Roger Stone and Donald Trump
President Donald Trump was up at nearly 2 a.m. Tuesday worrying about his longtime associate Roger Stone, who's facing seven to nine years in prison.
Federal prosecutors called for a higher-end sentence for Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness related to his efforts to learn about hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 election.
"This is a horrible and very unfair situation," Trump tweeted at 1:48 a.m. "The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!"
The tweet was in response to a tweet from a right-wing Daily Caller correspondent, who insisted that Stone had never been accused of working with the Russians or WikiLeaks.
But Trump's former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, who struck a cooperation agreement as part of his own guilty plea to conspiracy and other charges, testified that he overheard a July 2016 call in which Trump himself seemed to be discussing WikiLeaks with Stone.
Gates and former 2016 campaign manager Steve Bannon said the campaign saw Stone -- a longtime Republican operative -- as a liaison to WikiLeaks and who seemed to know about the group's plans for releasing hacked data.
Stone's case is now being overseen by interim U.S. attorney Timothy Shea, a former close adviser to Attorney General William Barr.
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