Chris Christie: I wouldn’t have commuted Roger Stone sentence

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Sunday that he wouldn’t have commuted President Trump associate Roger Stone.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Christie, who sat on the roundtable panel for “This Week,” whether commuting Stone’s sentence was “the right thing to do.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have done it, George, because I don’t think that the facts that surround the Stone prosecution support the idea of any type of clemency,” the former governor said.

Christie acknowledged that the president “has the right to do it” but maintained that “I wouldn’t have done it.”

“I wouldn’t have done it,” Chris Christie says when asked about President Trump commuting the sentence of Roger Stone, “because I don’t think that the facts that surround the Stone prosecution support the idea of any type of clemency.” https://t.co/NJ1yDcze81 pic.twitter.com/eAyqRK41l2

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) July 12, 2020

Trump commuted Stone’s sentence of three years and four months on Friday after Stone, his former campaign adviser in the 2016 election, was convicted of several crimes, including witness tampering and lying to Congress. Stone’s sentence was supposed to start on Tuesday.

Trump has held that Stone’s conviction was a political witch hunt, and Stone has openly asked for clemency from the president.

Stone is one of six of the president’s associates who were charged during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The probe concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign was open to Russia’s election interference, but there was not enough evidence to charge the campaign with conspiring with Russia.

Mueller reacted to the commutation by defending the charging of Stone saying he “remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”

Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) are the only Republican senators to criticize the president for the commutation, prompting backlash from Trump over Twitter.