Roger Stone trial set to begin (Update: Stone found guilty on all 7 counts)(Update: Trump commutes sentence) (2 Viewers)

[superchuck500]

Jury selection will begin Tuesday morning. Note that Steve Bannon intends to testify for the prosecution.

Roger Stone will go on trial starting Nov. 5 in Washington, the federal judge presiding over the high-profile case said Thursday.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson set out a calendar for a two-week trial that will pit the longtime Trump associate against special counsel Robert Mueller on charges Stone lied to Congress and obstructed lawmakers’ Russia investigations.

Stone entered the D.C. courthouse for Thursday’s status hearing uncertain whether he’d face any penalties — including jail — for violating the terms of a gag order restricting his ability to talk about any aspect of the case.

But Stone was spared any punishment after Jackson opened the proceedings saying she didn’t “intend to dwell” on the dispute, which centers on discrepancies over whether Stone mislead the court about plans to rerelease a recent book with a new introduction bashing Mueller’s investigation.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/14/roger-stone-trial-1221289


https://www.law.com/nationallawjour...n-roger-stones-trial/?slreturn=20190931143946

 

[Nebaghead]

Very interesting thought. I have to think it's a consideration for Stone.

Imagine having your freedom for the better part of the next decade rest entirely on the whim of Trump. Stone would have to hope that in Trump's own mind, whatever info Stone could give the feds on Trump by cooperating would be worse politically for Trump than the spectacle of the pardon itself.

It's possible Stone's lawyers think -- as I do -- that he's likely not getting a new trial regardless, but filed the motion for new trial anyway because it gives Trump more political cover to pardon Stone. Trump obviously thinks the issue helps him since he's tweeting about it, and we can be sure the twitter bots will explode if Stone's motion is denied.

Seems like the play here. Make it look like he had to intervene because Stone wasn't getting a fair shake.

 

[JimEverett]

It's possible Stone's lawyers think -- as I do -- that he's likely not getting a new trial regardless, but filed the motion for new trial anyway because it gives Trump more political cover to pardon Stone. Trump obviously thinks the issue helps him since he's tweeting about it, and we can be sure the twitter bots will explode if Stone's motion is denied.

Highly doubtful.
It would be malpractice not to move for a new trial IF, and its a big if, she was deceitful in any possible way on her questionnaire. And there is almost certainly some argument to be made that she was deceitful.

 

[Beach Friends]

How awful must that jury pool have been for the defense to not to have saved a peremptory challenge for Tomeka Hart?

 

[TaylorB]

How awful must that jury pool have been for the defense to not to have saved a peremptory challenge for Tomeka Hart?

Well given that the jury was drawn from the same territory that the Washington Nationals draw their fans from, it's not like the jury pool was ever going to be full of Trump lovers. Political polarization has been a problem for both sides in these Mueller-related cases, though, because as we saw in Manafort's case, it only takes one person to acquit (there was one holdout juror on the handful of charges he was acquitted of).

So basically, Stone should have committed his crimes in Alabama if he really wants a favorable jury pool (or just not committed them at all)

 

[TaylorB]

It's well known that Trump had plenty of shady or corrupt people on his campaign staff and some of them had contacts with people from Russia. As you know it's not illegal to have contacts in Russia. Trump had done business in Russia so it's hardly suprising that some of his campaign staff had contacts with people in Russia. Putin also disliked Clinton for publicly criticizing the fairness of Russia's election. If Putin wanted to harm Clinton's chances of election, as well as sow discord, then the only other option was to try to help Trump win.

Why Putin hates Hillary

Behind the allegations of a Russian hack of the DNC is the Kremlin leader's fury at Clinton for challenging the fairness of Russian elections.

www.politico.com

It's highly misleading to imply that the Trump-Russia contacts uncovered by Mueller and others were mostly routine business contacts that were just incidental to Trump doing business in Russia. They weren't. Stone's case is a good example -- Stone reached out to Wikileaks and Guccifer because he believed they had information which could harm Hillary and help Trump, not because he or Trump generally had prior Russian business contacts. Same for the Trump Tower meeting, the Grand Havana meeting, Flynn-Kislyak, etc. These were all specific to Trump's candidacy.

