Updated at 8:58 p.m. ET

President Trump on Friday commuted the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative who was convicted of lying to Congress about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement. “There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia.”

“Roger Stone has already suffered greatly,” she continued. “He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

Stone’s attorney Robert Buschel told NPR, “We are grateful and relieved. Glad this nightmare is over.”

The commutation, which Trump issued days before Stone was to report to federal prison, brings an end to Stone’s legal fight — but only further inflames the political battle over his prosecution and the broader Russia investigation.

Earlier Friday evening, a federal appeals court denied an emergency bid from Stone to stay out of prison.

The case against Stone was brought by then-special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Stone was indicted over lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction. The charges related to his efforts during the 2016 presidential race to act as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks was releasing Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence services, and Stone publicly and privately presented himself as someone with inside knowledge about the group’s operations.

After the election, when Stone was questioned under oath about the matter by the House Intelligence Committee, he lied to lawmakers about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks.

He also tried to prevent an associate from testifying before the committee.

After a tumultuous runup to his trial, during which the presiding judge, Amy Berman Jackson, imposed a gag order on Stone after he published a threatening photograph of her, a jury found him guilty on all seven counts in November.

After his trial, Stone raised allegations of juror misconduct and tried to get the verdict dismissed. Jackson entertained the motion, even holding a hearing in which she brought back members of the jury for questioning, but she ultimately rejected Stone’s bid for a new trial and sentenced him to more than three years in prison.

Stone has since appealed his conviction.

In an interview this month with ABC News, Attorney General William Barr called Stone’s prosecution “righteous” and said the sentence handed down was “fair.”

COVID-19 complexities

Stone was scheduled to report to prison on July 1, but he received a two-week reprieve from Jackson due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, he filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to try to postpone his surrender date. The court denied that request on Friday evening.

Stone’s legal defense fund sent out a fundraising appeal with a message from Stone’s wife, Nydia, asking for donations to help buy advertisements online and on Fox TV in the Washington, D.C., area to appeal to the president to keep her husband out of prison.

Prisons have become hotbeds of infection, and authorities have sought to mitigate the spread as much as possible, including with releases of inmates who are then expected to confine themselves at home.

Stone was the last person charged under the Mueller investigation, and he is one of two Trump advisers to go to trial as part of the probe.

The other, Paul Manafort, served as Trump’s campaign chairman and is a former business partner of Stone’s. Manafort was convicted of a range of crimes. He was sentenced to more than seven years in prison but was released to home confinement this year due to the pandemic.

The president has been outspoken about the case against both men. He has repeatedly said that he feels Stone and Manafort were being treated unfairly despite the fact that juries convicted both of them.

Trump’s views square with his theory that the Russia investigation was a plot by the so-called deep state to hamstring his presidency.

Trump also repeatedly left open the door for a pardon for both men.

Updated at 2:15 p.m. ET

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the Hagia Sophia museum, one of Istanbul’s most famous landmarks, to be converted into a mosque.

He made the announcement Friday, hours after a top court cleared the way for him to make the change.

The Hagia Sophia, a major draw for tourists, has a long and complicated history. The architectural marvel was built as a church by the Byzantines in the 6^th century and then converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

In 1934, Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s cabinet decreed that it be turned into a museum. It is widely regarded as a symbol of peaceful religious coexistence.

Friday’s court ruling invalidates the 1934 decree. It grants Turkey’s president the authority to restore the museum to its status as a working mosque. The decision said the site is listed as a mosque in its title deed and that cannot be changed, Turkey’s Anadolu news agency reported.

Erdogan had previously signaled that he intended to make that change. In his decision Friday, he said the site would be transferred to the Directorate of Religious Affairs and will be open for worship.

In a speech later that day, he said the mosque would open for Friday prayers on July 24.

The president added that the mosque would remain open to non-Muslims. It will “continue to embrace everyone,” Anadolu quoted Erdogan as saying.

When Hagia Sophia issued the Muslim call to prayer on Friday afternoon, a crowd in the nearby plaza broke out in cheers, an Anadolu video showed. The museum has been broadcasting the call to prayer for several years.

The Turkish government has “allowed Quran readings there on special occasions” in recent years, Anadolu reported.

Previously, a presidential spokesman offered assurances that no changes would be made to the interior. The domed site retains its Christian iconography, and minarets were added during its time as a mosque.

The possible change to the museum’s status has been widely condemned internationally.

“As museum, Hagia Sophia can function as place and symbol of encounter, dialogue and peaceful coexistence of peoples and cultures, mutual understanding and solidarity between Christianity and Islam,” wrote Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians.

He warned that the museum is a place where “East is embraced with the West” — and if converted, it would “fracture these two worlds.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this month that converting the Hagia Sophia would limit “its unsurpassed ability — so rare in the modern world — to serve humanity as a much-needed bridge between those of differing faith traditions and cultures.”

Elizabeth Prodromou, a professor focused on geopolitics and religion at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the Hagia Sophia decision was a “tragedy, quite candidly, although it’s not surprising.”

