Romney condemns Trump move on Stone

Bloomberg

Senators Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey became the first major Republican elected officials to criticise President Donald Trump‘s decision to commute the prison sentence of Roger Stone.
“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” Utah senator Romney said.
The tweet trended on the social media site, and shortly by Sunday had been “liked” over 580,000 times and retweeted over 166,000 times. Toomey’s criticism was mild, calling it the commutation a “mistake” in a statement, and arguing that the decision should have been left to the court system.
“He was duly convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstructing a
congressional investigation conducted by a Republican-led committee,” wrote the senator from Pennsylvania.
“The president clearly has the legal and constitutional authority to grant clemency for federal crimes. However, this authority should be used judiciously and very rarely by any president. While I understand the frustration with the badly flawed Russia-collusion investigation, in my view, commuting Roger Stone’s sentence is a mistake.”
Trump issued a commutation for Stone, who’d been sentenced to three years in prison for witness tampering and lying to Congress. Stone had 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. Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, was the lone Senate Republican to vote in favour of removing Trump from office at the conclusion
of Trump’s impeachment trial
in February.