and our firm.”

Last week, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison announced an agreement in which Mr. Trump rescinded his executive order against the law firm in exchange for its committing to represent clients regardless of their political leanings and pledging $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Mr. Trump has championed.

Paul Weiss reached its deal within days of Mr. Trump’s executive order after the firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, flew from New York for an Oval Office meeting with the president and some of his staff. Mr. Karp said in an email to the firm that he had moved quickly because Paul Weiss’s big corporate clients were threatened with the “loss of their government contracts and the loss of access to the government” if they stuck with the firm.

Mr. Karp cast the deal as a move to save Paul Weiss, which employs about 2,000 people. He also complained that other law firms had not come out to support Paul Weiss.

But that deal was widely criticized. The firm — which is stocked with Democrats who have opposed Mr. Trump — was seen as bending to the president to protect its bottom line.

“A large part of this are business decisions being made by law firms,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor and a professor at New York Law School who specializes in legal ethics. “These firms are calculating that their clients will feel aligned with their decisions.”

Mr. Trump has been going after big law firms that he contends have “weaponized” the legal system. He is initially targeting law firms that hired lawyers who were once involved in the many investigations of his actions during his first presidential term and his business dealings.

The executive orders have been premised on Mr. Trump’s notion that the law firms’ partisan representations and pro bono work for groups that he disagrees with could pose a threat to national security.

A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said in a statement: “Democrats and their law firms weaponized the legal process to try to punish and jail their political opponents. The president’s executive orders are lawful directives to ensure that the president’s agenda is implemented and that law firms comply with the law.”

The suit by Jenner & Block was filed in federal court in Washington, and the firm is asking a judge to step in immediately and stop the executive order, which was leveled against it by Mr. Trump this week. The firm is being represented by Cooley, another law firm. The lawsuit named numerous government agencies and officials as defendants.

WilmerHale filed its lawsuit in the same federal court and is being represented by Paul Clement, a solicitor general during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Jenner & Block and WilmerHale represent some of the nation’s biggest companies, and often deal with regulatory issues before government agencies. Jenner & Block has represented the defense contractor General Dynamics, as well as the entertainment giant Viacom, while one of WilmerHale’s major clients is JPMorgan Chase.

The executive order accused the firm of engaging “in obvious partisan representations to achieve political ends” and claimed the firm “discriminates against its employees based on race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws, including through the use of race-based ‘targets.’”

The executive orders against both Jenner & Block and WilmerHale focused, in large part, on the work of lawyers with the federal investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. The investigation was led by a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, a former director of the F.B.I. who was a partner at WilmerHale.

One of Mr. Mueller’s top assistants on that investigation was Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor and former partner at Jenner & Block.

Both Mr. Mueller and Mr. Weissmann rejoined their firms after the investigation was completed. The lawyers left their firms in 2021. But on the WilmerHale website, there is a page devoted to a lengthy interview with Mr. Mueller, who is normally media-averse, in which he discusses his “remarkable life and career.”

Jenner & Block’s complaint said Mr. Trump’s action was unconstitutional and would compromise the ability of the firm’s more than 500 lawyers to “zealously advocate for its clients.”

The lawsuit noted that Mr. Trump’s deal with Paul Weiss did not include any new security measures imposed on that firm.

In a statement, WilmerHale, which has about 1,000 lawyers, said the president’s executive order “is a plainly unlawful attack on the bedrock principles of our nation’s legal system — our clients’ right to counsel and the First Amendment.”

Perkins Coie, one of the first law firms targeted by Mr. Trump, sued him earlier this month. A federal judge temporarily halted Mr. Trump’s order, saying it was likely illegal and adding: “It sends little chills down my spine.”

Vanita Gupta, a civil rights lawyer and former senior Justice Department official in the Biden and Obama administrations, said the new lawsuits were necessary in a time of peril for the legal profession.

