Trump pardons former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Roger Stone

Washington: US President Donald Trump issued pardons and sentence commutations for 29 people, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, campaign aide Roger Stone, and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law.

The actions on Wednesday, local time, bring to 49 the number of people who Trump in the last two days has granted clemency either through pardons or sentence commutations.

Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman.Credit: AP

The pardons of Manafort and Roger Stone, who months earlier had his sentence commuted by Trump, underscore the president's determination to use the power of his office he final weeks to unravel the results of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation and to come to the aid of associates he feels were wrongly pursued.

Stone, whose 40-month prison sentence had previously been commuted by Trump, has maintained his innocence and insisted there was prosecutorial malfeasance. He was convicted on seven counts of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House inquiry into possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia.

Konstantin Kilimnik, assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence.

On Tuesday, Trump pardoned two other people convicted in Mueller's investigation, including former campaign associate George Papadopoulos, former members of Congress who were early supporters and former government contractors convicted in the killings of Iraqi civilians.

With Wednesday's pardon of Manafort, Trump has now intervened to aid five people charged in the Russia probe, which was eventually taken over by special counsel Mueller.

The White House announcement of the pardons made no secret that Trump was taking aim at that investigation.

A White House announcement of the pardons called said Manfort's convictions were "premised on the Russian collusion hoax," and that the pardon for Stone would "help to right the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation".

In November, Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his dealings with a Russian diplomat, though he later sought to take it back. In July, he commuted the sentence for Stone, who was convicted of seeking to impede a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and sentenced to 40 months in prison.

And on Tuesday, he pardoned Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to his 2016 campaign who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its Russia investigation, and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Mueller's team.

Trump has drawn significant criticism for how he has used his pardon power, though one adviser said the president is unconcerned about the blowback.

Roger Stone.Credit: AP

"He's just burning it all down," this person said. The adviser said the president has also discussed pardoning former Stephen Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, and will issue dozens more before he leaves office.

Trump flew to his resort at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday, where he was greeted by hundreds of supporters along his motorcade route. The mostly unmasked supporters waved Trump flags and signs and chanted "Four more years!"One small boy had a sign that said, "We're going to miss you."

The practical effect of Trump's latest move particularly significant for Manafort, who had been facing a half-year federal prison sentence, though he was released to home confinement in May, about two years in, over fears of coronavirus.

Manafort was found guilty in Virginia federal court in 2018 of stashing the money he made as a lobbyist from Ukrainian oligarchs overseas to avoid taxes and then committing bank fraud to keep up a lavish lifestyle when his patrons lost power.

He then pleaded guilty to related charges in DC federal court and pledged to cooperate with the special counsel, but a judge concluded that he lied to investigators, notably about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime aide assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence.

During the 2016 campaign, Manafort gave Kilimnik internal Trump campaign polling data; Mueller's investigators said they were never able to determine how Kilimnik used the information.

Charles Kushner, who was sentenced to two years in prison, already had served his time. Among the allegations brought by prosecutors were that he paid for an unnamed individual's private school tuition out of company accounts and declared the payments as charitable contributions on his tax returns, according to court documents.

Charles B. Kushner in 2005.Credit: AP

Upon his release Charles Kushner resumed practicing real estate development and his New Jersey-based firm manages more than 20,000 apartments in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee.

Jared Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump, has long held that the prosecution against his father, led by then US attorney Chris Christie, was unjust, despite his father's guilty pleas.

According to court documents, while Charles Kushner was under investigation for campaign contributions, he grew angry when he learned that other family members were cooperating with the probe. He paid a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law in a New Jersey motel room, where hidden cameras had been set, and later had the tape mailed to his sister as a warning, according to the documents.

The conviction changed Jared Kushner's trajectory, he later said, from his goal of becoming a prosecutor. "Seeing my father's situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him," he told a real estate magazine, The Real Deal, in 2014. "I just never wanted to be on the other side of that and cause pain to the families I was doing that to, whether right or wrong."

Jared Kushner's continued ownership stake in his family's business while working in the White House repeatedly raised concerns among ethics officials and experts, particularly when the Kushner Companies was seeking buyers and lenders for its money-losing project at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York. Brookfield Properties took over the property from the Kushners in 2018 and renamed it 660 Fifth.

In an unusual twist, the man who prosecuted Charles Kushner was Chris Christie, now the former governor of New Jersey, who also has served as an adviser to Trump.

Christie was quoted by CNN as saying Charles Kushner's case was "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he prosecuted.

Charles Kushner told the New York Times in 2018 that he would "prefer not to have a pardon" because of the publicity it would generate.

AP, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Times