By: Daniel John Sobieski
The best thing that can be said about Willard Mitt Romney, the future one-term RINO Senator from Utah, is that he looks good in an empty suit. The wooden Romney, who holds the distinction of being the only candidate to lose a presidential debate to both Barack Hussein Obama and CNN’s Candy Crowley, has climbed down from the top of the wedding cake to opine that Trump has now become the poster child for ultimate corruption with his commutation of the outrageous sentence given to former associate Roger Stone for made-up process crimes.
Romney’s saying Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence is the epitome of insider corruption:
GOP Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) on Saturday sharply condemned President Trump’s commutation for longtime ally and political confidant Roger Stone, labeling it “historic corruption.”
“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” Romney tweeted Saturday morning.
Romney does not note that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose confused testimony on his report before Congress made Joe Biden seem competent by comparison, found no evidence of Russian collusion and admits he didn’t find any again in a Washington Post op-ed damning the commutation. So how can Roger Stone have been involved in assisting and covering up a crime that never happened?
The persecution and prosecution of Roger Stone was a classic attempt to scare and squeeze the bit players to “sing,” or as Professor Alan Dershowitz puts it, to “compose” a story pleasing to the prosecution. Except that Stone did nothing and knew nothing. There was nothing to confess. Nor would he have turned on President Trump to save his own skin, even if he did. So Mueller’s stormtrooper raid on Stone’s house and resultant prosecution and trial was a vendetta against someone who could not, would not, and did not assist Mueller in his politically motivated witch hunt. That is what real corruption looks like, Willard.
The raid on Stone’s house, an event choreographed for the liberal media, showed the personal animus and hatred of Trump and Stone motivating Mueller. More force was used to arrest Roger Stone than was used to rescue our heroes that were abandoned by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama as four Americans were left to die. As Attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon notes at Focnews.com:
President Trump’s Friday night commutation of the unjust 40-month prison sentence given to Roger Stone for convictions of lying to Congress and witness tampering was necessary to correct a grave injustice and abuse of power.
Now — at long last — the tragedy of Stone’s wrongful and politically motivated indictment, trial, conviction, sentencing, and the rejection of his appeal is nearly over. This is a prosecution that should have never happened, and one that was motivated entirely by ego, politics, and hatred of President Trump….
The saga began with a predawn SWAT team raid on Stone’s Florida home, televised by a gleeful CNN crew that — by an amazing “coincidence” – happened to be on the scene. It looked like a bad made-for-TV movie about the takedown of an armed and dangerous terrorist leader of the caliber of Usama bin Laden — when, in fact, Stone was unarmed and posed no danger to anyone….
What exactly did Roger Stone do to merit 40 months in prison — a sentence longer than some drug dealers, killers, human traffickers, rapists, and robbers receive?…
The judge abandoned all pretense of impartiality when she complained about alleged threats Stone had made against her on social media in his typical flamboyant, exaggerated fashion (before she muzzled him with a gag order). Since when have we allowed the alleged victim of wrongdoing to judge the allegation and hand out a prison sentence to the alleged perpetrator?
Most laughable was the stentorious pronouncement that Stone should have received more punishment for “witness tampering” — angry texts by Stone to a longtime friend, Randy Credico about Credico being a “rat” for talking to prosecutors and about the disputed substance of his testimony.
That’s it – this is the list of his crimes along with a 60-something’s foggy and inconsistent memory about things that weren’t crimes and things that were true such as Stone’s alleged collusion with leaker Julian Assange of Wikileaks. So why aren’t those who lied about serious things in and outside of Congress in the attempt to overthrow a sitting President with falsified documents like the Steele dossier and committing fraud against the FISA Court among other real crimes prosecuted? Why aren’t James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and others on trial or in jail? If nasty text messages are a crime why are Peter Strzok and Lisa Page roaming free?
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett heartily concurs and notes the framing and entrapment of Roger Stone were eerily similar to the persecution and prosecution of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn:
Illegitimately appointed under federal regulations, Mueller employed a scorched-earth strategy to bully, intimidate, and threaten people like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos into coerced guilty pleas.
Mueller’s ultimate goal was to get these people to incriminate President Trump for imaginary crimes based on invented evidence of Russian “collusion” to steal the 2016 presidential election. But they didn’t. There was nothing incriminating. But the truth was irrelevant to the special counsel….
People associated with the president — like conservative radio host Jerome Corsi and former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland — were put in a room and threatened with years behind bars if they declined to capitulate. But they refused to lie and no charges were brought against them because there was no evidence they had done anything wrong….