Putin hating Hillary does not exclude him also wanting Trump to win for other reasons. But whatever Putin's motivation for influencing the election in Trump's favor, the point in my post about Stone was that Trump's people knew about Russia wanting to help, and welcomed that help. Stone's behavior tends to confirm the accuracy of that conclusion.

What political candidate wouldn't welcome anything that harmed their opponent especially if they weren't involved and it was already publicly known?

This is a loaded question. Trump claims not to have been involved despite having regular conversations with Stone at a time when Stone was privately obsessed with getting to Assange and Trump was publicly obsessing over Wikileaks releases. Stone's conviction may pressure him to give more information about what Trump knows. That's likely why Trump wants to pardon him.

Also, the answer to the loaded question is: a political candidate with ethics. It was not normal for Trump to publicly encourage Russia to hack Hillary's emails while he was secretly negotiating a massive business deal in Russia, lying to the public about it, and directing his lawyer to lie about it. They should have told the FBI what the Russians were doing, but they didn't because they're unethical people. You said yourself plenty of them were shady and corrupt -- this was shady and corrupt.

I can clarify that statement. There has been zero evidence that anyone was in contact with Wikileaks about the hacked Clinton emails or Russian election interference. I'm sure you saw the exchange on Twitter between Don Jr and Wikileaks. Wikileaks contacted Don Jr about an anti Trump website. Nothing to do with anything related to the hacked emails

I don't know how you can possibly say this after the Stone conviction. But again, Wikileaks is a small part of what the investigation uncovered.

Who is the Russian cutout that Stone was trying to contact and coordinate the timing of releases?

Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks.

There are quite a few assumptions and trying to connect the dots instead of going on concrete evidence in your paragraph. The whole Russia case was so flimsy that the Democrats didn't include any of it in the impeachment articles. I'll go with a bunch of shady and corrupt campaign officials who had contacts with people in Russia, but have not been proven to be involved in any way with the hacked emails and/or colluding with Russia on their election interference.

Nearly all of the things we're discussing in this post are things we didn't know about before the Mueller investigation. Without the investigation, Trump would still be out there saying Russia didn't interfere, and didn't want to help him win. We wouldn't know his campaign manager was acting as an agent for pro-Russian interests. We wouldn't know that most of his national security team was secretly in contact with Russians and trying to negotiate the removal of sanctions during the transition. We wouldn't know Stone was trying to coordinate with Wikileaks. We wouldn't know Trump was secretly negotiating on several hundred million dollar deals with Russia while lying about it.

We still don't know the whole story because guys like Stone and Manafort are staying tight-lipped, and because much of what Mueller was doing has spun off into other ongoing investigations. You're moving the goalposts when you say Trump's people "weren't involved with hacked emails." This thread is partially about Trump desperately wanting to pardon someone who was convicted of lying about trying to obtain hacked emails. So no, Trump's people weren't the hackers, but they did plenty of under-the-table dealings with Russia trying to get them and/or give Russia things it wanted. The national security concerns in the Mueller report extend far beyond the Wikileaks / pre-election hacking conspiracy angle. If the Russia case were flimsy, Trump's people wouldn't still be going to prison for it.

 

[Beach Friends]

Hillary also said something like Putin had no soul and compared him to Hitler.

Trump said that he would like to improve relations with Russia and that he thought he could work with Putin.

In any event, despite the fact that Putin is essentially a gangster, I think the United States would be well advised to look at matters from the Russian perspective. That's not a matter of taking their side. If you want to further your own interests you need to understand what motivates the other party.

Russia has always been paranoid and xenophobic. I think the history is that when the USSR started coming apart the Russians agreed not to oppose the reunification of Germany on our promise not to extend NATO eastward. We probably missed an opportunity for better relations with Russia when we expanded NATO.

Russia was down, but nations that are down don't always stay down. See Germany and its rise after WWI, fueled by resentment over Versailles.

 

[SaintForLife]

This article makes some good points and states there is a pattern:

George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.

The Roger Stone Double Standard | National Review

For all the hullaballoo around the Stone case, he still faces prison — while his partners in dishonesty are lauded as patriotic heroes.

www.nationalreview.com

 

[zztop]

A national association of federal judges has called an emergency meeting Tuesday to address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases, the group’s president said Monday.

Philadelphia U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who heads the independent Federal Judges Association, said the group “could not wait” until its spring conference to weigh in on a deepening crisis that has enveloped the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr.

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe told USA TODAY. “We’ll talk all of this through.”

