Andrew McCarthy: Should Trump pardon Roger Stone? President should decide or keep quiet
By Andrew McCarthy | National Review
The first thing to grasp about the Roger Stone sentencing fiasco is that Stone, even accepting the worst plausible gloss on his crimes, is a 67-year-old nonviolent first offender. If the criminal justice “reform†fad were authentic, and not a stratagem of social-justice warriors who have taken Washington’s surfeit of useful idiots for a ride, then we could all agree that the original seven-to-nine-year sentence advocated by prosecutors was too draconian — even if it was, as we shall see, a faithful application of the federal sentencing guidelines as written.
But no. Like criminal justice “reform,†the Stone prosecution is more politics than law enforcement. It was the Mueller probe’s last gasp at pretending there might be something to the Russia-collusion narrative – notwithstanding that, when the “gee, it sure feels like there could be some collusion here†indictment was filed, over a year and a half after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, it had long been manifest that there was no Trump-Russia conspiracy.
So, the left has a quandary here: Do they hate Trump more than they love sentencing “reform� We could have predicted the decision to go with hating Trump, thus fomenting outrage over DOJ’s retraction of its original sentencing recommendation of about nine years’ imprisonment, now slashed to a far more reasonable range of four years or less.
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https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-trump-should-decide-whether-he-wants-to-pardon-roger-stone-or-keep-quiet
