Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is suggesting President Donald Trump may have been blackmailed into commuting Roger Stone’s prison sentence.
During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Clinton weighed in on the commutation, as she admitted that it looks “pretty clear” the president was “threatened” by Stone in private and in public.
“Well, I think it’s pretty clear that Stone threatened him,” Clinton said on Monday evening. “He probably threatened him privately, but he also threatened him publicly about what he would say if he had to go to prison.”
The former Democratic presidential nominee went on to note that the commutation appears to be a “continuation of the cover-up” stemming from the 2016 general election.
“This is a continuation of the cover-up,” she said.
See Clinton’s remarks below:
She later added, “So, what [the president] did was to use the awesome power of commutation, as part of the pardon power of the president, to basically shut up Roger Stone so that Roger Stone would not spill any more beans about what actually happened and how much Donald Trump actually knew.”
Clinton’s interview follows a string of reports surrounding the controversy that led up to the commutation of Stone’s sentence.
Stone — a long-time friend and advisor to Trump — was accused of colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 presidential election, an allegation he has repeatedly denied. He was convicted of seven crimes.
“While some may label me a dirty trickster, the members of this committee could not point to any tactic that is outside the accepted norms of what political strategists and consultants do today. I do not engage in any illegal activities on behalf of my clients or the causes in which I support,” Stone said in a prepared statement ahead of a previous House hearing. “There is one ‘trick’ that is not in my bag and that is treason.”
As a known friend of the president, Stone’s commutation was seen as a decision Trump made to protect his own personal interests, according to The Washington Post.
Despite the allegations against Stone, Trump made it clear that he did not view Stone as a criminal but, instead “a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” as the White House press secretary said.
