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Friday, November 15, 2019 12:17:03 PM
Roger Stone found guilty in federal case
"4 Disturbing Details You May Have Missed in the Mueller Report"
Roger Stone as he arrived Friday at court with his wife Nydia (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
By Rachel Weiner and Spencer S. Hsu
November 16, 2019 at 3:46 a.m. GMT+11
BREAKING: Roger Stone convicted in federal case over statements to Congress related to WikiLeaks. Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser, was on trial in Washington on charges of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction over his remarks about WikiLeaks’ email releases in the 2016 presidential campaign.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
In the last indictment brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump confidant Roger Stone’s slippery brand of political brawling has been put on trial in a case now before a jury due back Friday for a second day of deliberations.
In hopes of keeping himself out of prison, the veteran Republican operative has asked jurors to treat his case as a referendum not on him but on Mueller’s entire Russia investigation — leading to the only defense at trial of that probe’s importance.
Of the 34 people indicted by Mueller, only two have gone to trial.
Stone’s old consulting colleague Paul Manafort, whose defense also insisted his prosecution was political, was convicted on tax and bank charges .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/paul-manafort-faces-sentencing-in-washington-in-mueller-special-counsel-case/2019/03/12/d4d55dd4-44d0-11e9-aaf8-4512a6fe3439_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_8 .. in a 2018 trial in federal court in Virginia where Russia went unmentioned.
Lead Stone defense attorney Bruce S. Rogow named Russia in his closing argument 54 times at trial in federal court in Washington.
Accused of lying to a House committee about his efforts to get his hands on hacked Democratic emails released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, then threatening a witness to obstruct the House probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference, Stone argued that his behavior was irrelevant because it was “not about Russian collusion.”
Stone’s lawyers conceded that a raft of emails, texts and extensive other documentation showed Stone claiming inside information on WikiLeaks’ releases and wanting to get even more that could be relayed to the Trump campaign. But in its closing, the defense urged jurors to reframe the question from whether Stone lied to whether that issue mattered.
As Rogow put it, “So much of this case deals with that question that you need to ask .?.?. so what?”
The question echoed some of Stone’s own sentiments in comments as he allegedly bullied a witness out of testifying before the House committee.
[Who is who at the Roger Stone trial?
https://wapo.st/2KfPHWn]
“No one cares,” he twice told talk show host Randy Credico in messages shown in court. Credico invoked his Fifth Amendment protections and declined to answer Congress’s questions.
Stone’s defense repeated his position that there was “no collusion” with Russia on the presidential race and thus any of Stone’s misstatements, as his lawyers cast them, about his WikiLeaks pursuits were inconsequential.
As his lawyers urged the jury to size things up: So Stone didn’t tell the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get information from WikiLeaks — the efforts never amounted to anything. So he didn’t tell them he talked to the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks — that’s not illegal. So he told his old friend Credico not to testify — “These two guys tampered with one another for 20 years over all kinds of crazy things,” Rogow said.
None of it matters, Rogow argued, because “it doesn’t have any kind of connection to Russia.”
It was a line of argument that turned the sardonic prosecutors passionate and earnest.
“Roger Stone doesn’t get to choose which facts he thinks are important and lie about the rest of them,” U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis said in closing arguments.
His colleague, Michael J. Marando, more broadly condemned Stone’s defense as corrosive to civil society.
“If that’s the state of affairs that we’re in, I’m pretty shocked. Truth matters. Truth still matters,” Marando told jurors. “I know we live in a world nowadays with Twitter, tweets, social media where you can find any view, any truth you want.” But in “our institutions of self-governance, to a congressional committee, in our courts of law, truth still matters.”
It matters, the prosecutors said, that the House committee put out an incomplete report based on Stone’s misleading testimony. While he was not accused of obstructing the special counsel investigation, they brought up in closing arguments three times a message in which Stone said of Mueller, “tell him to go f--- himself.”
