Trump’s Misleading Spin on Roger Stone’s Conviction
In commuting Roger Stone’s prison sentence, President Donald Trump and the White House gave a misleading account of Stone’s conviction and the federal investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
In November, a jury found Stone guilty of obstructing a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. All of the counts were related to a House intelligence committee investigation that ran parallel with a separate investigation by the Department of Justice.
A key line of inquiry in the House investigation was WikiLeaks’ public release of documents stolen by Russian intelligence officers that were damaging to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and whether the Trump campaign had “advanced knowledge of or access to stolen information.”
During the campaign, Stone — Trump’s informal adviser — said that he had been in contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“A jury later determined [Stone] lied repeatedly to members of Congress,” special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in a July 11 for the , defending his office’s prosecution of Stone. “He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall
