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Roger Stone's Commutation Is Trump's Admission of Guilt


BarryLaverty

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This lays it all out. You may start with your defensive cliches and personal attacks whenever you are ready. 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-clemency-roger-stone-admission-080003059.html
USA TODAY Opinion

Trump's clemency for Roger Stone is an admission of the president's guilt in Russia probe

Joyce White Vance, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY Opinion
 
 

Predictably, President Donald Trump’s long-hinted pardon of his old friend, Roger Stone, came about 8 p.m. Friday. While the Trump administration is not the first to bury bad news in that part of the cycle, it has done so with great regularity. When it came, it wasn’t actually a pardon, it was a commutation. That means Stone will spend no time in jail, but his conviction still stands and he can continue his crusade to have it reversed on appeal without the admission of guilt that is implicit in a pardon. In other words, it’s a win for Stone and for Trump as well, but a terrible loss for the rule of law and American justice.

Trump, never one to let an open sore scab over, issued an official statement later Friday night, justifying the commutation as the closing act of what he still, despite evidence, deems the “Russia Hoax” — in other words, Russia’s well-documented efforts to interfere in our 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.

Having been resoundingly reminded by the Supreme Court just a day earlier that he was not above the law, it was as though he could not resist the compulsion to push back and show that he was, or at least that he could still act like he was.

Trump rewarded the man who lied to protect him from criminal investigation and congressional oversight, a shameless abuse of the presidential pardon power. Permitting Stone to avoid prison for seven felony convictions involving Trump’s campaign was the ultimate act of lawlessness.

 

With rare exceptions — Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. — no one in the president’s party rose to criticize him for an outrageous breach of the rule of law. Even Attorney General William Barr and his defenders mustered nothing more than a toothless leak from the Justice Department that he had advised the president against clemency.

A presidential announcement of commutation

Trump’s Friday night statement was so out of bounds that even the perpetually taciturn Robert Mueller broke his silence, reiterating that his office’s work speaks for itself, because Mueller, at least, still believes we live in a functioning democracy. The former special counsel clarified that his investigation had established Trump's “campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

This carefully chosen language says out loud what Trump has worked so hard to deny.

Trump’s statement is a transparent effort to convince his supporters that his access to power should not be constrained by his oath to uphold the Constitution. It is painful but necessary to review the lies and self-serving rationales he offers to justify his perversion of justice and disguise the quid pro quo that is Stone’s reward for concealing the truth. Too often, Trump’s misdeeds run into each other with such speed, we are on to the next one before we can fully reflect on its significance. But the Stone commutation is uniquely awful because it is a direct attempt by the president to protect himself. It is a shocking betrayal of American ideals, and we cannot let it get lost in the undertow of whatever distraction comes next.

It no longer seems strange to hear the president criticizing the work of the Justice Department he oversees, as it would have in any other presidency. If anything, it has become too familiar and seemingly normalized. Here, again, that’s Trump’s message. Indeed, in the final sentences of his statement, when Trump claims Stone has been “treated very unfairly” and is now a “free man,” Trump sounds more like a defense lawyer who has won a hard-fought acquittal for his client than the head of the executive branch responsible for the prosecution:

Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!

The statement’s opening is equally deceptive. Despite his obligation to protect the country from all enemies foreign and domestic, Trump trots out the tired lie of the “Russia Hoax” to dismiss Russian interference in our 2016 election and justify commuting Stone’s sentence. Fortunately, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into it, and rightly so if our elections are to have the chance to remain fair and free:

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. 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.

Stone and the Russia investigation

Once credible allegations of foreign interference in a U.S. election came to light, it would have been unthinkable for the FBI not to investigate. And far from collusion being a fantasy, Stone emerged as a central figure in the Russia investigation. Mueller, who was consistently conservative in his estimation of what the evidence could prove, nonetheless was confident in saying that Stone “communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers.”

Stone was the middle man between Trump and the Russian efforts on Trump’s behalf, and if Mueller came up short on proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a criminal conspiracy, that was likely attributable, at least in part, to Stone’s evasions.

The same lies that Trump rewarded Stone for by saving him from prison also ensured that the American people never learned the full truth about Russia’s attack on the election and any role Trump’s campaign may have played. But someone thought the truth was damaging — Stone ran the risk of lying under oath to Congress and threatening a witness to avoid revealing it.

Trump moves on from complaining about hoaxes to denigrating what he labels “process-based charges.” Trump seized upon the characterization of serious offenses, like perjury and obstruction of justice, early on and has used it consistently as a rhetorical point, as though it minimizes the severity of these serious crimes:

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.

