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Trump’s Clemency Came After Displays of Loyalty by Stone

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The extraordinary decision to commute the prison sentence of an embattled adviser demonstrates how the president has managed to bend America’s legal machinery to his advantage.
Months before F. B. I. agents arrived in darkness at his Florida home to take him into custody, Roger J. Stone Jr. promised that he would remain loyal to his longtime friend. “I will never roll on Donald Trump,” he said.
He did not, and Mr. Stone is now a free man.
The president’s decision on Friday to commute Mr. Stone’s prison sentence for impeding a congressional inquiry and other crimes was extraordinary because federal prosecutors had suspected that Mr. Stone could shed light on whether Mr. Trump had lied to them under oath or illegally obstructed justice. Even Mr. Stone suggested a possible quid pro quo, telling a journalist hours before the announcement that he hoped for clemency because Mr. Trump knew he had resisted intense pressure from prosecutors to cooperate.
It was the latest example of how Mr. Trump has managed to bend America’s legal machinery to his advantage and undermine a criminal investigation that has dominated so much of his presidency. Mr. Trump’s move was so stunning that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russia’s election interference and has insistently refused to go beyond what was in his report, responded with an op-ed published late Saturday in The Washington Post.
“When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands.”
A jury determined that Mr. Stone, 67, was guilty of seven felonies, including witness tampering and lying to federal authorities, and a judge sentenced him to 40 months in prison. But to some, his brazen taunting of F. B. I. agents, prosecutors and a federal judge for the past three years indicated that he knew how the story would end: His friend Mr. Trump would rescue him.
Mr. Stone has always described the special counsel investigation as bogus. And he has said he refused to help prosecutors because he would not “bear false witness” or “make up lies” about Mr. Trump — not because he was covering up any wrongdoing.
But recently unsealed portions of the Mueller report underscore why investigators were so eager to gain his cooperation. The passages show that prosecutors suspected that the president had lied to them in written answers when he said he did not recall any conversations with Mr. Stone during his 2016 campaign about WikiLeaks. The organization released tens of thousands of emails that Russian government operatives had stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democratic political organizations and had funneled to it to help Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Although Mr. Trump said he spoke with Mr. Stone occasionally, he had “no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone” for the six months before the November 2016 election.
Mr. Stone might also have shed light on whether the president’s conduct toward him amounted to possible criminal obstruction of justice. The Mueller team investigated — but did not ultimately determine — whether the president had committed that offense, focusing in part on whether he tried to influence Mr. Stone and other witnesses not to cooperate with investigators.
Mr. Trump repeatedly praised Mr. Stone and others for refusing to aid the investigation. In a December 2018 tweet, he singled out Mr. Stone for resisting “a rogue and out of control prosecutor,” adding, “Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’”
“It is possible that, by the time the president submitted his written answers two years after the relevant events had occurred, he no longer had clear recollections of his discussions with Stone or his knowledge of Stone’s asserted communications with WikiLeaks,” the Mueller prosecutors wrote in a passage disclosed last month as a result of a lawsuit.

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