The White House announced yesterday that President Trump issued an Executive Grant of Clemency commuting the “unjust sentence” of longtime political ally Roger Stone. Stone was set to report to prison to serve a more than three-year sentence days from now.
He was convicted of various procedural crimes, including lying to authorities, stemming from Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
In a statement released by the White House, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the President’s decision came as the result of new evidence revealed regarding the Mueller investigation and FBI agents that behaved in an unfair manner throughout.
“Roger Stone is 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,” the statement reads. “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. The collusion delusion spawned endless and farcical investigations, conducted at great taxpayer expense, looking for evidence that did not exist.”
Mueller’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,” the statement adds. “These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.”
Charges against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – also connected to the broader Russia investigation – were ordered dropped by an appeals court last month after it was found that FBI agents attempted to frame Flynn for those charges. (Flynn was convicted of lying to authorities about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. in December 2019.) The judge in that case, Judge Emmet Sullivan, in an unusual move, is appealing that court’s decision to drop the charges.
You can read the full report on Stone here.