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Nancy Pelosi Looks to Limit Presidential Pardon Power After Trump Frees Stone

A conflict over clemency is forthcoming.

President Trump’s recent decision to commute the sentence of longtime acquaintance Roger Stone hasn’t gone over so well in Washington DC’s establishment circles, despite the fact that just about everyone on The Beltway saw it coming.

Petition’s calling for Stone’s pardon had been circulating for months, and the President himself seemed to hint that such a maneuver was coming all along.  Still, when it did, it send some of the President’s fiercest critics into a tizzy.

First there was Robert Mueller, who penned a fiery op-ed that blasted Stone as “still a convicted felon, and rightly so”.

Then came House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who announced that she would be looking at way to neuter the President’s ability to repeat the performance.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that in the wake of President Donald Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s criminal sentence, she plans to support a bill limiting the ability of presidents to take such actions.

“President Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of top campaign adviser Roger Stone, who could directly implicate him in criminal misconduct, is an act of staggering corruption,” Pelosi said in a statement on Saturday.

Stone had been sentenced to more than three years in prison for witness tampering and lying to Congress. He’d openly lobbied for a pardon or commutation from Trump by touting that he had refused to cooperate with investigators looking into possible wrongdoing by the president.

“Congress will take action to prevent this type of brazen wrongdoing. Legislation is needed to ensure that no president can pardon or commute the sentence of an individual who is engaged in a cover-up campaign to shield that President from criminal prosecution,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi and Trump have been feuding from the moment that the latter arrived in Washington DC, with the Roger Stone pardon representing just another brick in the “resistance” wall that Madam Speaker is constructing.

 

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