President Donald Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s prison sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice was roundly rebuked on Friday evening and Saturday as corrupt and generally of a piece with the 45th president’s scandal-plagued administration.
President Donald Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s prison sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice was roundly rebuked on Friday evening and Saturday as corrupt and generally of a piece with the 45th president’s scandal-plagued administration.
Although a decidedly constitutional grant that cannot be legally questioned or limited by the Congress whatsoever, the pardon power, when a used by a president, is more or less a guaranteed source of strife, obloquy and consternation. It’s an instant headline-generator for both the wielder and those quick to harshly criticize its use. Context is key here because partisan disputes over the propriety of certain pardons are all but baked into the power’s use and are largely informed by the letter next to a president’s name.
The Stone commutation was no different in this respect but the White House’s late Friday action also elicited some scorn from some members of Trump’s own party–including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a consistent critic and former fan of the president.
“Unprecedented, historic corruption,” the former GOP presidential candidate who auditioned for and scooped up Trump’s endorsement in 2012–at the height of Trump’s promotion of the racist anti-Barack Obama birther conspiracy theory–tweeted on Saturday, “an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”
The Utah senator’s claim that Stone’s commutation was “unprecedented” does not withstand scrutiny when considered alongside relatively recent presidential pardons, however, and Romney was quickly upbraided for this.