Roger Stone outside a courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2019.
Roger Stone outside a courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2019.

Perjury and obstruction are used to hold people who lie during an investigation accountable. Without them, successful liars would never face justice, which underlines how important they are. Trump, as always, is willing to undermine the justice system’s integrity to serve himself.

Trump actually confirms this later in his statement, furthering our understanding of why process crimes are so important:

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.

Of course, he’s wrong when he says “no such evidence exists” — abundant evidence existed but was deemed to fall short of the high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, likely due to obstruction by Stone and others. Prosecutors’ only option was to charge Stone for his conduct during the investigation to ensure he didn’t get away with the lies. And we are fortunate that they did. Otherwise, we would know even less about the truth. The rule of law doesn’t work if people can get away with their crimes by lying about them.

The prosecution process

According to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, “Mr. Stone was charged by the same prosecutors from the Mueller Investigation tasked with finding evidence of collusion with Russia.”

But it is entirely unsurprising that the prosecutors who investigated Russian election interference also prosecuted efforts to obstruct that investigation. Who better? But Trump complains of their participation, before concluding:

These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.

If Mueller’s team had any hunger for splashy headlines, they could have easily provoked them. Instead, they remained professional in the face of attacks and abuse and developed evidence that Stone lied about transmitting highly accurate information about WikiLeaks and Russia’s efforts to help the Trump campaign. Prosecutors may get frustrated in the face of witnesses who withhold the truth, but malice has nothing to do with their prosecutions, and the unanimous verdict of the jury that convicted Stone on seven charges substantiates that.

Far from a failed investigation, Mueller revealed hostile action by Russia against the United States in two blockbuster indictments and convicted numerous members of the president’s inner circle.

Trump’s next effort to justify commuting Stone’s sentence is a rehash of complaints about Stone's arrest and jury that were fully litigated during his trial and rejected by the court. But even if they were accurate, these are the sort of claims a court can adequately address. They might lead to exclusion of evidence or, as Stone continues to advocate for in his appeal, a new trial. They don’t support commuting a sentence following conviction.

An unhealthy justification for Stone

Trump offers another thin justification for keeping Stone out of prison: medical risk. Stone’s trial judge previously considered and rejected the evidence Stone offered in this regard:

Mr. Stone would be put at serious medical risk in prison. He has appealed his conviction and is seeking a new trial. He maintains his innocence and has stated that he expects to be fully exonerated by the justice system.

But this raises larger questions. If the president is serious and sincere in offering this as a reason to commute Stone’s sentence, there are many inmates in the Bureau of Prisons who present compelling cases for early release in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit federal prisons hard. Will the president be commuting all their sentences or just Stone’s? Absent broad release orders this week, this argument is a pretense for corruption.

Resolve after appalling Roger Stone commutation: Don't let Donald Trump break us, America.

Trump concludes that “Mr. Stone, like every American, deserves a fair trial. ...The President does not wish to interfere with his efforts to do so. ... However, and particularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence."

Here again, the president denigrates a trial, doubling down on the doubts he has cast in the minds of his followers about Stone’s trial and further damaging the country’s already fragile trust in its democratic institutions. The reality is, Stone got a fair trial. Even AG Barr acknowledged that the prosecution was "righteous" and that the sentence was warranted.

As if the commutation of Stone’s sentence alone wasn’t enough, Trump’s statement is abject testimony to his willingness to undermine the rule of law and our justice system to save himself.

Prosecutors across the country are heartsick over this miscarriage of justice. I hope they will stay at their posts because the shame is not theirs. The power to end these abuses lies within the Republican Party and Trump's appointees, like Barr. We have seen little condemnation and no resignations from them. History won't judge them kindly.

AG William Barr was once widely respected: Thanks to Trump, not anymore.

Mueller may have been prevented from securing sufficient evidence to prove there was a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, but there is more than enough evidence for an intelligent court of public opinion to reach that conclusion. Trump provided the linchpin himself, commuting the sentence of the man who lied to protect him. Why would Stone lie to Congress unless there was something important to lie about? And even Trump wouldn’t run the political risk of rewarding a witness who lied on his behalf, with an election on the horizon — unless the damage Stone could do to Trump, if he decided to cooperate to spare himself from prison, was substantial.

Roger Stone knows too much for Donald Trump to permit him to spend a single night in prison. Stone has always known that. The final piece of evidence Mueller didn’t have, but that the American people now possess — Trump provided it himself when he commuted Stone’s sentence.

Joyce White Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. Follow her on Twitter: @JoyceWhiteVance

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Either one of you gentlemen have this kind of background? This is who wrote it, not USA Today staff members. 

