He is a pattern now familiar to Trump and his administration. The President does or says something totally outrageous. Everyone is scared for 24 hours. And then he does something else scandalous, and the previous indignation is forgotten or neglected. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Except that Stone’s switching shouldn’t be so quickly forgotten or replaced by the latest outrage. Because it represents not only a misuse of presidential power, it will also have a long-term impact on the ways that future presidents view their powers of forgiveness and commutation.
Consider why Stone was convicted by a jury of his peers: seven charges including lying to Congress about his contacts with Trump campaign officials regarding the release of a series of emails stolen by Democratic National Committee servers by the Russian and subsequently published on the WikiLeaks website.
“On October 7, 2016, after WikiLeaks released its first set of emails from then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, prosecutors say Stone received a text message from ‘an associate of the senior official of the Trump campaign ‘that said’ well done ‘stating that the Trump campaign was involved in Stone’s search for dirt on the Democrats.
“The associate and high-ranking campaign official are not mentioned in the complaint, although the indictment describes how Stone told a journalist that what Assange had in the unpublished emails was good for the Trump campaign. Stone replied at that time: ‘I’ d say [the high-ranking Trump Campaign official] but it doesn’t call me back. “
“An email matching the wording published by The New York Times shows that the officer Stone he was referring to was Steve Bannon.
“After the Oct. 7 releases, Stone bragged to ‘senior Trump Campaign officials’ that he had correctly predicted the data dump, prosecutors say.”
Stone repeatedly publicly insisted, and in testimony to Congress, that he had not attempted to contact WikiLeaks and had not attempted to serve as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the launch of the emails. , which were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
These are not small crimes. Let’s be very clear about what Stone did: He lied to Congress about his efforts to find out what WikiLeaks had in terms of hacked emails that were designed to harm Clinton. He also threatened someone, with death, unless that person lied to Congress about the nature of his role in the WikiLeaks information pipeline.
“A jury then determined [Stone] lied repeatedly to members of Congress. He lied about the identity of his broker to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying that he had contacted the Trump campaign about the timing of the WikiLeaks launches. In fact, he repeatedly updated top campaign officials on WikiLeaks. And he manipulated a witness, imploring the stone wall of Congress. “
“Roger Stone is a victim of Russia’s deception that the left and its media allies perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency,” read the official White House statement on Stone’s commutation. . “There was never 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 outcome of the 2016 election.”
(Sidebar: From the odd capitalization to the tone of the statement, it seems clear that Trump wrote the statement or played an important role in its construction.)
Impressive stuff, with a deeply troublesome message underlying everything.
“Unprecedented Historic Corruption: A US President Commutes the Sentence of a Person Convicted by a Jury of Lying to Protect That Same President.”
.
