Roger Stone, who won a reprieve from prison time after the White House announced late Friday that President Trump was commuting his 40-month prison sentence, now says he plans to campaign for Mr. Trump if it will help the president’s reelection chances.
“I will do anything necessary to elect my candidate, short of breaking the law,” Stone told Axios in an interview published Monday.
Stone reiterated that sending him, a 67-year-old asthmatic, to prison during the coronavirus pandemic would be a “death sentence.”
He also said he plans to write a book “to put to bed the myth of Russian collusion.”
Stone said he had no assurances that his sentence would be commuted before Mr. Trump called him on Friday evening.
“But I had prayed fervently … and I believe the whole matter was in God’s hands and that God would provide. And He did,” he said.
The White House late Friday announced that Mr. Trump was commuting the sentence of Stone, who was convicted on seven criminal counts last year.
Those charges included lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstructing a congressional investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia ahead of the 2016 election.
Democrats slammed the move, saying it fit into a pattern of Mr. Trump’s rewarding his cronies at the expense of the U.S. doctrine of equal justice under the law.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said Stone’s prosecution by “overzealous Special Counsel prosecutors” was “an outgrowth of the Obama-Biden misconduct.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said he plans to call Special Counsel Robert Mueller to testify after Mr. Mueller defended his office’s handling of the case in a Washington Post opinion piece over the weekend.
