Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke a nearly year-long silence on Saturday to defend his office's investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia and its indictment of Roger Stone, a confidant of President Donald Trump whose prison sentence in connection to the probe was commuted by the president Friday night.

"Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes," Mueller said in a Washington Post op-ed published online Saturday afternoon. "He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so."

Mueller mounted a rare rebuttal against claims from Trump and others that Stone was a "victim" of the special counsel investigation, which found that Stone had communicated with Russian intelligence officials and that Stone claimed advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks dump of damaging Hillary Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian intelligence.

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