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“I know these prosecutors, I’ve been around them maybe 100 hours over the last year and they’re good guys. They’re decent guys, they’re hard working guys, they’re civil servants,” Randy Credico, who testified against Stone last year, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “At This Hour.”
Credico, a comedian and radio host who was a longtime Stone associate, had testified against Stone at trial and a jury convicted Stone for threatening Credico in an attempt to keep him from speaking to Congress. But since the trial, Credico has come out in support of Stone, writing a letter to the judge in the case that Stone doesn’t deserve prison time and that he didn’t feel threatened by Stone, even though the former Trump adviser used violent language with him.
Credico’s testimony and subsequent letter to the judge puts him in the middle of the two sentencing memos from the Justice Department.
The jury found Stone threatened Credico with obscenities, said he would steal Credico’s dog and made references to a scene from The Godfather where a mafia associate lies to Congress.
The prosecutors, in their original sentencing memo, even compared Stone’s witness tampering crime with convicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s, saying Stone’s was “substantially more serious.” Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is set to sentence Stone on Thursday, gave Manafort a three-and-a-half year prison sentence following his plea on two charges — with 13 months of the sentence stemming from Manafort’s contact with a potential witness before his scheduled trial on lobbying charges. Manafort ultimately pleaded guilty to the witness tampering charge.
In his letter to the judge after the trial, Credico asked Jackson to not send Stone to prison, arguing that “a prison sentence is beyond what is required in this case” and that it would amount to “cruelty.”
“Indeed, with all of his talent and knowledge, Mr. Stone would be an ideal candidate for participation in an alternative to incarceration program that would serve and benefit needy organizations or distressed communities,” the letter read.
But that reasoning wasn’t fair, Credico said on Monday.
“When they put this out and they used my name and my letter, they’re basically trying to rationalize the cleansing, the purging of the Justice Department and the judiciary. This is very dangerous. That’s a cynical move on their part,” he said.
“As the son of a man who spent 10 years in prison, I have (consistently) opposed incarceration,” he wrote. “That being said, Trump’s vile smear job on the 4 DC prosecutors were appalling and ominous.”
Of the prosecutors in the case, Credico said in his tweet that “in my experience, I found them to be professional, moral, ethical and non-partisan.”
CNN’s David Shortell, Evan Perez, Kaitlan Collins and Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.
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