Trump’s Roger Stone Pardon Prompts Liberal Outrage

Democrats, left-wing commentators, and President Trump’s vast array of liberal political adversaries are having a conniption over the president’s decision to commute the sentence of Roger Stone.

On Friday, the White House announced President Trump has signed an Executive Grant of Clemency order that commuted Roger Stone’s “unjust sentence”. Stone received a conviction on seven counts of witness tampering, obstruction, and making false statements to Congress last November. Stone, a seasoned political operator, was about to surrender himself to the federal prison system this Tuesday. He was about to serve a 40-month sentence stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s infamous investigation into Russian collusion.

Trump on the Robert Stone Sentence

In a statement released Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump decided to commute Stone’s sentence due to the “egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial.” McEnany went on to describe the investigation as a political frame job.

“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,” said McEnany. “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.”

Trump’s order to commute Stone’s sentence stopped short of a full pardon. However, it saved the former Nixon fixer from a lengthy jail sentence. Stone had campaigned for presidential intervention for several weeks leading up to his scheduled surrender date. He also filed a court motion requesting a commutation that cited his high risk of death from the COVID-19 outbreak that is currently sweeping through the federal prison system.

Liberal Media Reacts

The Stone commutation prompted an immediate backlash from the liberal media. Special Counsel Robert Mueller even weighed in with a lengthy Op-ED piece defending the conviction in The Washington Post. He felt “compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper,” Mueller said. He mentioned his investigators acted with the “highest integrity” and claimed that any claims to the contrary were false.

Democrats are also lambasting President Trump for supposedly abusing his executive powers, but a look at the data indicates yet another left-wing double-standard. So far, President Trump has issued 26 pardons and commutations during the course of his presidency. President Obama, his predecessor, issued a staggering 1,927 pardons and commutations while in office. Yet somehow the left is in an uproar over this perceived abuse of presidential privilege.

Pelosi Shares Her Opinion

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also chimed in on the decision in dramatic fashion. She called the commutation “staggering corruption” and “a threat to national security”. She also used the event to reprise the now-debunked Russian collusion narrative and insist that the case still has merit. “This case was about the Russian connection,” she said.

However, the case doesn’t really fit Pelosi’s “Russian connection” narrative. Prosecutors couldn't come up with enough evidence to charge anyone with collusion. So, they came after Stone for his conduct during the investigation instead. McEnany described the situation as part of her Friday statement: “Mr. Stone was charged by the same prosecutors from the Mueller Investigation tasked with finding evidence of collusion with Russia. Because no such evidence exists, however, they could not charge him for any collusion-related crime. Instead, they charged him for his conduct during their investigation. The simple fact is that if the Special Counsel had not been pursuing an absolutely baseless investigation, Mr. Stone would not be facing time in prison.”

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