The Hagia Sophia, she said, “has been a lightning rod for a synthesis of religio-nationalism and instrumentalized as a symbol by the Erdogan government.”

“It’s just another example of the long pattern now of Turkey’s turn away from its commitments as a member of the NATO Western alliance, and its commitment to the norms that are associated with democracy,” Prodromou added.

On Friday, the plaza in front of the Hagia Sophia, normally packed with visitors standing in long lines to get in, was nearly empty, after officials warned against large public gatherings that could spread the coronavirus. Visitors strolled in and out of the building without waiting.

A 32-year-old man named Sahib held his prayer mat and said he made the trip to the Hagia Sophia in hopes of performing Friday midday Muslim prayers there. Speaking before the decision was announced, he said, “I am hoping the Council of State reverses this wrong decision, so we can do our prayers in the Hagia Sophia.” He said he’d be back next Friday to pray.

Elena, a Russian on her first visit to Istanbul, said she doesn’t favor converting the museum back into a working mosque. “Well, even being Muslim myself,” she said, “I think it still has to stay as a museum.”

She said visiting the Hagia Sophia was an unexpectedly thrilling part of her visit.

“As I was about to enter, I didn’t expect that I would feel so excited,” she said. “It was really breathtaking.”

Ever since the pandemic struck, state and local election officials across the country have made it clear: To avoid an election disaster in November, they need more money now.

Congressional Republicans are now signalling a new willingness to provide that, after initial fears from voting rights advocates that the federal government would provide no more support than the $400 million that came as part of a March relief package.

Experts expect as many as 70% of all ballots cast in November’s presidential election will be cast through the mail, a quick and radical shift that will require equipment upgrades and greatly increase costs for cash-strapped states and counties. During the 2018 midterms, about a quarter of ballots were cast by mail.

Officials across the country, like Lynn Bailey, who is the board of elections executive director of Augusta, Ga., are looking ahead to November and wondering how they will pay for it.

Bailey testified Wednesday as part of an Election Assistance Commission hearing about the 2020 primaries. She said Georgia’s June 9 primary cost about 60 percent more than a normal election would have in her jurisdiction, due to adjustments made as a result of the pandemic.

“We had about a 35 percent turnout rate in our jurisdiction in this past election, and we know that in November that number will likely double,” Bailey said. “We can only expect therefore that our budget will likely double over what we spent this time, if not more.”

Similarly, the executive director of Kentucky’s state board of elections testified that the state had already spent the majority of money Congress allocated in March just on the state’s primary in late June.

“We can’t afford not to get the money [from Congress],” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The consequences would be so dire. It would be so devastating, not just to our election, but to America’s standing in the world overall.”

New optimism

Democrats in Congress have supported a massive influx of elections funding virtually since the onset of the pandemic to help the country adjust to voting during a national emergency. The Brennan Center estimated the total cost of such adjustments to be $4 billion, which is how much was allocated in a proposal that passed the Democratic-controlled House in May.

What’s unclear now is how much Senate Republicans are actually willing to approve as part of the next relief package that Congress is expected to begin negotiating later this month.

After the CARES Act was passed in March, “there was a time it looked like more funding would be off the table,” Weiser said.

But, she added, it’s only become more apparent since, after a number of primaries saw huge lines and bungled mail voting expansions, why the funding is necessary.

“We’ve already had four months slip between our fingers,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “The decision on whether to act or not is really the decision of whether you want your citizens to have to risk their health to have their voice heard in November.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also released new guidances for elections safety that noted that in addition to providing “a wide variety of voting options,” election administrators must also adjust their Election Day precincts to respond to the pandemic. They will need to provide adequate hygiene supplies and try to find bigger spaces that provide more room to social distance, all of which will cost more money.

While President Trump has made a series of false claims in an effort to discredit voting by mail, many state and congressional Republicans support efforts to expand it.

Senate Rules Committee chair Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said on the Senate floor before lawmakers went on recess, that he was “prepared to look at more money for the states to use for elections this year.”

The Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal election law, is expected to hold a hearing about elections safety in late July, which may also be a precursor to more funding being approved.

“We continue to work toward an election that produces a result that people have confidence in,” Blunt said. “And done in a way that everybody that wants to vote, gets to vote.” On Friday he announced a Senate committee will hold a hearing on July 22 about preparing for the general election.

In addition to more money, Democrats had wanted broader policy changes, including mandated weeks of early voting and universal access to mail ballots nationwide, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said that such requests are a non-starter.

While many congressional Republicans have voiced support for mail voting as an option for voters, they are loathe to have the federal government set national standards over U.S. elections, which are run mostly by the individual states and localities.

Senate Democrats now seem resigned to the fact that more money may be the most they can get. Still, they are pushing for individual states to greatly expand access to mail voting, and they see providing more funding as a means to allow that.

“I would rather put ballots in the mail, than voters in the hospital,” said Senate Rules Committee ranking member Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.