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

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    superchuck500

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    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
     
    Barr was handpicked by Trump! Lol.

    I think it’s just another example of the difference between law and tradition. Trump is an outsider to American political and legal traditions, and can just ignore them in furthering his agenda. And that’s not necessarily wrong (though it might be fairly destructive). Here, the Attorney General does indeed serve at the pleasure of the president. Yes there’s a tradition of law over politics and quasi-independence at DOJ - but that isn’t law. It isn’t in the Constitution that the AG is supposed to be free of presidential direction. The judicial branch is independent of the president and Congress has an oversight role - but has no requirement to be any less political than the president.

    But we have formed traditions about these things for good reason - and avoiding testing the system to their legal limits is prudent. Those kinds of virtues don’t appeal to Trump, so it’s easy for him to resist in the interest of political success. He has personally ignored them (e.g. his stance on the Fed, tax returns, etc) and at this point, has a cabinet that will follow his lead.

    Remember when he first criticized judges and accused them of political favoritism and even the Chief Justice publicly reacted as disappointed at that kind of rhetoric from the president? Well, Trump still does it. He’s doing it right now:



    But really this is all obviously a setup to pardon Stone in the near term. Trump has managed to make the Special Counsel prosecutors look rogue and punitive despite the fact that their recommendation was in line with federal sentencing guidelines, and now he’s painting the judge as Democratic operative. She could even come out on the low end of the guideline range (Stone doesn’t have nearly the same aggravating factors that Manafort had) and still draw heavy condemnation from Trump. Then the pardon only serves to undo this horrible injustice. . . they asked for it, right?

    This kind of shirt remains his strongest talent.
     
    trump and this administration is exposing all the flaws and shortcomings of our system that has depended on the honor of people holding those powers. Never in our history has it be necessary to explicitly state what can and cannot happen with the power of the presidency. In a way, he may actually be doing something good in showing us exactly where the weaknesses lay. The question is whether congress will make the necessary changes to make sure nothing like this happens again. I fear that it will not. Republicans and the man whose actions show that he may be controlled by Moscow, Mitch McConnell,
     
    Great. Links and attribution to the sites you copied, pasted and compiled that manifesto from?

    Fortunately, you do not order me around here.
    I am asking for attribution from somebody else, who obviously copied and pasted a massive amount of material from elsewhere.
    With all due respect, it's not your concern.

    This is a false and absurd accusation, Dadsdream. Your instinct to attack the messenger when you’ve cornered yourself is not a good look. I wrote the entire post myself, as I wrote all my other posts. I will provide support for any factual statement you ask me to, but there’s literally nothing copied and pasted from anywhere except the PDF image from the sentencing memo. Respond to the substance, or don’t, but do not keep falsely accusing me of plagiarism.
     
    Fortunately, you do not order me around here.
    I am asking for attribution from somebody else, who obviously copied and pasted a massive amount of material from elsewhere.
    With all due respect, it's not your concern.
    MT15, or anyone else, is as entitled to an opinion about the content of your posts as you are to an opinion about TaylorB's.

    And from where I'm sitting, MT15's opinion is a lot more valid. What grounds have you got for thinking TaylorB's post was in any way copied and pasted? The quality and depth of the post is entirely consistent with their previous postings.

    As for asking for attribution, you appear to be deliberately avoiding asking for anything specific to be cited, and instead asking for 'all of it', and that's absurd. This is a discussion forum, not an academic journal. No-one, including you, provides citations for every statement they make in a post, nor should they. You can ask for specific statements to be supported, and I'm sure TaylorB can and will oblige.

    You are, of course, free to continue to not do that. It's not an order. It's just an observation that if you're unable to do that, it will continue to look like your request is being made in bad faith.
     
    This is a false and absurd accusation, Dadsdream. Your instinct to attack the messenger when you’ve cornered yourself is not a good look. I wrote the entire post myself, as I wrote all my other posts. I will provide support for any factual statement you ask me to, but there’s literally nothing copied and pasted from anywhere except the PDF image from the sentencing memo. Respond to the substance, or don’t, but do not keep falsely accusing me of plagiarism.
    Post your sources, then. If you took the time to cobble together all this information, just share where you got it from. Otherwise, you're passing all this off as totally original. Obviously, the .pdf isn't.

    You want people to consume all information for whatever reason, but you won't name the sources?

    I don't eat Chinese crawfish and I don't read political diatribe from Lord-knows-where.


