President Trump faces fallout from commuting Roger Stone's sentence
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi accuses Trump of 'staggering corruption'; reaction and analysis on 'The Five.'
"The Five" co-host Jesse Watters claimed Monday that critics of President Trump's decision to commute the prison sentence of longtime Republican political consultant Roger Stone are mostly upset that the "witch hunt got exposed."
"Stone's no saint and he has been in the gutter for decades, but he is not a criminal either," the "Watters's World" host said. "He is an old man who likes to talk a lot of trash and got caught up in a frame job."
The 67-year-old Stone was due to report to federal prison Tuesday to begin a 40-month sentence after he was convicted in November 2019 on seven counts of obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements to Congress in connection with the Russia investigation.
"If a guy plants a gun on you and he is a police officer and you throw the gun in the river, you cannot be charged with obstruction," Watters continued. "It is a dirty investigation, and we know it was a baseless investigation. There was no collusion."
Trump's commutation of Stone's sentence has drawn criticism from Democrats and the media, as well as Republican Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
Watters then pointed to what he considered to be more egregious pardons by Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Obama, he noted, commuted the sentence of former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of passing classified information to Wikileaks.
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Co-host Greg Gutfeld chimed in that Obama also commuted the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera, a leader of the Puerto Rican separatist terror group FALN -- which has claimed responsibility for dozens of urban bombings in the U.S.
"Bill Clinton, didn't he pardon his brother [Roger Clinton]? Or his business partner?" Watters asked. "But this is the craziest thing: He pardoned the biggest tax cheat [financier Marc Rich] because his wife gave $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. Come on! A little perspective."
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