If President Donald Trump thinks he can pardon associate Roger Stone after he just got sentenced to serve nearly 3-½ years in prison, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has a warning for him.
On Thursday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Stone to 40 months in jail as punishment for his conviction on seven counts of lying to the FBI and Congress, obstruction and witness tampering. The sentence is consistent with the recommendation Attorney General Bill Barr approved after he denounced the original recommendation of seven to nine years following a tweet by Trump whining about it.
While it certainly looks as though Berman bowed down to Trump’s demands, doing so may have been her attempt to make Stone’s conviction pardon-proof because Trump’s own Department of Justice recommended the sentence. Pardoning him for committing crimes to cover for Trump would look really bad, especially for Barr.
But just in case Trump is thinking about pardoning Stone anyway, Schiff warned him against it.
Roger Stone was found guilty of lying to Congress and threatening a witness.
He did it to cover up for Trump. His sentence is justified.
It should go without saying, but to pardon Stone when his crimes were committed to protect Trump would be a breathtaking act of corruption.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) February 20, 2020
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Schiff is the House Intelligence Committee chairman who also masterfully served as a House impeachment manager during the Senate impeachment trial. He presented a strong case against Trump demonstrating that he abused his power by trying to extort Ukraine to investigate his political rivals and obstructed Congress to cover it up.
If Trump tries to pardon Stone for trying to cover for him, the House could start new impeachment proceedings. Stone repeatedly broke the law to protect Trump, so rewarding him with a pardon would be yet another breach of conduct and abuse of power that must be answered in the most forceful way possible. That means impeachment, no matter how much Republicans won’t like it.
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