Roger Stone drops appeal of felony convictions

Roger Stone, whose three-year, four-month sentence President Trump commuted last month, said Monday that he will drop his challenge to his criminal conviction.

Stone’s attorneys submitted a notice to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit withdrawing the appeal Monday, according to reports.

“I have been fully informed of the circumstances of my case and the consequences of a dismissal, and I wish to dismiss the appeal,” Stone wrote Monday under penalty of perjury, CNN reported.

The move came an hour before a midnight deadline for Stone’s attorneys to file a brief explaining a challenge to Stone’s conviction.

Stone was sentenced to three years and four months in prison in connection with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. He was convicted by a jury in Washington, D.C., of seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction of congress and witness tampering.

Trump commuted Stone’s sentence last month, just days before the former adviser was set to report to prison.  

The longtime Trump confidant said on his website Tuesday that he has “reluctantly decided to dismiss the appeal of what I believe to be a wrongful conviction in a trial tainted by judicial bias, egregious and blatant juror bias and misconduct and prosecutorial misconduct.”

“It is time for me to move on with my life with my family, friends, and supporters. I regret not going forward with the appeal to fully expose all that happened, with the hope that by doing so, I could help prevent it from happening to anyone else ever again; but I had to decide based on what is best for me and my family,” Stone wrote.

“My attorneys have convinced me that the odds of victory were slim and the risk of being subjected to both an unfair appeal and perhaps an unfair second trial before the same Judge was just too great a risk,” he continued. 

Trump and supporters of Stone have regularly railed against prosecutors in the case, in addition Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, who oversaw the trial. 

Stone also referenced the cost of the potential appeal, saying he cannot “justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing a futile appeal.”