Rufe, nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, said the group of more than 1,000 federal jurists called for the meeting last week after Trump criticized prosecutors' initial sentencing recommendation for his friend Roger Stone and the Department of Justice overruled them.

 

[Beach Friends]

A national association of federal judges has called an emergency meeting Tuesday to address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases, the group’s president said Monday.

Philadelphia U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who heads the independent Federal Judges Association, said the group “could not wait” until its spring conference to weigh in on a deepening crisis that has enveloped the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr.

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe told USA TODAY. “We’ll talk all of this through.”

Rufe, nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, said the group of more than 1,000 federal jurists called for the meeting last week after Trump criticized prosecutors' initial sentencing recommendation for his friend Roger Stone and the Department of Justice overruled them.

It sounds like they need some emergency CLE on their role under Article 3.

 

[TaylorB]

This article makes some good points and states there is a pattern:

Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way.

The Roger Stone Double Standard | National Review

For all the hullaballoo around the Stone case, he still faces prison — while his partners in dishonesty are lauded as patriotic heroes.

www.nationalreview.com

"Roger Stone's prosecution is illegitimate because the underlying behavior he's being prosecuted for was already proven not to have happened." That's an interesting way to frame it. Stone -- while being interviewed by Congress in an investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference -- lied repeatedly about his efforts to reach Russian cutouts who were pushing hacked DNC emails. He was convicted of 5 separate counts of lying, obstructing the investigation, and intimidating a witness with threats, and threatened a federal judge. He arrogantly flouted our justice system, and will likely pay a price for it.

My initial post was simply providing background on why Trump and Barr were likely trying to interfere with Stone's sentencing -- which I think is because Stone has damaging information they don't want him disclosing to prosecutors to get his sentence reduced. As I acknowledged, I could be wrong about that, but I provided plenty of reasons why I think that. The circular logic in that article does nothing to address Trump's interest in Stone's case.

George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.

The Roger Stone Double Standard | National Review

For all the hullaballoo around the Stone case, he still faces prison — while his partners in dishonesty are lauded as patriotic heroes.

www.nationalreview.com

Flynn's and Papadopoulos' lies are unrelated to the Stone topic, and merit their own discussions in a separate thread because the claims in that article are preposterous. But the short version: their lies were not trivial, and were designed to cover up what they were doing. Flynn sold US foreign policy for cash. Papadopoulos' lies hindered the investigation. Their lies related to contacts with Russia, a foreign enemy attacking our elections (plus Flynn's lies about secretly lobbying for Turkey for $530k while getting top secret US intel briefings). Mueller addresses their lies briefly beginning on p. 192 of his report, but there's much more to both of the stories than he discussed.

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

 

[Saintamaniac]

"Roger Stone's prosecution is illegitimate because the underlying behavior he's being prosecuted for was already proven not to have happened." That's an interesting way to frame it. Stone -- while being interviewed by Congress in an investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference -- lied repeatedly about his efforts to reach Russian cutouts who were pushing hacked DNC emails. He was convicted of 5 separate counts of lying, obstructing the investigation, and intimidating a witness with threats, and threatened a federal judge. He arrogantly flouted our justice system, and will likely pay a price for it.

My initial post was simply providing background on why Trump and Barr were likely trying to interfere with Stone's sentencing -- which I think is because Stone has damaging information they don't want him disclosing to prosecutors to get his sentence reduced. As I acknowledged, I could be wrong about that, but I provided plenty of reasons why I think that. The circular logic in that article does nothing to address Trump's interest in Stone's case.



Flynn's and Papadopoulos' lies are unrelated to the Stone topic, and merit their own discussions in a separate thread because the claims in that article are preposterous. But the short version: their lies were not trivial, and were designed to cover up what they were doing. Flynn sold US foreign policy for cash. Papadopoulos' lies hindered the investigation. Their lies related to contacts with Russia, a foreign enemy attacking our elections (plus Flynn's lies about secretly lobbying for Turkey for $530k while getting top secret US intel briefings). Mueller addresses their lies briefly beginning on p. 192 of his report, but there's much more to both of the stories than he discussed.

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

Facts have a way of ruining a perfectly good lie or getting in the way of repeated lies.

 

[CoolBrees]

And the judge denies.

