Russell Berman: “Forget bernie kerik, Scooter Libby, Michael Milken—even Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This was the presidential reprieve President Donald Trump’s critics feared most.”

“Trump’s move tonight to commute the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, nearly five months after a federal judge sentenced him to more than three years in prison, was surely the least surprising of his many high-profile acts of executive clemency. The president, after all, had been complaining about Stone’s prosecution from the start; had telegraphed by tweet his displeasure with the Department of Justice’s sentencing recommendation; and had tried to browbeat Judge Amy Berman Jackson into granting Stone a new trial.”

“But the seeming inevitability of Trump’s decision made it no less brazen. Stone was more than a political ally of the president, like Arpaio. He was not just a friend of a friend, like Kerik, Libby, and Milken—whose pardons were encouraged privately by Trump’s buddies or via public endorsements from the president’s fans on Fox News. Stone was a longtime confidant of Trump, but he was more than that. To the president’s critics, he was an accomplice to Trump’s crimes, convicted of lying to Congress and threatening a witness in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which directly involved Trump and his campaign. As Jackson noted in explaining her sentence, Stone ‘was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.'”