"I take my hat off to Donald Trump for what he did," said former NFL player Jerry Rice.

The pardon comes days ahead of Roger Stone's sentencing, amid speculation about whether the president will pardon him. The longtime Trump aide was at the center of last week's drama inside the Justice Deparment, with four career prosecutors quitting the case after Attorney General William Barr overruled their sentencing recommendation.

Stone's looming fate has drawn Trump's condemnation in recent weeks, with the president calling it a "miscarriage of justice!" on Twitter and excoriating the prosecutors and judge for their handling the case.

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Trump, though denying ordering Barr to downgrade the recommended sentence for Stone, claimed last week that he had an "absolute right" to intervene in his former aide's case. Asked last week if he was considering a pardon for Stone, Trump declined to rule it out, saying he "didn't want to say that yet."

Tuesday's pardon of DeBartolo, Jr. marks Trump's nineteenth pardon since taking office in 2017, and it isn't the president's first move with such a high-profile figure.

Conservative filmmaker and author Dinesh D'Souza received clemency in May 2018, and Trump pardoned Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, in April 2018. The president also commuted the sentence of a grandmother serving life without parole for a nonviolent drug crime at the behest of Kim Kardashian West.

The president has touted his pardon power in the past, telling reporters that he is "looking at literally thousands of names of people."