Longtime Donald Trump friend and political adviser Roger Stone was hit with a 40-month prison sentence on Thursday, after his convictions last year on charges of lying to congress and intimidating a witness. Afterward, Adam Schiff, the Democrat who led the House impeachment effort, appeared to issue a warning that if Trump granted a pardon for Stone, he could be impeached a second time.
Schiff, the California congressman and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, issued the possible warning on his Twitter account, after Judge Amy Berman Jackson handed down Stone’s sentence.
“He did it to cover up for Trump. His sentence is justified,” Schiff declared, noting Stone’s convictions on the lying and witness tampering charges.
The former lead House impeachment manager then added a warning. Given that Stone committed his crimes in an attempt to protect Trump, as Judge Jackson said in court, according to The Daily Beast , a pardon for the self-described Republican dirty trickster would constitute, “a breathtaking act of corruption,” Schiff wrote.
During his November trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Stone acted as a middleman between Trump and WikiLeaks, the document dumping site that in 2016 released thousands of internal Democratic Party emails that had been stolen by computer hackers employed by the Russian government.
While Trump has neither ruled out a pardon for Stone, nor indicated that he is planning one, on Thursday he said that he expected his friend and adviser of 40 years to have a “good chance of exoneration,” as seen in the NBC News video below.
WATCH: President Trump speaks after Roger Stone’s 40-month prison sentence: “I’m following this very closely, and I want to see it play out to its fullest, because Roger has a very good chance of exoneration, in my opinion.” pic.twitter.com/nTaIDMIaGf
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 20, 2020
Stone’s sentencing was itself a source of controversy, after prosecutors’ original recommendation of a seven-to-nine year sentence was quickly knocked down by Attorney General William Barr, according to the Daily Beast report. Barr’s intervention appeared to come only hours after Trump himself took to Twitter, calling the sentencing recommendation “horrible and unfair,” and a “miscarriage of justice.”
In federal court on Thursday, Jackson said that Stone’s prosecution was based on his own actions, and was not — as Stone and Trump have repeatedly claimed — a political motivated act of persecution. Jackson also stated that, though Stone appeared to treat his actions during the 2016 campaign as mere pranks, they were in fact serious crimes.
“This is not campaign hijinks,” Judge Jackson said. “This is not Roger just being Roger.”
Other than any appeals which may by filed in the case, Stone’s sentencing concluded the prosecutions to arise out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. Trump’s 2016 campaign chief, Paul Manafort, was also prosecuted by Mueller and is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence on convictions for financial crimes.
According to Mueller’s report, which remains available online via The New York Times , Stone and Manafort worked together as Republican political consultants for more than a decade, beginning in 1980, and it was Stone who suggested that Trump hire his former business associate as campaign boss.
