Array
Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, said he found it “a little perplexing” that the former president’s grant of clemency for him topped the list of Mar-a-Lago materials FBI agents seized.
The clemency letter that Trump issued in December 2020 was among around 20 boxes of items the agents removed during a raid of Trump’s Florida residence on Aug. 8, along with documents marked as classified, top secret, and confidential, although Trump said that the documents were “all declassified.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times shortly after the FBI search warrant was unsealed, the political lobbyist wondered why the clemency letter became a focus of the federal agency’s attention.
“Why these documents are being struggled over between the president and the National Archives, I have no idea other than to say everything was done perfectly legally,” said Stone.
Trump issued the pardon in December 2020 to Stone as his term as the 45th U.S. president was nearing the end, saying that the then-68-year-old had “numerous medical conditions” and had been “treated very unfairly” due to “prosecutorial misconduct.”
Stone, who served briefly as a Trump campaign adviser in 2015, was arrested in January 2019 in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia in influencing the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller’s report in April 2019 stated there was no evidence Trump or his associates had knowingly conspired with Russia.
Stone acknowledged that he had made misstatements to Congress under oath but maintained that they were “all innocuous” and “immaterial.”
“One cannot lie to Congress about Russian collusion, if no Russian collusion took place, can they? So I was framed solely for the purpose of pressuring me into giving false testimony against the president,” Stone said during the interview.
