President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he’s granted yet another spate of pardons to 26 people, including his friend and confidant Roger Stone, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared. Trump also gave sentence commutations to three people.
The move comes just a day after the president announced his decision to pardon or commute the sentences of 20 people, including three corrupt former Republican congressmen, two subjects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and four Blackwater security guards who were involved in the 2007 killings of Iraqi civilians.
In a Wednesday statement, the White House said Stone and Manafort ― both of whom were indicted in the Mueller probe as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election ― had been victims of “perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history.”
Stone was sentenced in February to 40 months in prison for multiple felonies, including witness tampering, lying to Congress and obstructing the House investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.
Trump commuted Stone’s sentence in July ― prompting a harsh rebuke from Mueller.
“Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so,” the special counsel wrote in an op-ed at the time.