Joyce White Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017.

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Trump right to commute Roger Stone’s sentence – Stone committed no crime, was framed by Mueller

Mueller charged Stone to get him to incriminate President Trump for imaginary crimes based on invented evidence of Russian “collusion"

The legal landscape is littered with the destruction wrought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his “hit squad” of partisan prosecutors.

 

By commuting the prison sentence of Roger Stone on Friday, President Trump took a justified step in rectifying an egregious wrong. The president’s decision was also a compassionate gesture toward a 67-year old man who is not in the best of health and would have entered a federal prison system Tuesday that is struggling to contain the deadly coronavirus that is especially virulent for older Americans.

Illegitimately appointed under federal regulations, Mueller employed a scorched-earth strategy to bully, intimidate, and threaten people like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos into coerced guilty pleas.

Mueller’s ultimate goal was to get these people to incriminate President Trump for imaginary crimes based on invented evidence of Russian “collusion” to steal the 2016 presidential election. But they didn’t. There was nothing incriminating. But the truth was irrelevant to the special counsel.

Mueller didn’t care that it was all a hoax and that the supposed “evidence” was phony. He was more than willing to force people to lie to falsely implicate Trump/

People associated with the president — like conservative radio host Jerome Corsi and former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland — were put in a room and threatened with years behind bars if they declined to capitulate. But they refused to lie and no charges were brought against them because there was no evidence they had done anything wrong.

Indeed, Mueller never charged anyone with a “collusion” conspiracy, since it never actually happened.

Roger Stone also resisted. But his punishment by Mueller was a 24-page indictment and jackbooted tactics during an early morning arrest at his home,

Twenty-nine FBI agents wearing tactical gear and wielding M4 rifles, swept across Stone’s lawn. Four agents used a battering ram to break down his front door and then pointed rifle barrels at Stone’s head.

A helicopter hovered above, and two police boats roared up to the back yard of Stone’s home. The bust was shown live on CNN, which just happened to be there at 6 a.m.

The bizarre raid was not designed to capture an armed and dangerous criminal, but rather a writer, self-promoter and longtime friend of Trump. The feds knew that Stone had no criminal record, owned no firearms, and had an expired passport and thus was not dangerous or a flight risk.

But that wasn’t the point. The objective was to scare the hell out of Stone so that he might say something damaging about Trump, even if it was a complete fabrication. It was the equivalent of suborning perjury.

The objective was to scare the hell out of Stone so that he might say something damaging about Trump, even if it was a complete fabrication

Mueller’s abusive wielding of power in the arrest of Stone revealed the rot at the heart of the entire Russia investigation. It was, as Trump tweeted at the time, the “Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers are treated better.”

The indictment of Stone was a gaseous windbag of a document. It told of a tantalizing story about Trump, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. The indictment suggested that Stone might have had some advance knowledge or inside information about the contents of hacked Hillary Clinton campaign emails that were released by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016.

 

“Advance knowledge” is not a crime, by the way. Hence, all the froth boiled down to allegations of what are known as “process crimes” — obstruction, making false statements and witness tampering.

I don’t want to minimize or condone process crimes. No person should ever lie, mislead, or obstruct a legitimate law enforcement investigation. But Mueller’s probe was far from legitimate.

Moreover, none of the charges had anything to do with Trump-Russia “collusion.” It was not alleged that Stone had conspired with Russians to hack or steal documents.

Instead, Stone stood accused of reaching out to WikiLeaks and asking others to do so — as did hundreds of journalists in the summer of 2016, myself included. That is not a crime. If it was, I’d be composing this column behind bars.

An examination of Stone’s emails showed that he provided little more than the same information that WikiLeaks had already stated publicly. Stone speculated that the Clinton emails would be damaging. But that was stating the obvious.

By trying to insert himself into the action, Stone created the appearance that he knew more than he did — a frequent habit of his.

Mueller’s job was to uncover crimes that had occurred before he was appointed. But his investigation generated or created the charges against Stone. This invites the question: did Stone lie or make false statements?

 

Stone insisted that he had forgotten about some of the documents and conversations he had been asked to recount, saying: “I am human and I did make some errors.”

Did Stone threaten a witness? Stone claimed his statements were jocular and taken wildly out of context.

Although he pleaded not guilty, Stone was convicted by a jury in Washington in November.

If you are a friend of Trump, getting a fair trial in the District of Columbia is a challenge, if not an impossibility, especially in a politically charged case. In the last presidential election, 90.5 percent of the ballots in the nation’s capital were cast in favor of Hillary Clinton. A scant 4.1 percent of votes were cast for Trump.

