Bill Barr is begging Trump not to commute Roger Stone’s sentence
According to a report from Vanity Fair on Wednesday, President Donald Trump wants to commute Roger Stone’s sentence before he must report to prison on July 14.
Stone, who has long been pals with Trump, was convicted on seven counts and sentenced to over three years in prison (40 Months) after witness tampering, lying to investigators, and a slew of other things.
Attorney General Bill Barr “has told Trump not to do it, and if he does, there will be a mutiny at DOJ,” Vanity Fair cited a source briefed on the internal debates. Continue reading.
Roger Stone, just sentenced to 40 months in prison for impeding a congressional investigation of Russian election interference, is seeking the removal of the federal judge who sentenced him, in the latest turn of a bizarre legal odyssey involving President Trump’s longtime friend and political adviser.
The case has been fraught with political overtones as President Trump and conservative commentators have leveled broadsides against U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson and the jury’s forewoman, saying political bias has tainted the proceedings.
And that, former federal prosecutors say, is why Stone’s defense team may have thrown a Hail Mary in its motion for Jackson to recuse herself — not to win a new trial, but to win political intervention in the future. Continue reading.
No longer can there be any doubt that Paul Manafort expects Donald Trump to pardon him — and that Trump has encouraged that expectation in a broad strategy to obstruct the Russia investigation over the past two years.
The signals emanating from Manafort’s legal team over the past few days could scarcely have been clearer. Moments after Judge Amy Berman Jackson extended Manafort’s federal prison time to seven and a half years, his lawyer, Kevin Downing, assured the assembled press outside the Washington courthouse that the judge’s sentence indicated there had been “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Downing uttered that false statement just minutes after Judge Jackson had scolded him in court for making exactly the same irrelevant remark following Manafort’s sentencing last week in Virginia.
As the judge said, those statements were intended not for the court but for the White House, echoing the president’s own favorite alibi. Coming from Manafort, through his legal mouthpiece, “no collusion” means “I didn’t tell Robert Mueller about any collusion.”
Before he pleaded guilty and began assisting federal prosecutors last summer, Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former fixer, spoke with a lawyer who agreed to reach out to the president’s legal team on his behalf.
The lawyer, Robert J. Costello, had about a dozen conversations with Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, according to emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with people involved in the matter. In one email, the discussions were characterized as a “back channel of communication.”
During one of the conversations last April, Mr. Costello said in an interview, he asked whether Mr. Trump might put a pardon “on the table” for Mr. Cohen, who was under federal investigation for a variety of possible crimes, including arranging hush-money payments to two women who had said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani told Mr. Costello that the president was unwilling to discuss pardons at that time, Mr. Costello said in the interview, and they did not discuss it again.
For more than a year, Donald Trump has dangled presidential pardons before former associates who might provide evidence against him. He teased such miscreants as Mike Flynn, his crooked national security adviser, and Michael Cohen, his bullying ex-lawyer. And today we know how blatantly he has been using that same enticement to lure his former campaign manager Paul Manafort to abandon a plea agreement with the special counsel.
While supposedly cooperating with Robert Mueller’s prosecution team, Manafort and his attorney were revealing to President Trump and his lawyers what questions the prosecutors were asking and how he had answered. In short, he acted as a spy for the White House.
Why would a man facing many years in prison accept such a grave risk during those months of conferring with the Trump lawyers unless he heard a powerful hint of a pardon?
The following article by Peter Baker was posted on the New York Times website May 31, 2018:
Dinesh D’Souza outside federal court in Manhattan in May 2014. He pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations. Credit: Michael Appleton The New York Times
WASHINGTON — For more than a year, President Trump has struggled to control the United States’ law enforcement apparatus, frustrated that it remains at least partly out of his grasp. But he is increasingly turning to a tool that allows him to push back against a justice system he calls unfair.
In a burst of action and words, Mr. Trump demonstrated Thursday that, in some instances, he still has the last word. He pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative commentator convicted of campaign finance violations, and he said he may extend clemency to former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois and Martha Stewart, the lifestyle mogul. Continue reading “Trump Wields Pardon Pen to Confront Justice System”
The following article by Carol D. Leonnig, Ashley Parker, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger was posted on the Washington Post website July 20, 2017:
President Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the Russia probe, according to a person familiar with the effort. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.
Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the probe, according to one of those people. A second person said Trump’s lawyers have been discussing the president’s pardoning powers among themselves.
Trump’s legal team declined to comment on the issue. But one adviser said the president has simply expressed a curiosity in understanding the reach of his pardoning authority, as well as the limits of Mueller’s investigation.
Bill Barr is begging Trump not to commute Roger Stone’s sentence
Roger Stone, just sentenced to 
