Take a look
inside a Roger Stone Deposition
Trump commutes prison sentence of longtime
adviser Roger Stone
Stone was sentenced to three years and four months in
prison after being found guilty on seven felony charges brought by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller amid the Russian collusion investigation.
By JOSH
GERSTEIN, KYLE CHENEY and BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN
07/10/2020
07:51 PM EDT
Updated:
07/10/2020 08:56 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump on Friday commuted the prison sentence of longtime adviser Roger
Stone, who was found guilty of seeking to thwart congressional and FBI
investigations into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Stone, 67,
was sentenced in February to three years and four months in prison after a
trial late last year where a jury found him guilty on all seven felony charges
brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The White
House said in a statement: "Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an
Executive Grant of Clemency commuting the unjust sentence of Roger Stone, Jr,"
calling Stone "a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in
the media perpetuated for years."
Trump acted
just after a federal appeals court panel denied a last-ditch bid by Stone to
delay an order for him to surrender at a federal prison in Jesup, Ga. next
Tuesday. Stone claimed he suffered from health conditions that put him at
serious risk of dying if he went to that prison, which is experiencing a
coronavirus outbreak.
Trump's
move to protect a close ally from a conviction stemming from a probe that also
included an investigation of Trump’s own conduct quickly set off explosive
recriminations in the Democratically controlled House, where leaders have long
said clemency for Trump’s inner circle would amount to obstruction of justice. It
also comes despite Attorney General Bill Barr’s declaration that Stone’s
prosecution was “righteous” and that his sentence was fair.
“Stone
repeatedly lied to the House Intelligence Committee under oath and threatened a
witness, all to cover up an effort by President Trump and his campaign to
secretly communicate with Wikileaks and exploit its release of Russian-hacked
emails targeting his opponent,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam
Schiff said in a statement. “With this commutation, Trump makes clear that
there are two systems of justice in America: one for his criminal friends, and
one for everyone else.”
House
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler and House Oversight Chairwoman
Carolyn Maloney said they intended to immediately seek a briefing from the
White House counsel about the circumstances of Stone's commutation.
Trump’s
involvement in the case prior to Friday — criticizing the initial sentence
proposed by prosecutors, attacking the judge and jury in the case — had already
prompted howls of outrage from Democrats, accusations of self-dealing and
warnings from Justice Department veterans about an effort to shatter the
justice system’s independence to benefit the president.
The White
House’s statement Friday did not explicitly mention that six of the seven
felonies Stone was convicted of pertained solely to efforts to deceive
Congress. The official explanation of the commutation also asserted that Stone
would never have been prosecuted if Mueller had not been appointed.
The
statement also minimized the charges Stone faced, calling them “process-based”
and suggesting that they weren’t necessarily crimes at all. Rather, per the
White House, they were leveled “to manufacture the false impression of
criminality lurking below the surface.”
“‘The
Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at
high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of
criminality lurking below the surface. These charges were the product of
recklessness borne of frustration and malice,” the statement said. “The simple
fact is that if the Special Counsel had not been pursuing an absolutely
baseless investigation, Mr. Stone would not be facing time in prison.”
Trump’s
move follows a frantic effort by Stone to keep himself out of jail, contending
in a series of recent court filings that the coronavirus outbreak presented a
life-threatening risk. But the federal judge in his case, Amy Berman Jackson,
rejected his push to delay his sentence deeper into the summer and ordered him to
prison on July 14, noting that his sentence — imposed in April — had already
been postponed for months.
While the
timing of a pardon for Stone has been the subject of speculation for some time,
there has been little doubt that Trump would grant some form of clemency if it
appeared Stone needed that to avoid prison.
“Roger was
a victim of a corrupt and illegal Witch Hunt, one which will go down as the
greatest political crime in history. He can sleep well at night!” Trump tweeted
last month.
Stone
supporters insisted in advance of the commutation that there was little
political risk in granting clemency to Stone, but potentially serious trouble
with Trump's base if he was seen as abandoning his outspoken ally.
However,
Trump appeared to hold out hope until recently that such a pardon might not be
necessary because Stone would be vindicated through post-trial motions or
appeals. He’s taken a similar approach to charges against former national
security adviser Michael Flynn, whose legal battle against a false statements
charge has played out for years, even as Trump has assailed the prosecution.
“I want the
process to play out," the president said following Stone’s sentencing in
February. "I would love to see Roger exonerated.”
By granting
a commutation to Stone rather than an outright pardon, Trump allows his
longtime adviser and confidant to continue with his appeal of his convictions.
For Trump,
a commutation serves two additional purposes: protecting a close political ally
who was deeply tied to his campaign’s effort to promote WikiLeaks’ hacked
emails from the Clinton campaign and casting doubt on the subsequent
investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election by Mueller. Trump
has assailed the probe since its May 2017 onset, and now he’s poised to absolve
the allies who defended him throughout it.
