BREAKING: Trump Commutes Roger Stone Sentence

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President Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of political operative and former adviser Roger Stone on Friday, ending a saga four years in the making.

Stone, 67, was set to report to prison on Tuesday after the Justice Department said this week it supported a judge’s decision to send him to a facility in Jesup, Georgia, despite concerns about the spread of the coronavirus. Stone said underlying medical conditions including asthma made the prospect a “death sentence.”

District Judge Amy Jackson Berman sentenced Stone in February to 40 months in prison on seven counts related to misleading Congress and the FBI during investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Stone suggested in interviews and on other occasions that year that he had been in contact with individuals connected to WikiLeaks, which released troves of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, and from Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, in the months leading up to the November election. Those suggestions led the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 to ask Stone for records of his communications.

Stone said in response that he didn’t hold any relevant information, an assertion prosecutors said was a lie. Stone maintained the information in dispute came from public sources — including public statements by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and emails on which he was copied along with other figures in politics and in media, such as Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano.

Stone’s trial was marred by accusations of bias from the day of his Jan. 25, 2019 arrest, when a CNN crew filmed a group of heavily armed FBI agents showing up for an early morning raid on Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The president along with then-Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker questioned at the time whether CNN was the beneficiary of improper leaking by law enforcement officials, an allegation the network denied. Stone described it as being “arrested” by CNN, who he said “brought a few FBI agents with them.”

Acrimony arose again after the trial when reporting revealed Tomeka Hart, the jury forewoman, had a long history of criticizing Republicans on social media that she failed to disclose during the jury selection process, including a reference to “Trump and the white supremacist racists” and a March 24, 2019 Facebook post taking glee in “the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in [Trump’s] inner-circle.”

Jackson, an Obama appointee who has served as a judge since 2011, denied Stone’s request for a retrial based on the posts. “The assumption underlying the motion – that one can infer from the juror’s opinions about the president that she could not fairly consider the evidence against the defendant – is not supported by any facts or data and it is contrary to controlling legal precedent,” she wrote in an April opinion.

Trump has cited Hart’s posts in his criticism of the case on numerous occasions and spent months hinting he might pardon Stone but refused to commit to the possibility, saying as recently as Thursday, “He was framed, he was treated horribly, he was treated so badly. He had a foreman or foreperson who was, should have not been there — how that trial wasn’t re-done is incredible.”

Stone said he wanted a commutation rather than a pardon because the latter “implies guilt,” NBC analyst Howard Fineman wrote on Twitter Friday. He quoted Stone saying with respect to Trump, “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

Some observers speculated the delay in acting on Stone’s case might have been a result of disagreement between Trump and Attorney General William Barr, who on Wednesday praised Jackson’s decision. “I think the prosecution was righteous and I think the sentence the judge ultimately gave was fair,” Barr said. That assessment came despite a February move by Barr’s Justice Department to reduce its request for Stone’s sentence from seven to nine years in prison to just 15 months. Four prosecutors resigned from the case in protest, while Jackson opted to hand down the 40-month sentence instead.

Stone has worked as a Republican political operative since serving as a junior staffer for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. He met Trump in 1979, started his own lobbying firm in 1980, and did some lobbying work for the Trump Organization in the 1990s and early 2000s.