Analysis: The president’s commutation of his longtime adviser’s prison sentence was spectacularly unsurprising.
The law and order president has decided that a convicted criminal should not go to prison.
It may be mere coincidence that Roger Stone is an old friend and fellow resident of Florida with a shared crush on Richard Nixon.
It may also be mere coincidence that Donald Trump
made the announcement on a Friday night, a graveyard shift that has
become his favorite for firing inspectors general and others who get in
his way.It may be mere coincidence that Roger Stone is an old friend and fellow resident of Florida with a shared crush on Richard Nixon.
Stone was convicted by a jury last November of obstructing a congressional investigation, lying under oath to Congress and tampering with a witness. He did so to protect Trump. The 67-year-old was scheduled to report by Tuesday to a federal prison in Jesup, Georgia, to begin serving a sentence of three years and four months.
Three and a half years into his presidency, Trump’s intervention was spectacularly unsurprising. He did not grant Stone a full pardon that would have erased his criminal record, which might perhaps have been too incendiary in an election year. Even so, it was one of Trump’s most savage attacks yet on the rule of law.
Jeffrey Toobin, the chief legal analyst for CNN, added on the network: “This is the most corrupt and cronyistic act in perhaps all of recent history. Nixon at the height of Watergate never pardoned or commuted the sentences of any of the people involved in Watergate. He thought he could never get away with it.”
Personal and political forces worked in favour of Stone, whose cause was reportedly championed by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” and dapper dresser, who has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back, has been pals with Trump since the 1980s, his longest-serving political adviser. Both men are mavericks who relish riling liberals. Stone was involved in the 2016 election campaign and refused to flip in court.
According to Howard Fineman, an NBC News analyst, Stone said of Trump earlier on Friday: “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” The implication being that Stone could have revealed damaging information about the president if he chose.
Sparing Stone also fits Trump’s “Obamagate” narrative that the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which documented Russian interference in the 2016 election to boost Trump’s candidacy, was a hoax.
Stone was convicted for lying to the House intelligence committee about his attempts to contact WikiLeaks, the website that released damaging emails about Trump’s 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton. He was one of several Trump associates charged with crimes in the investigation.
In a statement on Friday, the White House said Stone was 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”.
It added: “There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia. Such collusion was never anything other than a fantasy of partisans unable to accept the result of the 2016 election.”
Mueller’s investigation did find a total of 272 contacts between Trump’s campaign team and Russia-linked operatives, including at least 38 meetings.
More broadly, Trump, often frustrated by Congress or the constitution, has embraced the pardon power like a medieval monarch. Among the beneficiaries have been the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, the ex-Arizona-county-sheriff Joe Arpaio, the former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik, the financier Michael Milken and the newspaper publisher Conrad Black, who had written a laudatory book about the president.
Trump even commuted the prison sentence of the Democratic former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who had been a contestant on Trump’s TV show Celebrity Apprentice. Meanwhile the US attorney general, William Barr, is seeking to dismiss charges against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI but is seen by Trump as another Mueller martyr.
Even as he demands arrest and jail for protesters who topple statues, the president is straining the justice system to breaking point with his selective application of executive clemency. But what if he starts prosecuting perceived enemies, too? Don’t expect Barr to stand in his way.
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