Stone saved from prison
Trump commutes long-time friend’s 40-month jail sentence
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of his longtime political confidant Roger Stone, intervening in extraordinary fashion in a criminal case that was central to an investigation that concerned the president’s own conduct.
The move came yesterday, just days before Stone was to begin serving a 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
The action, which Trump had foreshadowed in recent days, underscores the president’s lingering rage over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and is part of a continuing effort by Trump and his administration to rewrite the narrative of a probe that has shadowed the White House from the outset.
Democrats, already alarmed by the Justice Department’s earlier dismissal of the case against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael
Flynn, denounced the president as further undermining the rule of law.
House Intelligence Committee chairperson Adam Schiff called it “offensive to the rule of law and principles of justice” while Democratic National Committee chairperson Tom
Perez asked, “Is there any power Trump won’t abuse?”
Stone, 67, a larger-than-life political character who embraced his reputation as a dirty trickster, was the sixth Trump aide or adviser to have been convicted of charges brought during Mueller’s investigation.
He had been due to report to prison on Tuesday after a federal appeals court rejected his bid to postpone his surrender date. But he said Trump called him on Friday to tell him he was off the hook.
“The president told me he decided, in an act of clemency, to issue a full commutation of my sentence, and urged me to vigorously pursue my appeal and my vindication,” Stone said by phone from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he was celebrating.
Although a commutation does not nullify Stone’s felony convictions, it protects him from serving prison time as a result.
The move marks another extraordinary intervention by Trump in the nation’s justice system and underscores anew his willingness to flout the norms and standards that have governed presidential conduct for decades.
White House press secretary Kayleigh Mcenany called Stone a “victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media”, and declared, “Roger Stone is now a free man!”