    MT15, or anyone else, is as entitled to an opinion about the content of your posts as you are to an opinion about TaylorB's.

    And from where I'm sitting, MT15's opinion is a lot more valid. What grounds have you got for thinking TaylorB's post was in any way copied and pasted? The quality and depth of the post is entirely consistent with their previous postings.

    As for asking for attribution, you appear to be deliberately avoiding asking for anything specific to be cited, and instead asking for 'all of it', and that's absurd. This is a discussion forum, not an academic journal. No-one, including you, provides citations for every statement they make in a post, nor should they. You can ask for specific statements to be supported, and I'm sure TaylorB can and will oblige.

    You are, of course, free to continue to not do that. It's not an order. It's just an observation that if you're unable to do that, it will continue to look like your request is being made in bad faith.
    OK, RobF, you"ve made the call and I'll respect that.
     
    For anyone who needs context on what's happening with Roger Stone:

    Stone is a longtime Trump friend, and one of the first people Trump told he was running for POTUS in 2016. Stone was also a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort, Trump's now imprisoned campaign manager who made millions between 2006 and 2014 working for a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine. Stone was also a friend and neighbor of Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who worked for the Trump campaign, and whose proprietary polling data on key battleground states was ultimately shared with the Russians by Manafort. Stone had done consulting work for Trump for years, and their relationship was such that Manafort recently said "it's hard to define what's Roger and what's Donald."

    In mid-2016 -- just a few days after Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner met with Russians in Trump Tower to get "dirt" on Hillary Clinton -- it was revealed that Russia hacked the DNC and obtained stolen emails. Russia began publicly releasing the stolen materials through "cut-outs" to give themselves plausible deniability over the hacks. The primary cutouts were an online persona named "Guccifer 2.0," and Wikileaks, founded by Julian Assange.

    Stone spent much of the second half of 2016 attempting to contact Guccifer and Assange (Wikileaks), trying to either obtain access to the stolen emails, or to find out the timing of the releases to get the information to Trump's campaign. Stone had his own "cutouts", including Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico, but also communicated some on his own. Stone tweeted publicly about Guccifer (calling him a "hero"), and wrote an article at one point claiming that Guccifer, not Russia, was responsible for the hacks. Stone also exchanged private messages with Guccifer on Twitter.

    In 2017, Stone was interviewed under oath by the House Intelligence Committee in its investigation into Russia's interference into the 2016 election. From that interview, Stone was later indicted, then a jury of his peers found him guilty of (1) lying to Congress about 5 separate topics, (2) obstructing a congressional investigation, and (3) witness tampering. All pertaining to his lies about contacts with Russian cutouts.

    The DOJ sentencing memo is a document wherein the government's prosecutors handling the Stone case makes recommendations to the judge about what Stone's sentence should be, within certain sentencing guidelines for federal judges' consideration in issuing a sentence. The judge is not bound by the DOJ recommendation, but their recommendations can be influential. The defendant also files his own sentencing memo.

    The DOJ's original sentencing memo on Stone shows that he lied about five topics, all designed to conceal his communications with the Trump campaign and his own associates about Wikileaks:
    • Stone lied when questioned about who his back-channel was to Wikileaks during an important time-frame, claiming it was Credico, when it was really Corsi;
    • Stone lied about the fact that he had directed Corsi to “get to Assange” and to “get the pending Wikileaks emails”;
    • Stone falsely claimed he did not tell members of the Trump campaign about his conversations with the Corsi and Credico regarding Wikileaks, when in fact he had communicated with Rick Gates, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Erik Prince about Wikileaks;
    • Stone lied about whether he discussed Wikileaks with Corsi or Credico;
    • Stone lied about whether he had emailed third parties about Assange, and whether he had documents, texts, or emails about Assange;
    Stone knew Credico was not the cut-out during the time frame -- Corsi was -- and knew Credico's testimony on that issue would take him down. Stone falsely telling the House that it was Credico also allowed for the destruction of numerous texts that further impeded the House's investigation. Stone then engaged in an aggressive pressure campaign to convince Credico to lie or take the 5th -- witness tampering -- culminating in this lovely exchange:

    1581465048286.png


    The DOJ's original sentencing memo asked for 7-9 years for Stone. The guilty pleas and convictions of other Trump associates have resulted in cooperation arrangements whereby the convicts provide prosecutors information on "bigger fish" in exchange for leniency.