Twenty-nine FBI agents wearing tactical gear and wielding M4 rifles swept across Stone’s lawn. Four agents used a battering ram to break down his front door and then pointed rifle barrels at Stone’s head.
A helicopter hovered above, and two police boats roared up to the back yard of Stone’s home. The bust was shown live on CNN, which just happened to be there at 6 a.m….
The indictment of Stone was a gaseous windbag of a document. It told of a tantalizing story about Trump, WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange. The indictment suggested that Stone might have had some advance knowledge or inside information about the contents of hacked Hillary Clinton campaign emails that were released by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016.
“Advance knowledge” is not a crime, by the way….
Instead, Stone stood accused of reaching out to WikiLeaks and asking others to do so — as did hundreds of journalists in the summer of 2016, myself included. That is not a crime. If it was, I’d be composing this column behind bars.
An examination of Stone’s emails showed that he provided little more than the same information that WikiLeaks had already stated publicly. Stone speculated that the Clinton emails would be damaging. But that was stating the obvious.
Willard has done this before. Before he butt-kissed President-elect Trump at a private dinner while lobbying for a secretary of state job that would have returned the 2012 presidential loser to political relevance, Romney during the 2016 campaign trashed Trump as the coming of America’s political apocalypse: On March 3, 2016, Romney before the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the Libby Gardner Hall in the University of Utah went after Trump. In that speech, he thoroughly trashed Donald Trump, who was then the front-runner in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries:
Romney said Trump’s domestic policies “would lead to recession.” He said his foreign policies “would make America and the world less safe.” And he said Trump’s temperament was unsuited to the White House: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”
The shameless name-calling didn’t stop here. Romney quickly proclaimed that Trump was a “phony” and a “fraud,” tweeting, “Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.”
Of course, none of this was true. Instead, we saw things like the remaking of the federal judiciary, returning it to its originalist roots, and SCOTUS appointments like Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, appointments to the Supreme Court that will affect the course of this nation and our democracy for generations, not just until the next election.
In the end, Trump first won the nomination and then the election because he pursued and enacted policies as conservative as Reagan’s if not more so. He cut taxes, regulations, environmental restrictions, prohibitions against energy exploration and development, all to free the American entrepreneur and worker from the chains of creeping socialism. Before the China Wuhan virus and Democratic-sponsored riots, minority unemployment was at historic lows, wages were rising, manufacturing jobs were returning, opportunity zones were reshaping our inner cities and prison reform had brought true social justice to black America, He’s rebuilding the military, but in a sensible way. Yes, we need to fight terrorism but we can beat ISIS, and have, but we don’t need to spend our resources and manpower chasing random jihadists through Middle Eastern deserts while China and Russia test hypersonic missiles.
Again, Trump is transforming the courts at all levels, restoring them as bastions protecting the originalist interpretation of the Constitution the Founders. The words of the Constitution will be interpreted as they were written in the context of the times they were written, not interpreted in the heat of contemporary passions or the finite wisdom of the Washington Post editorial board.
So what is Romney’s problem now other than his cummerbund is on too tight? The basic problem is that Trump became President and Romney never did or could. Trump brought jobs, prosperity, growth, and opportunity. Romney is clearly polishing his street creds for a 2024 presidential run. Jealousy in a rich and entitled stuffed shirt is an ugly thing. A forgiving Trump endorsed Romney’s Senate bid in 2018 only to be repaid by being the only sitting Republican Senator to vote to impeach a President of his own party ever. Historic corruption, Mitt? Try Robert Mueller and Obama’s deep state den of traitors. You are the poster child for historic spinelessness and shameless opportunism
None of the charges against Trump, Flynn, or Stone are true. But they were true about the terrorists and traitors Obama set free with full pardons. As PJMedia reports:
Obama also commuted the sentence of convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Puerto Rican terrorist group. FALN was responsible for 130 attacks in the United States, and at least six deaths. An unrepentant Lopez-Rivera was serving a 70-year sentence when Obama set him free. The Congressional Black Caucus had repeatedly lobbied for Lopez’s release during the Obama years, and the commutation was met with praise from Democrats like Bill de Blasio, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, Bernie Sanders, and others.
Obama also granted clemency to hundreds of drug offenders he claimed were non-violent offenders who deserved a second chance, because of racism or something. It later came out that many of the people he released were actually violent offenders guilty of gun crimes. Obama granted more acts of clemency than any president since Truman.
On these things Willard is silent. Maybe if Romney has gone after Obama’s and Hillary’s very real record of failure and corruption in 2012 he would have won. Trump did and Romney is not likely to get tickets to Trump’s second inaugural.
* Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.