[Read the Stone indictment here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/roger-stone-indictment/7cedd188-130a-4fa3-8736-904a46747c92_note.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_31]
Stone’s lawyers were barred by Judge Amy Berman Jackson from raising claims about a Ukrainian role in the Democratic email hack — a theory raised by Trump in a July phone call to Ukraine’s president that factors in this week’s impeachment hearings.
But Stone’s lawyers took every chance to pick away at the Russia investigation, spending much of their final words to the jury arguing that not just Stone but the Trump campaign had been unfairly maligned.
“There was nothing illegal about the campaign being interested in information that WikiLeaks was going to be sending out,” Rogow said.
It was a gambit they tried repeatedly before trial, pushing without success .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-asks-court-to-toss-out-evidence-saying-russian-hacking-of-democrats-in-2016-is-assumption/2019/05/10/4462bb2a-7365-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_37 .. for dismissal of Stone’s case .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-asks-judge-to-dismiss-indictment-and-to-order-he-get-copy-of-full-mueller-report/2019/04/13/caea8a9c-5cc7-11e9-9625-01d48d50ef75_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_37 .. on the grounds that the Russia probe was fatally flawed.
Rogow earned a rare mid-argument rebuke at trial from the judge for claiming the FBI had “nothing that shows” the hacker who claimed credit for the email leaks, Guccifer 2.0, “is Russian.” The FBI traced the “Guccifer 2.0” persona to Russian intelligence; the agent who testified at Stone’s trial merely said she had no direct insight into that inquiry.
While Stone maintained that none of his WikiLeaks outreach was successful, prosecutors argued otherwise. They pointed to an email from writer and Stone acquaintance Jerome Corsi, saying: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. .?.?. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
Corsi referred to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had been living under house arrest at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since 2012.
Corsi says he rejected a plea offer .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/conservative-author-and-roger-stone-associate-jerome-corsi-says-he-is-rejecting-plea-deal-from-special-counsel/2018/11/26/53fb33a6-e6bf-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_43 .. from the special counsel and was never charged with a crime. He has denied having any contact with WikiLeaks, saying as Stone did that he was guessing based on Assange’s public statements.
The charge of witness tampering against Stone carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and the other counts up to five-year terms, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.
Stone did not testify during the trial, which began Nov. 6. Instead jurors saw videos of his television appearances and heard scratchy audio of his appearance before the House committee.
[Bannon says Stone claimed contacts with WikiLeaks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-trial-set-to-turn-to-alleged-witness-threats-contacts-with-trump-campaign-about-wikileaks/2019/11/08/156e0854-01b0-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_47]
The defense argued that Stone’s voluntary testimony, in which he offered to follow up with more details about the journalist he described as his sole intermediary with WikiLeaks, showed his guilelessness. “This was not the voice of a man who was trying to lie, to mislead,” Rogow said.
But jurors also saw texts in which Stone used vulgarity and threats to pressure that person, Credico, to back up his version of events.
“You are a rat. A stoolie,” he wrote. “Prepare to die.”
Kravis read some of those quotes to the jury, and asked: “Are these the words of a man who believes he told the truth?”
Stone’s reputation as a dirty trickster .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/06/16/the-rise-and-gall-of-roger-stone/d8ce308b-7055-4666-860e-378833f46e17/?tid=lk_inline_manual_53 .. who courts attention, good or bad, left him a fringe figure in the Republican Party until his friend Trump ran for president.
“Roger is an agent provocateur,” former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told jurors, as he testified for the government about Stone’s exchanges with him over WikiLeaks contact and the campaign’s interest. “He’s an expert in the tougher side of politics.” Trump was such a long shot, Bannon said, that the campaign had to “use every tool in the toolbox.”
Stone himself explained his philosophy in a clip from his House testimony played for jurors. Quoting the writer Gore Vidal, he said, “Never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.”
