How Trump’s “dirty trickster” dodged jail
By commuting the prison sentence of Roger Stone, Donald Trump has “cemented his status as the most corrupt president in American history”, said Matt Ford in The New Republic. Stone, a selfproclaimed “dirty trickster”, was due to go to jail for three years and four months for lying to Congress (and witness tampering) during its investigation into a possible criminal conspiracy between Trump and Moscow. (Trump’s campaign was suspected of colluding with Kremlin cyberspies in their attempt to hack Democrat email accounts during the 2016 presidential campaign.) But now Trump has made good on the implicit promise he made to Stone on his conviction, when he praised him for being “very brave” in defying prosecutors and not “flipping”. The amazing thing is that this Trump-Stone cover-up has taken place not behind closed doors, but in the full light of day, said David Frum in The Atlantic. And it has succeeded. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators unearthed damning evidence that Stone had frequent communication with a Russian hacker and with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. These communications, which were shared with Trump, were about emails stolen from Democrat accounts by Russian hackers, which were then sent to WikiLeaks, which in turn published them. Stone’s lies about that treasonous scheme have now been rewarded, in what will go down as “one of the greatest scandals” in American history.
“Spare us the righteous indignation,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review. Stone is unquestionably “a whack job”, but there’s still no evidence either he or Trump had anything to do with the actual hacking of Democrat emails. That is why, despite “all the heavy breathing about collusion” in Mueller’s report, the charges against Stone were only for “process crimes”, for example, for claiming he’d only contacted Assange through an intermediary, when in fact he had done so directly. Given that Trump has long been raging about how unfairly he feels those involved in “the Russia hoax” have been treated, there’s nothing so very egregious about his decision to commute Stone’s sentence.
Indeed, in the “sordid history” of presidential pardons it looks “positively chaste”, said Jonathan Turley on The Hill. Have we forgotten that President Clinton erased his own brother’s conviction for cocaine possession, and pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich after he donated $450,000 to the Clinton Library? Most of us do remember, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, but we also recall it wasn’t just Republicans who voiced disgust at Rich’s pardon; many Democrats did so too. By contrast, the only GOP senators to join Democrats in attacking Stone’s commutation were Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey; the rest stayed silent or even defended it. And while it’s true that other presidents have issued shameful pardons to friends and allies, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, none, until Trump, ever used his pardon power to protect himself. Not so, said Byron York in the Washington Examiner. Bill Clinton, for example, pardoned his old business partner Susan McDougal, who had been convicted of corruption in the Whitewater scandal, and who, in contempt of court, had refused to testify to Clinton’s role in that affair in exchange for a lighter sentence.
Be that as it may, rewarding Stone for his cover-up still stinks, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. But then again it hardly marks the ethical nadir for a president who pretends a pandemic isn’t happening and pours salt into America’s racial wounds. In trying to fathom “the lowest moment of the Trump presidency, one answer is almost always correct: tomorrow”.