Trump Commuted His Pal Roger Stone's Prison Sentence
These days, you never know just what perversion of justice a Friday night will bring. Last month, it was the ouster of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, while his office was in the midst of an investigation of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. In its latest Friday night news dump, the White House revealed that it had commuted the prison sentence of longtime Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone.
In February, Stone was sentenced to serve 40 months in prison after being convicted on charges that he lied to Congress and tampered with a witness during the House investigation of the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia. Stone was scheduled to report to prison on Tuesday.
"Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency," reads the thoroughly Trumpian White House statement on Stone's commutation. The statement argued that the serious misconduct that Stone was convicted of—the witness tampering charge alone could have found him facing up to 20 years imprisonment—amounted to "process-based charges."
"He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case," the statement concluded. "Roger Stone is now a free man!"
Stone, an infamous political dirty trickster who worked on Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns, has been a Trump associate for decades, though the friendship has been a rocky one. In 2008, Trump told The New Yorker that Stone was a "stone-cold loser." By 2015, Stone was working on Trump's presidential campaign, until he either quit (according to Stone) or was fired (according to Trump.)
But the two patched things up again, and Stone remained a staunch Trump supporter throughout his trial. And this commutation isn't the first time that Trump has intervened in Stone's criminal case. In February, federal prosecutors recommended that Stone be sentenced to serve up to nine years in prison. After the president railed against the sentence on Twitter, the Justice Department overruled the recommendation in favor of a more lenient sentence.
Trump addressed the commutation in his Saturday morning Twitter storm, and raised the completely unfounded "spygate" conspiracy theory in Stone's defense. "Roger Stone was targeted by an illegal Witch Hunt that never should have taken place," he wrote. "It is the other side that are criminals, including Biden and Obama, who spied on my campaign - AND GOT CAUGHT!"
"With Trump there are now two systems of justice in America," tweeted House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff Friday. "One for Trump's criminal friends and one for everyone else."
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