Not one juror smiled.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/roger-stone-jury-weighs-evidence-and-a-defense-move-to-make-case-about-mueller/2019/11/15/554fff5a-06ff-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html
"4 Disturbing Details You May Have Missed in the Mueller Report"
Roger Stone as he arrived Friday at court with his wife Nydia (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
By Rachel Weiner and Spencer S. Hsu
November 16, 2019 at 3:46 a.m. GMT+11
BREAKING: Roger Stone convicted in federal case over statements to Congress related to WikiLeaks. Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser, was on trial in Washington on charges of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction over his remarks about WikiLeaks’ email releases in the 2016 presidential campaign.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
In the last indictment brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump confidant Roger Stone’s slippery brand of political brawling has been put on trial in a case now before a jury due back Friday for a second day of deliberations.
In hopes of keeping himself out of prison, the veteran Republican operative has asked jurors to treat his case as a referendum not on him but on Mueller’s entire Russia investigation — leading to the only defense at trial of that probe’s importance.
Of the 34 people indicted by Mueller, only two have gone to trial.
Stone’s old consulting colleague Paul Manafort, whose defense also insisted his prosecution was political, was convicted on tax and bank charges .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/paul-manafort-faces-sentencing-in-washington-in-mueller-special-counsel-case/2019/03/12/d4d55dd4-44d0-11e9-aaf8-4512a6fe3439_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_8 .. in a 2018 trial in federal court in Virginia where Russia went unmentioned.
Lead Stone defense attorney Bruce S. Rogow named Russia in his closing argument 54 times at trial in federal court in Washington.
Accused of lying to a House committee about his efforts to get his hands on hacked Democratic emails released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, then threatening a witness to obstruct the House probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference, Stone argued that his behavior was irrelevant because it was “not about Russian collusion.”
Stone’s lawyers conceded that a raft of emails, texts and extensive other documentation showed Stone claiming inside information on WikiLeaks’ releases and wanting to get even more that could be relayed to the Trump campaign. But in its closing, the defense urged jurors to reframe the question from whether Stone lied to whether that issue mattered.
As Rogow put it, “So much of this case deals with that question that you need to ask .?.?. so what?”
The question echoed some of Stone’s own sentiments in comments as he allegedly bullied a witness out of testifying before the House committee.
[Who is who at the Roger Stone trial?
https://wapo.st/2KfPHWn]
“No one cares,” he twice told talk show host Randy Credico in messages shown in court. Credico invoked his Fifth Amendment protections and declined to answer Congress’s questions.
Stone’s defense repeated his position that there was “no collusion” with Russia on the presidential race and thus any of Stone’s misstatements, as his lawyers cast them, about his WikiLeaks pursuits were inconsequential.
As his lawyers urged the jury to size things up: So Stone didn’t tell the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get information from WikiLeaks — the efforts never amounted to anything. So he didn’t tell them he talked to the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks — that’s not illegal. So he told his old friend Credico not to testify — “These two guys tampered with one another for 20 years over all kinds of crazy things,” Rogow said.
None of it matters, Rogow argued, because “it doesn’t have any kind of connection to Russia.”
It was a line of argument that turned the sardonic prosecutors passionate and earnest.
“Roger Stone doesn’t get to choose which facts he thinks are important and lie about the rest of them,” U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis said in closing arguments.
His colleague, Michael J. Marando, more broadly condemned Stone’s defense as corrosive to civil society.
“If that’s the state of affairs that we’re in, I’m pretty shocked. Truth matters. Truth still matters,” Marando told jurors. “I know we live in a world nowadays with Twitter, tweets, social media where you can find any view, any truth you want.” But in “our institutions of self-governance, to a congressional committee, in our courts of law, truth still matters.”
It matters, the prosecutors said, that the House committee put out an incomplete report based on Stone’s misleading testimony. While he was not accused of obstructing the special counsel investigation, they brought up in closing arguments three times a message in which Stone said of Mueller, “tell him to go f--- himself.”
