John,

In addition to our letter to the House Judiciary Committee last Friday, Free Speech For People has just filed an urgent motion before the federal district court in U.S. v. Stone on behalf of constitutional law Professors Jed Shugerman and Ethan Leib of Fordham Law School. The motion seeks permission to submit an amicus brief arguing that the court should not automatically accept the executive grant of clemency, but rather should consider whether it may be unconstitutional.

President Trump commuted Mr. Stone’s forty-month prison sentence last Friday. Stone’s convictions stemmed from his efforts to impede Congress’s investigation into Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential elections, crimes that Stone carried out in order to protect President Trump. As the sentencing judge, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, explained in her closing remarks, Mr. Stone “was prosecuted for covering up for the president.” 

“When the Framers added the phrase “faithful execution” to the Constitution, for the president to ‘take Care that the laws be faithfully executed’ and for the presidential oath, they were drawing on a long English tradition of this phrase signifying limited powers on behalf of the public interest, and rejecting the unlimited prerogatives of kings,” says Shugerman. “These republican limits are similar to fiduciary duties against self-dealing. Thus, pardons and commutations that are in self-interest and against the public interest are unfaithful execution of the office and are constitutionally invalid.”

“The pardon power is not above constitutional scrutiny and is not some absolute royal prerogative,” says Leib. “The President took an oath to “faithfully execute” his office and that can limit his ability to pardon himself, his co-conspirators, or his friends and family–when that power is not exercised in the public interest.”

This case isn’t over. The Supreme Court has acknowledged that the pardon power is not unlimited, and the Constitution requires the President to exercise that power loyally and carefully in the public interest rather than in his own self-interest. The judge should hear what Professors Leib and Shugerman have to say before taking any further action with respect to Roger Stone.

Read the motion here.

In solidarity,

Ron Fein

Legal Director, Free Speech For People