Hi, this is Heather in Albany, New York, and I'm doing my favorite social distancing

activity, taking a nice ride in the woods with my horse Fiona. So far we've seen two

turkeys for deer and absolutely no other people. This podcast was recorded at

209 PM on Monday, July 13th. So things may have changed by the time you hear it.

All right, here's the show.

I'd love to go for a horseback ride. I know. That sounds nice right about now.

No kidding. It's telling me. But in this heat, I mean, whoa. Hey there, it's the

NPR Politics Podcast. I must my call it. I'm covering the presidential

campaign. I'm Franco Ordonia as I cover the White House. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I

cover the Justice Department. On Friday night, President Trump commuted the

prison sentence for his longtime friend Roger Stone. Stone, as you all probably

remember, is a veteran GOP operative who was convicted of lying to Congress.

And Ryan, if I'm recalling this correctly, his conviction had to do with lying

about conversations that he had around WikiLeaks. Is that right? Yes. The case

against Stone was brought by special counsel Robert Mueller's team was actually

the last case brought by Mueller's team as part of the Russian investigation.

And Stone was charged with and convicted of lying to Congress, witness

tampering and obstruction. And yes, all of those charges relate to efforts that

Stone made during the 2016 presidential campaign to get in touch with WikiLeaks

to find out what the group intended to do with all those hacked democratic

emails that we subsequently learned were hacked by by the Russian intelligence

services. Yeah. The charges also relate to Stone's efforts, essentially, to hide

...