[Read the Stone indictment here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/roger-stone-indictment/7cedd188-130a-4fa3-8736-904a46747c92_note.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_31]
Stone’s lawyers were barred by Judge Amy Berman Jackson from raising claims about a Ukrainian role in the Democratic email hack — a theory raised by Trump in a July phone call to Ukraine’s president that factors in this week’s impeachment hearings.
But Stone’s lawyers took every chance to pick away at the Russia investigation, spending much of their final words to the jury arguing that not just Stone but the Trump campaign had been unfairly maligned.
“There was nothing illegal about the campaign being interested in information that WikiLeaks was going to be sending out,” Rogow said.
It was a gambit they tried repeatedly before trial, pushing without success .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-asks-court-to-toss-out-evidence-saying-russian-hacking-of-democrats-in-2016-is-assumption/2019/05/10/4462bb2a-7365-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_37 .. for dismissal of Stone’s case .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-asks-judge-to-dismiss-indictment-and-to-order-he-get-copy-of-full-mueller-report/2019/04/13/caea8a9c-5cc7-11e9-9625-01d48d50ef75_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_37 .. on the grounds that the Russia probe was fatally flawed.
Rogow earned a rare mid-argument rebuke at trial from the judge for claiming the FBI had “nothing that shows” the hacker who claimed credit for the email leaks, Guccifer 2.0, “is Russian.” The FBI traced the “Guccifer 2.0” persona to Russian intelligence; the agent who testified at Stone’s trial merely said she had no direct insight into that inquiry.
While Stone maintained that none of his WikiLeaks outreach was successful, prosecutors argued otherwise. They pointed to an email from writer and Stone acquaintance Jerome Corsi, saying: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. .?.?. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
Corsi referred to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had been living under house arrest at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since 2012.
Corsi says he rejected a plea offer .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/conservative-author-and-roger-stone-associate-jerome-corsi-says-he-is-rejecting-plea-deal-from-special-counsel/2018/11/26/53fb33a6-e6bf-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_43 .. from the special counsel and was never charged with a crime. He has denied having any contact with WikiLeaks, saying as Stone did that he was guessing based on Assange’s public statements.
The charge of witness tampering against Stone carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and the other counts up to five-year terms, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.
Stone did not testify during the trial, which began Nov. 6. Instead jurors saw videos of his television appearances and heard scratchy audio of his appearance before the House committee.
[Bannon says Stone claimed contacts with WikiLeaks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-trial-set-to-turn-to-alleged-witness-threats-contacts-with-trump-campaign-about-wikileaks/2019/11/08/156e0854-01b0-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_47]
The defense argued that Stone’s voluntary testimony, in which he offered to follow up with more details about the journalist he described as his sole intermediary with WikiLeaks, showed his guilelessness. “This was not the voice of a man who was trying to lie, to mislead,” Rogow said.
But jurors also saw texts in which Stone used vulgarity and threats to pressure that person, Credico, to back up his version of events.
“You are a rat. A stoolie,” he wrote. “Prepare to die.”
Kravis read some of those quotes to the jury, and asked: “Are these the words of a man who believes he told the truth?”
Stone’s reputation as a dirty trickster .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/06/16/the-rise-and-gall-of-roger-stone/d8ce308b-7055-4666-860e-378833f46e17/?tid=lk_inline_manual_53 .. who courts attention, good or bad, left him a fringe figure in the Republican Party until his friend Trump ran for president.
“Roger is an agent provocateur,” former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told jurors, as he testified for the government about Stone’s exchanges with him over WikiLeaks contact and the campaign’s interest. “He’s an expert in the tougher side of politics.” Trump was such a long shot, Bannon said, that the campaign had to “use every tool in the toolbox.”
Stone himself explained his philosophy in a clip from his House testimony played for jurors. Quoting the writer Gore Vidal, he said, “Never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.”
Not one juror smiled.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/roger-stone-jury-weighs-evidence-and-a-defense-move-to-make-case-about-mueller/2019/11/15/554fff5a-06ff-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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