Judge refuses to delay sentencing of Trump ally Roger Stone

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday refused to delay sentencing for Roger Stone on his witness tampering and lying to Congress conviction as President Donald Trump kept up his unrelenting defense of his longtime confidant and said he wouldn’t be quieted on social media even if he's making t

apnews.com

 

[TaylorB]

And the judge denies.

Judge refuses to delay sentencing of Trump ally Roger Stone

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday refused to delay sentencing for Roger Stone on his witness tampering and lying to Congress conviction as President Donald Trump kept up his unrelenting defense of his longtime confidant and said he wouldn’t be quieted on social media even if he's making t

apnews.com

She hasn't denied the motion for new trial yet, according to the article. She's going to sentence him first, then will rule later. I still think she may conduct a hearing re: the juror's bias.

 

[superchuck500]

It sounds like they need some emergency CLE on their role under Article 3.

I think you’re right if the concern is the Stone sentencing issue. But if the concern is Trump’s attacks on Judge Jackson (in line with other derision of federal judges), that wouldn’t be out of scope.

 

[MT15]

This article makes some good points and states there is a pattern:

George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.

The Roger Stone Double Standard | National Review

For all the hullaballoo around the Stone case, he still faces prison — while his partners in dishonesty are lauded as patriotic heroes.

www.nationalreview.com

I think I read that article. If it’s the one I’m thinking of he clearly downplays the things that Flynn, Manafort and Stone did wrong. Like seriously downplays them. He is cherry picking statements that he feels supports his thesis and omitting facts that would contradict it.

For example, obstruction is an act that is independent of whether the investigation actually uncovered a crime or not. Stone is certainly guilty of obstruction, and his obstruction was meaningful and egregious. It doesn’t matter what the investigation uncovered, the crimes were still committed during the investigation.

Flynn’s misdeeds made his judge seriously ask prosecutors why they hadn’t charged him with more crimes and more severe ones. And the judge has refused to go along with some of the prosecutions motions to end Flynn’s case. Before Flynn stopped cooperating, IIRC prosecutors were recommending no jail time. Flynn threw away his chance for probation only. He had a good deal going and mucked it all up.

ETA: Taylor said a lot of the same stuff and said it better. But it’s good to point out the bias in such a flawed article more than once, maybe.

 

[Beach Friends]

I think you’re right if the concern is the Stone sentencing issue. But if the concern is Trump’s attacks on Judge Jackson (in line with other derision of federal judges), that wouldn’t be out of scope.

I agree. I also think that just because the association has 1k members that does not necessarily mean that 1k are in agreement on anything yet - including whether there should be a meeting.

There may be something I am unaware of, but it seems like these articles may be written so that people will infer broader concurrence than there actually is.

 

[Optimus Prime]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr has told people close to him he’s considering quitting his post after President Donald Trump wouldn’t heed his warning to stop tweeting about Justice Department cases, an administration official told The Associated Press.

The revelation came days after Barr took a public swipe at the president, saying in a television interview that Trump’s tweets about Justice Department cases and staffers make it “impossible” for him to do his job.

The next day, Trump ignored Barr’s request and insisted that he has the “legal right” to intervene in criminal cases and sidestep the Justice Department’s historical independence........

AP source: Barr tells people he might quit over Trump tweets

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr has told people close to him he’s considering quitting his post after President Donald Trump wouldn’t heed his warning to stop tweeting about Justice Department cases, an administration official told The Associated Press.

apnews.com

 

[insidejob]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr has told people close to him he’s considering quitting his post after President Donald Trump wouldn’t heed his warning to stop tweeting about Justice Department cases, an administration official told The Associated Press.

The revelation came days after Barr took a public swipe at the president, saying in a television interview that Trump’s tweets about Justice Department cases and staffers make it “impossible” for him to do his job.

The next day, Trump ignored Barr’s request and insisted that he has the “legal right” to intervene in criminal cases and sidestep the Justice Department’s historical independence........

AP source: Barr tells people he might quit over Trump tweets

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr has told people close to him he’s considering quitting his post after President Donald Trump wouldn’t heed his warning to stop tweeting about Justice Department cases, an administration official told The Associated Press.

apnews.com

Or he's ready to quit because he only wanted the job in the first place to shirt on the Mueller report - as he outlined in his giant memo that got him the job - and doesn't want to totally ruin his reputation by helping Trump ruin the DOJ.