Trump ally Roger Stone is all-in for the man who kept him out of federal prison.
In an interview published Monday, Stone said he would work to get Trump reelected after writing a book about “this ordeal” — in which the former Trump campaign adviser was convicted of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements to Congress during the body’s investigation of Russian election meddling.
Now, Stone told Axios, he’s gunning for Trump’s second term.
“I will do anything necessary to elect my candidate, short of breaking the law,” Stone said.
President Donald Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence on Friday, four days before Stone was scheduled to report to the slammer.
In a statement accompanying the pardon, the White House bashed former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and said Stone had been charged for “his conduct during their investigation.”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who handled the Stone case, saw it differently.
“He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the President, he was prosecuted for covering up for the President,” Jackson said at Stone’s sentencing in February.
And in a Washington Post op-ed Saturday, Mueller himself wrote that Stone “remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
“He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks,” Mueller wrote of Stone. “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 Congress.”
Trump, Stone told Axios, “has an enormous sense of fairness and justice and mercy.”
Stone discussed the commutation with reporters on Friday night. And he’s scheduled for an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity during Hannity’s Monday show.
