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(CNN)President Donald Trump is publicly teasing clemency for his friend and former political adviser, Roger Stone, days before Stone is set to report to a federal prison in Georgia. At least half a dozen people close to the President told CNN it's widely believed he'll pardon or commute Stone's sentence, though the timing is still unclear.
The clock for Stone is ticking. The Justice Department said this week it supports Stone going to prison Tuesday, and he's all but conceded the courts won't grant him a reprieve. The DOJ, which has been criticized for going easy on Stone, said the report date of July 14 that was set by his trial judge is "a reasonable exercise of that court's discretion based on the totality of the factual and legal circumstances."
Stone's criminal case has drawn intense political reactions since the beginning and a pardon could set off another round of Trump's attacks on the Russia investigation, as well as criticism that Stone benefited after he was found guilty because he's a friend of the President.
On Friday morning in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a Stone associate visiting him confirmed Stone was at home, saying, "He has to be."
"We have not received any confirmation," if Stone will be pardoned, the man, who identified himself as Enrique Alejandro and said he works with Stone, said. "He is praying."
Trump has faced immense pressure from some of his political allies to pardon Stone after he was sentenced to more than three years in prison, in part for lying to Congress about his effort to set up a backchannel between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. Stone was also convicted of witness tampering and obstruction related to Congress' inquiry into Russian meddling.
After requesting a 60-day delay in his reporting date citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a federal judge delayed Stone's sentence by two weeks last month, according to court filings, ordering him to spend that time at home essentially in quarantine. He's slated to report to prison Tuesday, unless an emergency request he made this week to an appeals court asking for another delay is granted.
Several of Trump's advisers have voiced concern in recent months about the possible political repercussions of him clearing his former adviser. But Stone's allies have lobbied Trump for months to clear him, telling him Stone was facing devastating legal fees.
Not all the lobbying has been done behind closed doors. Some of Stone's closest confidantes, including his daughter and friend Michael Caputo, who now works in the administration, have advocated for a pardon on Fox News on Tucker Carlson's program, which Trump watches religiously.
Stone himself has circulated a petition on his website asking for Trump to grant him a full pardon. "It's time to stop the Deep State from working against our President," it says. "He stood with you against the hate directed at your campaign, and now he needs your help."
At times Trump has seemed reluctant to pardon Stone, fuming and bad-mouthing him to others. But the President sees his former confidant through the lens of himself, several people close to him say, viewing an attack on Stone as an attack on him.
Stone's conviction also came as part of the Mueller investigation, which Trump loathes, and Justice Department prosecutors explained in court Stone had lied to protect Trump. Trump's knowledge of Stone's efforts to get leaked Democratic documents in 2016 was a major question in the Mueller investigation, that Democrats on Capitol Hill still want to investigate.
Trump and Stone have been friends -- and sometimes frenemies -- for four decades. And while sources close to Stone are hopeful the President will intervene, they haven't received word that a pardon is imminent.
Stone, 67, was indicted in January 2019 when armed FBI agents arrested him at his Florida home. He had covered up records that would have revealed he sought to reach WikiLeaks in 2016 to help Trump, lied about the effort when he testified to a Republican-led congressional committee, then threatened another congressional witness, according to the charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller and the DC US Attorney's Office.
Trump and Stone have tried to cast his prosecution and conviction as a politically motivated witch hunt. But prosecutors argued to a jury that Stone threatened a witness and lied in part to protect the President. The jury agreed, finding Stone guilty of all seven counts he faced.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the DC District Court sentenced him to 40 months in prison in February.
A gag order that was on his case and kept him essentially silent lifted soon after, and in recent weeks, Stone has railed against prosecutors, the judge and the media in persistent attempts to appeal to Trump. He's publicly appealed for a pardon, claiming he was treated unfairly by the justice system and that coronavirus is a death sentence if he is to surrender to prison.
