Utter contempt for the rule of law
Roger Stone, convicted by a jury of seven felonies, should have been checking in to federal prison this week. That Stone remains free is a measure of the contempt the president he protected holds for the principle of rule of law. President Trump commuted Stone’s sentence for crimes that included witness tampering and lying to Congress in an effort to frustrate investigations related to Russian sabotage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The upshot could be neither clearer nor more unseemly. Stone broke the law to save Trump’s skin, so Trump acted to save Stone’s, appearances be damned.
Sen. Mitt Romney, RUtah, was the most prominent of the rare Republicans who were willing to speak out against this brazen abuse of a president’s authority to grant clemency.
“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” Romney tweeted.
The commutation prompted the normally circumspect former Special Counsel Robert Mueller to pen a Washington Post opinion piece to defend the legitimacy of an investigation Trump has denounced as “a hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Mueller noted that his team
“identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel — Stone among them.” Stone had lied about his contacts with WikiLeaks and his communications about them with the Trump campaign, Mueller noted.
“When a subject lies to investigators,” Mueller said, “it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.”
Even Attorney General William Barr, who otherwise has done Trump’s bidding at almost every turn, acknowledged last week that the prosecution of Stone was “righteous” and the 40month sentence was “fair.” Yet Barr had added in that ABC News interview that clemency was “the president’s prerogative.”
Stone was certainly aware all along that his friend in the White House had the power to erase anything the justice system meted out. Trump encouraged Stone’s defiance, praising his former adviser in a December 2018 tweet for resisting “a rogue and out of control prosecutor” and declaring, “Nice to know that some people still have guts!”
Just before the White House announcement, Stone removed any lingering doubts about the corruptness of the move in an interview with NBC News.
“He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him,” Stone said. “It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who issued the sentence, made plain that Stone was not prosecuted for “standing up” for Trump. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president,” she said.
In 1788, as the framers debated the granting of presidential pardon power, an apprehensive George Mason warned that a president “may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself ” and could lead to an attempt to “establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.” James Madison was less concerned: Impeachment, he said, would be a safeguard against such abuse of power.
These are dark days indeed for the rule of law in Trump’s America.