Stone’s
case, though, presented a complicated calculus. Many in Trump’s inner circle
have no love for the longtime political provocateur, and Stone aggravated
matters throughout his legal process, at one point posting incendiary social media
posts about the judge, earning a stiff gag order for months. As late as June,
prosecutors said they considered Stone a public safety risk for his violent
rhetoric, and the judge, in her decision to send Stone to jail on Tuesday
indicated his pre- and post-trial behavior was part of the consideration.
After his
sentencing, Stone sought to invalidate the trial altogether by claiming that
the jury’s foreperson espoused hostile political views. Jackson held a hearing
on the matter and interviewed the juror, plus a colleague, but said Stone
failed to present any evidence that the juror had failed to act impartially.
Rather, she said, a person’s political views have no bearing on whether they’re
able to perform jury service, as long as they set those views aside to weigh
evidence.
Despite the
backlash, there is some fairly recent precedent for acts of clemency like the
one Trump granted Friday. Both President Bill Clinton and President George H.W.
Bush pardoned allies who faced charges brought by special prosecutors who had
investigated those presidents. Neither, however, took the politically explosive
step in the middle of their reelection campaign.
And Trump
has wielded the pardon power in other, more overtly political ways than his
predecessor. For example, Trump pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio in
August 2017 despite Arpaio’s ongoing legal battle against a contempt of court
order. The move was widely seen as a boost to a beleaguered political ally who
is beloved by Trump’s base. In 2018, Trump also pardoned former Dick Cheney
aide Scooter Libby, who was convicted in 2007 of obstruction of justice. The
move occurred almost precisely a year before Mueller released his final report,
which offered significant evidence that Trump himself sought to obstruct the
investigation.
Nothing
would prevent Trump from issuing a full pardon to Stone later as long as he
remains in office.
The
president’s power to issue pardons and commutations is found in the
Constitution and remains largely unchecked. A few legal scholars have suggested
courts might not recognize a Trump pardon seen as aimed at avoiding his own
culpability for wrongdoing, but challenging such an act of clemency would be a
longshot. It’s also unclear who would have legal standing to raise the issue.
Stone
declined to take the stand in his own defense at his trial last November, but
during an epic deposition earlier this year in connection with several civil
lawsuits, he insisted he never discussed the hacked Clinton camp emails or
other WikiLeaks disclosures with Trump.
“I’ve never
spoken to him about WikiLeaks,” Stone said, adding of his conversations with
Trump: “None of them regard WikiLeaks. There was no evidence of that presented
during the trial. It was an assertion by the government, but that does not make
it true.”
Trump’s
decision came following an extraordinary intervention in his case earlier this
year by Barr that led to an uproar within the Justice Department and complaints
that Barr was doing favors for the president’s friends.
After
prosecutors filed a sentencing memorandum calling for Stone to receive between
seven and nine years in prison, Trump decried the proposal in a late-night
tweet as “horrible and very unfair,” adding: “Cannot allow this miscarriage of
justice!”
Within
hours, the Justice Department told reporters that there was a foul-up related
to the filing and that a new sentencing proposal would be forthcoming. It
withdrew the seven-to-nine-year recommendation and instead urged the court to
impose a more lenient sentence.
The move
led the four career prosecutors who handled Stone’s trial to quit the case in
protest. One of the four resigned outright. In a sign of the internal strife
over the issue, the revised recommendation to the judge bore only the name of
the acting U.S. Attorney, Timothy Shea — a former aide Barr had installed in
the post a less than two weeks earlier.
For his
part, Barr insisted that he did not change the sentencing recommendation for
Stone because of Trump’s tweet but had already resolved to do so before the
president signaled his displeasure. Nonetheless, Trump praised Barr for “taking
charge” of the case.
Barr’s
handling of the episode led more than 1,100 former prosecutors and Justice
Department officials to sign a petition calling on the attorney general to
resign. While Barr defended his conduct as proper, he seemed to recognize that
his authority within the department was being eroded by the appearance that he
was allowing Trump to influence prosecutorial decisions.
In a
remarkable development, Barr appeared to threaten to resign if Trump did not
stop commenting publicly on the department’s pending cases.
However,
Trump spoke or tweeted about such matters more than 100 times in the ensuing
weeks. No resignation was forthcoming and Barr soon assuming a leading role for
the administration in efforts to impose “law and order” to combat civil unrest
that broke out following the killing of African-American motorist George Floyd
by a Minneapolis police officer.
Stone was set
to report to prison by June 30, but last month asked the judge who oversaw his
case to delay his reporting date until early September because of the dangers
of coronavirus in prison. However, Jackson instead ordered Stone into home
detention at his Fort Lauderdale, Fla., residence and instructed him to
quarantine and report to prison on July 14.
The judge’s
move prompted more calls among Trump allies for the president to pardon Stone
and head off the possibility that he serve prison time.
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