Convicted felon Roger Stone has some friends–around 120,000 at last count–and they want to set him free. That is, they want President Donald Trump to do it by issuing a pardon.
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump’s former campaign advisor Michael Caputo announced that he had founded a committee focused on persuading Trump to pardon his longtime political confidante.
Caputo, a Republican Party consultant and political strategist who briefly worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in a communications position, railed against the assistant U.S. Attorneys who oversaw Stone’s prosecution–and all of whom resigned en masse on Tuesday following the Trump administration’s controversial and unprecedented intervention in Stone’s sentencing process.
“You don’t have to look any further than the federal prosecutors who railroaded Roger to know this prosecution was out of control,” Caputo said in a statement which echoed White House talking points on the Stone controversy. “They called for seven to nine years of incarceration–after misleading their DOJ bosses–charges which, as the President tweeted, a connected insider served only two months.”
“This entire investigation was a political hit job, and we believe the MAGA movement agrees: the President should pardon Roger Stone,” Caputo continued, in a bid to rally supporters to the Republican Party’s newfound cause: opposition to harsh prison sentences.
Caputo also went on the attack against Stone’s prosecutors:
Roger Stone was targeted by dirty cops because, despite all their illegal efforts, they failed to Get Trump. As a result, the Stone family has been destroyed for a 30-year friendship with the Trump family. By imprisoning Stone, they think they imprison the president. Our committee strongly urges the President to take action to pardon Roger Stone and save his family from what was obviously a political hit job.”
According to a press release obtained by Law&Crime, the Pardon Roger J. Stone Committee is made up of Stone’s “old friends” who are said to be “closing ranks around the Stone family” in anticipation of the Richard Nixon aficionado’s sentencing date.
Department of Justice (DOJ) veterans and most legal observers turned several shades of sickly on Tuesday as the sequence of resignations rolled across breaking news chyrons and Twitter feeds throughout the day in response to Attorney General William Barr‘s obvious intervention on Trump’s behalf.
The 45th president, for his part, initially admitted to placing his fingers on the scales–but he later walked that admission back. As for the potential of a Stone pardon? President Trump is reportedly keeping “mum,” according to Fox News.
There is one person well-known to Stone who says a pardon is in the works: conspiracy theorist and former Stone associate Alex Jones.
“I talked to somebody that had been inside the White House and they said that Trump is going to pardon Roger Stone but that he’s going to do it after he’s sentenced and that the president was really upset at the seven-to-nine year number,” Jones said Tuesday on his InfoWars radio show.
So, maybe Caputo’s effort does, in fact, have an empathetic ear—along with a substantial amount of popular support for such a move.
The press release also notes that “members of the new committee had collected 120,000 signatures in four days on a petition to President Trump urging him to pardon the legendary Republican strategist convicted of process crimes related to partisan Russia investigations on November 15, 2019.”
The committee says they are currently in the process of raising money to help defray the cost of Stone’s legal bills in the event of a likely appeal “and to establish a fund to care for his wife Nydia and their family” who have apparently been “left destitute after paying millions in legal fees.”
[Image via screengrab/Fox News]