“The only way through this attack on the very foundations of our legal system is by fighting back,” Ms. Gupta said. “If firms want to be trusted to fight the biggest fights, they must not cave to blatantly unconstitutional government actions.”

She praised the three firms that are fighting the administration and said she hoped others would do the same because “collective action is the only way to pull through in this moment.”

Mr. Trump’s executive order against Paul Weiss was motivated in part by the fact that a former partner at that firm has worked with the Manhattan district attorney’s office in trying to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump after he lost the 2020 election.

One pattern of the executive orders is going after law firms that have employed attorneys whom Mr. Trump’s sees as his personal enemies. One of those is Mr. Weissmann, whom Mr. Trump has often lashed out against on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Mr. Weissmann has a reputation as an aggressive investigator. In recent years, he has emerged as a public critic of Mr. Trump, appearing frequently on MSNBC to provide legal analysis about the range of indictments Mr. Trump faced for his conduct.

In the complaint, the firm said Mr. Weissmann had not worked for it since 2021. It also noted that it has had prominent lawyers from all political parties on its staff.

Tyler Pager contributed reporting.

Charlie Javice, who made big headlines in 2023 when JPMorgan Chase accused her of faking her start-up’s customer list, was found guilty in federal court Friday of three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud.

She now faces the possibility of decades in prison.

The bank has its own civil lawsuit on standby as it attempts to claw back some of the $175 million it paid for her company, Frank. It sued her three years ago, and Ms. Javice was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport not long after that.

Frank, which was founded in 2016, aimed to help customers fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid at a time when the FAFSA was notoriously complicated. Ms. Javice, 32, quickly became a go-to quote for journalists writing about paying for college and turned up on lists of under-30 and under-40 up-and-comers.

Not long after Ms. Javice sold Frank to JPMorgan, there was trouble. The bank ran a test of Frank’s customer list, hoping to persuade its young customers to open Chase accounts. Of 400,000 outbound emails, just 28 percent arrived successfully in an inbox.

At trial, a bank executive said that it had opened just 10 accounts via the Frank list. It was, as the bank put it in its own legal filing, “disastrous.”

An internal investigation ensued, and the bank claimed to have found evidence that Ms. Javice and Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, had faked much of its customer list. JPMorgan sued her, and the federal government followed with its own charges, which resulted in the verdict Friday.

Mr. Amar was charged and tried at the same time as Ms. Javice and was also found guilty on all counts. A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment on the verdict.

During the trial, JPMorgan bank executives said that one appeal of Frank was its promise of over four million customers, with detailed contact information, whom the bank could pitch. The bank could hook young adults with a checking account and potentially keep them and their business through decades of mortgages and retirement savings.

One striking bit of testimony came from Adam Kapelner, an associate professor of mathematics at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. As JPMorgan was performing due diligence, Ms. Javice told him she was in an “urgent pinch” and asked him to use “synthetic data” to create a list of over four million customers from a Frank list she supplied, which had fewer than 300,000 people on it. He asked why, according to his testimony, but she would not tell him.

“I found my genius,” she said in a text to Mr. Amar at the time.

After Professor Kapelner did some quick work — including pulling an all-nighter — Ms. Javice asked him to remove any specifics about the data from his invoice and paid him $18,000 instead of the $13,300 on his original bill.

According to prosecutors, Ms. Javice and Mr. Amar knew and feared that the bank was going to use Frank’s list for marketing. The pair eventually bought real names and emails from commercial data providers to make it look like Frank really did have millions of customers who had given the company their names and contact information.

This, too, was a rush job to avoid getting caught, according to the prosecution. It produced a text message exchange in which Mr. Amar told Ms. Javice, “You’ll have 4.5 million users today.” She replied, “Perfect. Love you.” Ms. Javice asked for specifics to be removed from an invoice on this transaction as well.

To the prosecution, this was evidence that Ms. Javice was trying to hide her tracks. “Why would you make a fake customer list if you weren’t lying about your customers?” Micah F. Fergenson, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court Wednesday.