Suspicions of a wrongful conviction against Stone became more acute when new evidence emerged after his trial that justice may have been undone by a jury foreperson who harbored a disqualifying bias.

Tomeka Hart, the foreperson, is a Democratic activist who voiced extreme anti-Trump opinions that were largely concealed during jury selection. Before she was ever picked for the trial, Hart posted numerous social media comments highly critical of Trump and actively engaged in protests against him.

Even worse, in a string of posts Hart commented negatively about the Stone case itself, praised the Mueller investigation and suggested that the president and his supporters (such as Stone) were racists.

 

Hart referred to Trump with the hashtag “klanpresident.” She should never, under any circumstances, have been sitting in judgment of Stone. Hart must have known this, inasmuch as she is a lawyer.

As I pointed out in a previous column, Hart’s record is indicative of a manifest prejudice against Stone by virtue of his close association with Trump. Because Hart was the foreperson who had the ability to guide and even induce other jurors to convict Stone, it is likely that he was deprived of his constitutional right to an impartial jury and a fair trial,

Predictably, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, denied a motion for a new trial for Stone.

The judge blamed Stone’s attorneys for not uncovering evidence of bias before the trial commenced. Under the law, that is not an excuse for refusing to overturn a tainted conviction by granting a new trial.

When our imperfect system of justice fails the president is constitutionally empowered to issue either a pardon or a commutation. Indeed, he may do so for either a good reason or no reason at all.

President Trump did not pardon Stone, which would have absolved him of his convicted crimes. Rather, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence of 40 months in prison.

Stone’s convictions will stand, unless a higher court reverses them on appeal. The political and media backlash will be severe, to be sure. But that has never deterred Trump before and should not in the future.

The contorted case of Roger Stone is a sad coda to the work of Robert Mueller. As Trump tweeted last month, Stone was “a victim of a corrupt and illegal Witch Hunt, one which will go down as the greatest political crime in history. He can sleep well at night!”

Stone has suffered enough, He deserves to sleep in his own bed.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY GREGG JARRETT

Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His latest book is the New York Times bestseller "Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History"  
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15 minutes ago, BarryLaverty said:

Either one of you gentlemen have this kind of background? This is who wrote it, not USA Today staff members. 

Joyce White Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017.

My background is just as good as hers. My credentials or opinions are just as qualified as hers--because it is an opinion, and everyone has one, just like Donkey,jackass,horse,horses,meadow - free image from needpix.com  HOLES. LOL

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1 hour ago, BarryLaverty said:

Either one of you gentlemen have this kind of background? This is who wrote it, not USA Today staff members. 

Joyce White Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017.

Don’t need any of that to have an Opinion. 

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1 hour ago, BarryLaverty said:

Either one of you gentlemen have this kind of background? This is who wrote it, not USA Today staff members. 

Joyce White Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017.

Still an Opinion.

Last time I checked, opinions aren't facts.

I'm guessing you don't have that kind of background, either.

Oh, and "Appeal To Authority": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

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8 minutes ago, Wild74 said:

It was a Kangaroo court from the get go, Trump did the right thing, crooked courts can't win when you have a righteous President in office

If there was any justice, Mueller and his henchmen should be indicted for conducting all of these phony manufactured prosecutions  ....

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16 minutes ago, KirtFalcon said:

If there was any justice, Mueller and his henchmen should be indicted for conducting all of these phony manufactured prosecutions  ....

Mueller’s gang used Gestapo/KGB tactics in the hope of framing Trump.   It didn’t work.  Very frustrating for the Left.   Larry’s just venting in their failure.   He’s frustrated as he faces 4 more years of Trump.  I’d like to be compassionate toward him, but geez, you’d think he’d just accept it after over 3 years, and all the good things Trump has done.  None is so blind as he that will not see.   Puzzling, that.

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34 minutes ago, Hagar said:

Mueller’s gang used Gestapo/KGB tactics in the hope of framing Trump.   It didn’t work.  Very frustrating for the Left.   Larry’s just venting in their failure.   He’s frustrated as he faces 4 more years of Trump.  I’d like to be compassionate toward him, but geez, you’d think he’d just accept it after over 3 years, and all the good things Trump has done.  None is so blind as he that will not see.   Puzzling, that.

Larry is straight up Twilight Zone 🦇 :poop: crazy ....

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2 hours ago, DB2point0 said:

Is there a way to minimize someone’s post like you can a long quoted text?  I ask so I don’t have to thumb through something that wasn’t worth reading the first time I opened this thread, I just want to read the responses

It’s a liberal thing, born of the old saying, If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with 🐂💩.

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