Will commuting Roger Stone's sentence hurt Trump politically?
Byron York weighs in on the backlash over President Trump commuting the sentence of Roger Stone
Washington Examiner contributor Byron York said on Monday that the commutation of Roger Stone's sentence was not unprecedented, despite what many critics have claimed.
“In the past, presidents have commuted sentences or pardoned people in their administration they felt have been targeted by unfair investigations,” York told “America's Newsroom.”
York said that former President George H.W. Bush pardoned five people who had been convicted or pleaded guilty in the Iran-Contra affair.
TRUMP COMMUTES ROGER STONE'S SENTENCE, DAYS BEFORE PRISON TERM SET TO BEGIN
“With Bill Clinton, he pardoned people who were involved in Whitewater, especially Susan McDougal, his old business partner who had been convicted of corruption and after that conviction, the independent counsel Ken Starr suggested that she could get a lighter sentence if she testified against Bill Clinton,” York said.
The Whitewater scandal in the 1990s involved an investigation into the real estate investments of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Jim and Susan McDougal, made in the late '70s. The Clintons formed the Whitewater Development Corporation with the McDougals in order to buy up 230 acres of riverfront land and sell it as a vacation property.
“She went to jail rather than testify against Bill Clinton. She served 18 months for contempt of court for refusing to answer the question of whether she had testified truthfully at their trial. In his last hours in the office, Bill Clinton pardoned Susan McDougal. A few years later, they made a documentary about her and he appeared at the premiere and called her a hero for refusing to testify against him so this is simply not unprecedented.”
York published an op-ed on similar actions taken by previous U.S. presidents.
York writes, "Unprecedented"? Who is Romney kidding? Put aside your opinion of whether Trump acted properly or improperly in commuting Stone's sentence — an action comparable to President George W. Bush's decision to commute the sentence of top White House aide Lewis Libby, convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak affair.
Trump’s move to commute Stone’s sentence came Friday, just days before Stone was to begin serving a 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
The action, which Trump had foreshadowed in recent days, underscored the president’s lingering rage over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and is part of a continuing effort by the president and his administration to criticize the probe that has shadowed the White House from the outset.
In a lengthy statement released late Friday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president had made the decision to commute Stone's sentence "in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial."
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“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,” McEnany said in a statement Friday night.
“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.”
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