WASHINGTON — President Trump has pardoned Trevor Milton, a convicted fraudster who once ran electric and hydrogen vehicle-making Nikola Motors — a now-bankrupt rival of Elon Musk’s Tesla.

Milton, 42, announced the pardon Thursday on X, and three White House officials confirmed to The Post Friday that Trump, 78, had indeed issued the reprieve — stifling speculation that it might be a PR stunt by Milton.

Trump told reporters Friday afternoon that the clemency had been “highly recommended” by “top-of-the-line people,” without specifying who urged it.

“I don’t know him, but they say it was very unfair, and they say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” Trump said.

“He supported Trump. He liked Trump. I didn’t know him, but he liked [me]. It was in Utah, and they went after him. They went after his family, they went after his businesses, and he was, I believe, exonerated, and then they went after him again, and they brought him this time into Manhattan.”

Trump added: “They got him. And I said, ‘That’s unfair.’ There are many people like that. They supported Trump, and they went after them.

“You don’t realize this is a vicious group of people that were in this office before us. This is a vicious group. They’re violent … They went after this man, and when I heard about it, I said, ‘Nope, it’s not going to happen.’ They persecuted, they destroyed five years of his life … and he did nothing wrong, and he’s a good person.”

Milton was convicted in 2022 on three counts of fraud involving Nikola — which, like Tesla, is named after the pioneering Serbian-American engineer.

He was sentenced in December 2023 to four years in prison, but was not jailed pending appeals.

Once a billionaire with a company valued more than Ford, Milton fell into disgrace when critics alleged that promotional videos showed his vehicles simply rolling downhill without propulsion.

Despite Nikola delivering few vehicles, his net worth peaked at an estimated $12 billion in 2020. In the same year, the company briefly had a corporate relationship with General Motors, before controversy caused its value to plummet.

Milton was indicted in July 2021 by a Manhattan grand jury, and was also accused of molesting two women, including a then-15-year-old cousin, though he didn’t face charges in either case.

Trump has repeatedly and publicly sympathized with businessmen accused of misconduct, citing his own legal woes in New York over the valuation of his assets and claiming prosecutors can make false claims to skewer their target — frequently mentioning assessments of his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Musk, one of Trump’s top advisers and a leader of the Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting initiative, previously ridiculed Nikola’s technology, calling it “staggeringly dumb” and tweeting, “fuel cells = fool sells.”

Trump himself has mocked the idea of hydrogen-powered cars, musing in public about explosions that leave no evidence of deceased drivers.