Roger Stone has been sentenced to prison, Bill Barr’s stunt failed, and now Donald Trump has a no-win decision to make

| 12:55 pm EST February 20, 2020
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Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Roger Stone to forty months in prison today, which is right around the three-to-four year range that Palmer Report and other observers were expecting, based on Jackson’s track record of middle of the road sentences. She was never going to give him the seven-to-nine years that prosecutors originally recommended. Nor was she going to pay any heed to Bill Barr’s changes to the recommendations. But now what?

For starters, Bill Barr has failed Donald Trump yet again. The question is whether Trump will be able to see it. Is Trump naive enough to believe that the judge only gave Stone forty months because Barr recurved the recommendation? We’ll see how that plays out. In the meantime, Trump has a no-win decision to make.

Would Donald Trump rather live with the major political and legal fallout from pardoning Roger Stone, or would he rather do nothing and run the risk that Stone starts retaliating by blabbing about the dirt from their forty years of shared personal history? Trump has been behaving so incoherently lately, it’s tough to predict what he’ll do. It’s worth stressing that while Trump has spent the past three years pardoning a slew of rich and powerful criminals he owed favors to, he’s never pardoned any of his own co-conspirators.

If Donald Trump pardons Roger Stone, he risks triggering a legal battle over the scope of pardon power, which would result in Trump getting blocked from being able to try to pardon himself and his kids on his way out the door. Stone could also get hit with state charges in New York and end up in prison anyway, due to his status as a part time resident in the state. And if Stone does end up fully in the clear, he’ll have no Fifth Amendment protections to hide behind. So if Trump loses the election and ends up on criminal trial, Stone would be required to testify against Trump, as a direct result of Trump having pardoned him.