Trump commutes jail sentence of confidant Roger Stone
US President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime political confidant Roger Stone, mere days before he was set to report to prison.
The move, short of a full pardon, is sure to alarm critics who have long railed against the president’s repeated interventions in the nation’s justice system.
Mr Stone had been sentenced in February to three years and four months in prison for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether Mr Trump’s election campaign colluded with Russia to win the race for the White House in 2016. He had been ordered to report to prison by Tuesday.
Mr Stone said Mr Trump had called him on Friday to inform him of the commutation.
After receiving the news, Mr Stone celebrated with friends in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Mr Stone a “victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated”.
“Not only was Mr Stone charged by overzealous prosecutors pursuing a case that never should have existed, and arrested in an operation that never should have been approved, but there were also serious questions about the jury in the case,” she said.
A commutation does not erase Mr Stone’s felony convictions in the same way a pardon would, but it would protect him from serving prison time as a result.
The action, which Mr Trump had foreshadowed in recent days, reflects his lingering rage over the Russia investigation and is a testament to his conviction that he and his associates were mistreated by agents and prosecutors.
His administration has been eager to rewrite the narrative of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with Mr Trump’s own Justice Department moving in May to dismiss the criminal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.