Call to Action: Contact Your Elected Representatives About the Commutation of Roger Stone’s Sentence
On Friday, July 10, 2020, President Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime friend and advisor Roger Stone, who was convicted of federal crimes (seven felony counts, including obstructing a congressional investigation, tampering with a witness, and five counts of lying to Congress) and then sentenced to 40 months in prison. While this is within the legal bounds of the president’s powers, it is unethical and corrupt to abuse those powers to commute the sentence of someone convicted in an investigation into that president’s own campaign.
To do:
Contact your members of Congress and ask them to call out this latest action for the self-serving corruption it is. In less than five minutes, you can submit a letter to all of your elected representatives at once via our website. You have the option to either write your own letter or answer some short prompts to have a personalized letter created for you. Go HERE to submit a letter.
Background:
After multiple U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, a special counsel investigation led by Robert S. Mueller was established and directed to pursue, among other lines of investigation, any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign.
Roger Stone, a longtime friend of Donald Trump, quickly became a central figure in the investigation. Stone was an official on Trump’s election campaign until mid-2015 and a supporter of the campaign throughout 2016. In 2016 he communicated with Russian intelligence officers. Stone also claimed advanced knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers. For these reasons, Stone was investigated both by the special counsel investigation and by the U.S. Congress.
This investigation held great importance to our country’s security and our democracy’s well-being. Former Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller explained: “Russian efforts to interfere in our political system, and the essential question of whether those efforts involved the Trump campaign, required investigation. In that investigation, it was critical for us (and, before us, the FBI) to obtain full and accurate information. Likewise, it was critical for Congress to obtain accurate information from its witnesses. When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts.”
Instead of upholding U.S. interests, Roger Stone obstructed a congressional investigation, tampered with a witness, and was convicted of five counts of making false statements to Congress. As Mueller wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post, “We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law. The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false. … Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes.”
Last week, on the eve of the beginning of Stone’s 40-month prison sentence, President Trump commuted the sentence, an act that is widely seen as a reward for Stone’s loyalty to the president. Mueller broke his typical silence to say, “[Stone] remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Unethical cronyism is bad enough. But journalist Howard Fineman reported just hours before the Friday-night commutation that Stone told him, “[President Trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” This is corruption, which, according to Transparency International, is “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”
This action is a violation of MWEG’s Principles of Ethical Government, including:
(1) Every government official and institution has a duty to respect the rule of law, including accepted processes for how the law is to be established, executed, and interpreted.
(c) Elected and appointed officials and government employees alike must eschew conflicts of interest and avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in fidelity to the public trust (see Mosiah 29:35-36 and D&C 134:3).
In acts of cronyism and corruption, Trump has used his powers overwhelmingly to help people with whom he has a personal or political connection. “No president in American history comes close to matching Trump’s systematically self-serving use of the pardon power,” asserted Jack L. Goldsmith (Harvard Law professor and former top Justice Department official during the George W. Bush administration) and Dartmouth student Matt Gluck in Lawfare.
A few courageous Republicans have condemned the president’s corrupt actions, including Senators Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey. Romney in particular noted the “[u]nprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield A very president.” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth tweeted: “This self-proclaimed ‘law and order’ President once again undermines actual law and order to protect himself and his friends.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who expressed support for Trump after the commutation, nevertheless said he will allow Mueller to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee after denying such requests for over a year.
