President Donald Trump on Friday granted commuted long-time friend and confidant Roger Stone’s 40-month sentence for obstructing justice, lying to congress and making false statements in connection with the probe into Russian interference in 2016 election.
Stone was the seventh person convicted and sentenced as a result of the investigation into the Russian interference by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Stone is a “free man” because of the commutation, the White House said while announcing the president’s decision, However, he has not been granted a presidential pardon and is not absolved of his crime.
The White House said in a statement that Stone’s sentence was being commuted because he was a victim of the “Russia hoax”. This is how the president and his allies describe Mueller’s investigation into the Russian interference. As a 67-year-old man with medical conditions, he would be “put at serious medical risk in prison”, the statement added.
“He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”
Stone, a long-time Republican operative who shot to fame for his work for President Ronald Reagan’s campaign, had been convicted of seven charges including lying abut his role in alleged Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russian interference, withholding information and threatening an associate to not cooperate with the investigation.
Stoner had publicly lobbied for presidential commutation of sentence in recent days as a quid pro quo for not implicating the president. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him,” he told Howard Fineman, a journalist who tweeted about his conversation with Stone shortly before the White House announcement. “It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”
Meanwhile, critics of the president wondered if Stone has a piece of information that he leveraged to get a commutation.
“No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose,” said a statement issued by Representatives Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House oversight committee, and Carolyn B. Maloney, both New York Democrats.