In late June, when he was set to report to prison, Jackson ordered Stone to home confinement for two weeks before July 14, effectively placing him in quarantine. The prison he's set to enter in Georgia has had 20 inmates test positive for the virus, according to Bureau of Prisons data Friday morning.
Stone's latest request in court this week went to the DC Circuit. Stone asked the appeals court to delay his prison date from July 14 to early September. The court could rule as early as Friday afternoon.
But even Stone has been bearish that the appeals court would allow for another delay. On Instagram, he's written that his latest request for a delay is a "Hail Mary appeal" that the appeals court "may or may not grant."
"I want the President to know that I have exhausted all my legal remedies and that only an act of clemency will provide justice in my case and save my life!" Stone wrote late Monday.
40 years of friendship
The friendship between Trump and Stone stretches back roughly 40 years, albeit with some rocky periods along the way. They were first introduced in the 1970s through a man they both admired: Roy Cohn, the lawyer who served as Sen. Joseph McCarthy's counsel during his communism investigation and who was later in life disbarred for unethical conduct.
"Roy thought Roger was a very tough guy. Roy knew some very tough guys, I will tell you that. But Roy always felt that Roger was not only tough, but a smart guy and very political," Trump said in the 2017 Netflix documentary "Get Me Roger Stone."
In the years that followed, Stone befriended the Trump family, attended two of Trump's three weddings, went to the funerals for both of Trump's parents and spent years agitating for his friend to run for president, Stone said in interviews.
"I was like a jockey looking for a horse. You can't win the race if you don't have a horse. And he is a prime piece of political horse flesh, in my view," Stone said in the Netflix documentary about one of his efforts in the late 1980s to convince Trump to run for president.
In the same documentary, Trump confirmed that Stone had pressed him over and over again to make a bid for the Oval Office.
"Roger always wanted me to run for president. And over the years, every time a presidential race came up, he always wanted me to run," Trump said. "And I just didn't have interest at that time. And nor was the country in trouble like it is today."
There were periods where the two men barely spoke. In a 2008 interview in The New Yorker, Trump said, "Roger is a stone-cold loser. ... He always tries taking credit for things he never did."
But they always reconciled.
The 2016 campaign proved to be Trump's big moment. And Stone was at his side, at least at the beginning.
Trump announced his presidential bid in June 2015, with Stone serving as a senior adviser. Just two months later, Stone was out. Trump said he fired Stone. Stone said he quit.
Stone remained a staunch supporter of Trump's campaign anyway. He did television appearances cheerleading Trump, called then-candidate Trump to give him advice and made recommendations when he believed the campaign was in crisis.
Ahead of the Republican convention, some of Trump's allies worried he could lose the GOP nomination in a delegate fight. Stone and other Trump allies convinced Trump to bring Paul Manafort into the campaign to manage the convention.
While Trump won the nomination, Manafort ended up being convicted of financial and foreign lobbying crimes as a result of Mueller's investigation and is currently serving out his prison sentence.
Around the same time, the Trump campaign was eager to know what WikiLeaks had coming. At Stone's trial, former Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates testified that he was with Trump when Trump received a call from Stone about the planned release of hacked Democratic emails.
"After Mr. Trump got off the phone with Mr. Stone, what did Mr. Trump say?" the prosecutor asked Gates.
"He indicated more information would be coming," Gates responded.
In the following months, Stone bragged publicly about being in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and appeared to predict that new document dumps would be coming.
The Mueller report also raised the possibility that Trump had lied to investigators in sworn answers about his communications with Stone regarding WikiLeaks.
Stone has long embraced no-holds-barred politicking and sports a tattoo of former President Richard Nixon on his back, as a tribute to his idol. Over his career, Stone earned a reputation as a dirty trickster and did little to try to water down the image.
"Roger has a really rough reputation. They talk about dirty trickster and lots of other things," Trump said in the documentary about Stone. "But I've known him for a long time and he's actually a quality guy."
CNN's John Couwels and Marshall Cohen contributed to this story.
