President Donald Trump granted full and unconditional presidential pardons to Roger Stone and Paul Manafort on Wednesday night, quashing the criminal convictions of two former Trump campaign figures who were railroaded by Robert Mueller’s Russia conspiracy prosecution.
Paul Manafort briefly served as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. On account of his political work, he attracted attention from the Special Counsel’s investigation, and was ultimately convicted of several financial crimes and failing to register as a foreign lobbyist when consulting the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Stone’s prison sentence was already commuted in July, sparing the 68-year old man a prison sentence of years for process crimes.
Stone had been railroaded in a fashion even more severe than Manafort was, having been convicted of a single process crime of lying to the FBI during interrogations probing supposed Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election. Stone had been subject to an ethically questionable armed FBI raid that was coordinated with CNN, federal agents arresting the senior citizen at gunpoint in his pajamas before dawn at his home.
Trump also pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The elder Kushner was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering in 2005.
Pervasive FBI misconduct, political bias in the federal bureaucracy, and criminal convictions of government officials trying to railroad charges against Donald Trump associates has long since sullied the credibility of prosecutions levied by Mueller, and critics of federal corruption have long encouraged the President to pardon figures that were subjected to ‘deep state’ prosecutions.