In his first television interview since he was pardoned by President Trump, longtime Republican consultant Roger Stone said he was acquitted and praised the president as the greatest since Abraham Lincoln.
“I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Almighty God for giving the president the strength and courage to acknowledge that my charge was a witch hunt with full political motivation,” Stone told Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Stone, 68, was sentenced to 40 months in prison in November 2019 after being convicted on seven criminal charges in connection with special attorney Robert Mueller’s investigation into the alleged collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence on July 10, days before his appearance in federal prison.
“My trial was a Soviet-style show trial, in which the judge denied us any powerful line of defense, in which the judge, we now know, hid apologetic evidence from us,” Stone told presenter Tucker Carlson. “Because I heard on election day, when no one was watching, the Justice Department released the last remaining edited sections of the Mueller report, in which they admitted having no evidence of my collusion with Russia, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, drug trafficking. emails …
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“They had no factual evidence that I had prior knowledge of the source or content of WikiLeaks disclosures, those things that I was accused of lying to Congress [about] … The whole thing was an outrage, and I take my hat off to the president, the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, who had the courage to correct this injustice. “
The Connecticut native went on to accuse federal prosecutors of wanting him to “bear false testimony against the president, and I refused to do so.”
“They must have mistaken me for [former Trump attorney] Michael Cohen, “noted Stone.” But they got the wrong guy and I refused to do that. Now the left invents a whole new rumor, which is Stone exchanged his silence about the president’s misconduct in exchange for commuting his sentence and now a pardon. This is a lie. There is no corroboration or evidence to prove this. It is the typical rewriting of history on the left. “
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Stone served as an informal consultant for Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016 and was the director of the then incorporator’s 2000 exploratory committee.
Stone also worked for decades in Washington, at one time co-leading the powerful consulting firm Black, Manafort & Stone, alongside Charlie Black and fellow recipient of forgiveness, Paul Manafort.