Roger Stone judge orders DOJ to submit Trump’s commutation order
The judge who presided over Roger Stone’s criminal trial and sentencing ordered the Justice Department to submit President Trump’s executive order commuting the sentence of the longtime Trump associate. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee who handed down Stone’s 40-month sentence earlier this year following the GOP operative’s jury conviction in November, asked for more information about Trump’s grant of clemency, which the White House announced in a press release on Friday. “In response to questions raised by the U.S. Probation Office, the parties are ORDERED to provide the Court by July 14, 2020 with a copy of the Executive Order commuting the defendant's sentence and to address the question of the scope of the commutation, in particular, whether it involves the sentence of incarceration alone or also the period of supervised release,” Jackson ordered on Monday.
Stone, 67, was swept up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and had been convicted of lying to congressional investigators about his alleged attempted outreach to WikiLeaks, obstructing a congressional investigation, and attempting to intimidate a possible congressional witness. The White House released a statement Friday evening announcing that Trump had signed a grant of clemency, calling Stone a "victim of the Russia Hoax." With the commutation, Stone's 40-month sentence was wiped away days before he was set to go to prison. Without a pardon, Stone maintains his criminal record. Mueller, a former FBI director, wrote an opinion article in the Washington Post on Saturday arguing that Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Trump, "remains a convicted felon, and rightfully so." The White House press office harshly criticized the credibility of Mueller’s investigation when Stone’s clemency was announced, arguing there was "never any collusion" between the Trump team and 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," the White House said. "As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’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 self-described "dirty trickster" was sentenced by Jackson to 40 months for obstruction of justice and 12 months for the other five counts to be served concurrently. He also received a $20,000 fine and two years of supervised release. “The defendant lied about a matter of great national and international importance. … He lied to Congress … And there was nothing unfair, phony, or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution,” Jackson said when handing down Stone’s sentence. “The truth still exists. The truth still matters … Roger Stone's insistence that it doesn't, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies, are a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the very foundation of our democracy.” Stone's lawyers alleged one of the members of the jury in his case, Tomeka Hart, was not an impartial juror due to her past partisan activity. Hart, who was a former Democratic congressional candidate and a program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, repeatedly shared anti-Trump posts on social media. Trump said the jury was "totally tainted" because of Hart, but Jackson rejected Stone's bid for a retrial in April, calling Stone's motion "a tower of indignation."
Aaron Zelinsky, a former Mueller team member and Stone prosecutor, testified last month that what he “repeatedly” heard was that Stone “was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president.” Zelinsky said Shea was “receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break.” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec countered those claims. “The attorney general determined the high sentence proposed by the line prosecutors in the Roger Stone case was excessive and inconsistent with similar cases," she said. “I am concerned that seven to nine years … would be greater than necessary,” Jackson said in February, rejecting the nearly decadelong sentence sought by Zelinsky. “I sincerely doubt that I would have sentenced him within that range, even if the sentencing had simply proceeded in its typical fashion.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/roger-stone-judge-orders-doj-to-submit-trumps-commutation-order