Saturday, July 11, 2020

Pure Corruption

Why did President Trump grant clemency to the guilty Roger Stone? Because Stone had the goods on him on the Russian hacking scandal and threatened to spill them.

David Frum lays out all the details in "Stone Walks Free in One of the Greatest Scandals in American History" in The Atlantic.
Stone was accused of—and convicted of—lying to Congress about his role in the WikiLeaks matter. Since Stone himself would have been in no legal jeopardy had he told the truth, the strong inference is that he lied to protect somebody else. Just today, this very day, Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman why he lied and whom he was protecting. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” You read that, and you blink. As the prominent Trump critic George Conway tweeted: “I mean, even Tony Soprano would have used only a pay phone or burner phone to say something like this.” Stone said it on the record to one of the best-known reporters in Washington. In so many words, he seemed to imply: I could have hurt the president if I’d rolled over on him. I kept my mouth shut. He owes me.
Read all the rest of the filthy details.

Trump should be impeached over this.

1 comment:

OnymousGuy said...

Since Stone’s crime was commuted, not pardoned, The reason is corrupt, like everything this reverse Midas touches.

Kevin Drum wrote this in Mother Jones:
“ ...Why the second-class treatment of a commutation instead of a pardon? Wasn’t Stone important enough for a pardon?

But wait. Someone who gets a pardon can no longer invoke the Fifth Amendment as a justification for refusing to testify in court. If Stone were called in some other case, he’d be required to spill any beans he had. But if I understand the law correctly, a commutation is more limited. The conviction stands, and the possibility of putting yourself in further jeopardy remains. Thus your Fifth Amendment rights stand.

So if you wanted to help out a buddy, but you also wanted to make sure he couldn’t be forced to provide dangerous testimony in the future, commutation sure seems like the best bet, doesn’t it?”

Source: Kevin Drum, “ Why Did Trump Commute Roger Stone’s Sentence Instead of Pardoning Him?”, Mother Jones magazine, 10 July, 2020.