“You learned the two greatest things in life … never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.” That was the advice Jimmy Conway gives Henry Hill after his first arrest in Goodfellas. It turns out that when it comes to the Trump crime family, you only have to heed the first half of that feedback. Roger Stone didn’t rat. But he’s never really kept his mouth shut. The former was enough for President Trump to commute Stone’s sentence (and you thought your commute was bad) in a heartbreaking work of staggering corruption. Right now, the two luckiest people in America are Roger Stone and whoever was gonna be his cellmate. Howard Fineman in WaPo: “Trump’s decision to free Stone from having to serve a prison term — never really in doubt — was a foghorn blast of everything you need to know about the president and his administration. Whatever Stone had or hadn’t done or said, however controversial the trial, what mattered most was that he kept his mouth shut.” Roger Stone is saved. ” (Now the question is whether the republic can be.)

+ “He clowned, he cavorted, he demanded limelight—which made it in some ways impossible to imagine that he could have done anything seriously amiss … Yet Stone is the central figure in the greatest scandals in U.S. history. Ames, Hanssen, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss—none of them worked with a foreign intelligence service to help a candidate for president of the United States. Stone did. And now he will receive a commutation of his sentence from the president he served. The amazing thing about the Trump-Stone story is how much of it happened in the full light of day.” (That’s the most amazing thing about the whole era.) David Frum: Stone Walks Free in One of the Greatest Scandals in American History.

+ Amazingly, letting Stone free might not be this particular Friday Night Blight historians focus on the most. Remember how William Barr tried to force the top prosecutor out at the SDNY and replace him with a more Trump-friendly face? He just used the same technique in the Eastern District of New York. Judge swears in new top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn (the hub for DOJ’s Ukraine work). This is a angle not even Goodfella Jimmy Conway thought of. If you really want to get away with a crime, just become the President of the United States.