    With respect to the information Stone has to offer, Trump is likely the only bigger fish the feds are interested in. Trump knows this. While Stone was contacting Assange via cutouts, Trump was publicly praising Wikileaks and asking Russia to find missing Hillary emails. Trump was being briefed by the FBI that Russia was behind the hacks, but publicly claiming it was not Russia. Trump refused to be interviewed under oath by Mueller, but later told Mueller in writing that he "spoke by telephone to Roger Stone from time to time during the 2016 presidential campaign," but that he did not recall any of the specifics of what they discussed :unsure: This was despite Mueller's determination that they had been in regular contact during that time frame.

    The harsher the sentence for Stone, the more pressure there is to flip on Trump, and the harder he is for Trump to pardon. Trump knows all of this; of course, the right wing campaign to convince Trump defenders to feel sorry for Stone ("poor guy was dragged out of bed at 5:00 AM, blah blah blah") is not an accident (same for Flynn, Manafort).

    When the sentencing memo comes out, Trump tweets furiously about the 7-9 year recommendation, then the DOJ -- headed by Trump lackey Bill Barr -- comes out and changes its mind on the sentencing recommendation. Suddenly, all 4 DOJ prosecutors on the Stone case but under Barr's authority resign, apparently in protest to direction from authorities in DOJ. The implication, which has yet to be confirmed, is that Barr ordered the prosecutors to back down on the recommendation and they chose instead to resign. It's not 100% known whether Trump issued orders directly to Barr, whether Barr simply understood the order from Trump's tweets, or whether it's something else. What it looks like at this point is that Trump's influence is causing the DOJ to rot from within while he attempts, yet again, to elevate himself above the law.

    The Stone case is yet another example of why the dismissive line about the "3 year Russia collusion hoax" is such utter garbage. So many of these people knew our election was being attacked by an enemy, and instead of reporting it, they did everything they could to encourage it to continue. The revelation of Stone's behavior by itself would vindicate the entire probe in terms of legitimacy. I can only hope that this destructive behavior takes Trump's approval down into the low 40% approval area (or lower) for good. The people mourning the destruction of the rule of law under Trump tonight are reacting appropriately.
    You seem to have left out this important point.



    IMG_20191116_155101.jpg
     
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    I think it’s just another example of the difference between law and tradition. Trump is an outsider to American political and legal traditions, and can just ignore them in furthering his agenda. And that’s not necessarily wrong (though it might be fairly destructive). Here, the Attorney General does indeed serve at the pleasure of the president. Yes there’s a tradition of law over politics and quasi-independence at DOJ - but that isn’t law. It isn’t in the Constitution that the AG is supposed to be free of presidential direction. The judicial branch is independent of the president and Congress has an oversight role - but has no requirement to be any less political than the President.
    Was Holder independent?

     
    Isikoff (and you) are missing the point. The testimony was damning because the intent to collude was clearly there. And there were attempts made to collude. The fact that these attempts were supposedly unsuccessful doesn’t really matter.

    After which Roger Stone lied repeatedly about his actions, and he threatened to kill another witness whose testimony was going to contradict his lies. I believe those things are what he will go to prison for, but I am not up on it like Taylor is.
     
    Isikoff (and you) are missing the point. The testimony was damning because the intent to collude was clearly there. And there were attempts made to collude. The fact that these attempts were supposedly unsuccessful doesn’t really matter.

    After which Roger Stone lied repeatedly about his actions, and he threatened to kill another witness whose testimony was going to contradict his lies. I believe those things are what he will go to prison for, but I am not up on it like Taylor is.
    He tried to collude with Wikileaks, but he couldn't because he had no connection to them as the NYT reported. Bombshell right? If I'm a betting man, I think it's you that are missing the point instead of the seasoned reporter Isikoff. Stone claimed he had connections to Wikileaks while having no connection. "Hucksters conning Hucksters"
     
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    I don’t know how to take this comment. I spent a good bit of time working on this to get it right. The bones that form the outline are from memory but the rest of it isn’t, but every fact or quote is checked for accuracy. Is whatever quote you referenced inaccurate?
    I was going to urge you to not take the bait - he obviously can’t argue with your posts in a factual basis so he’s left to argue/distract on style
    It’s a very disappointing tact - but it’s either do that or actually question to propaganda he ingests and regurgitates
    So here we are
     
    Work? All that writing, including dates and an entire paragraph of direct quoting and no links or attributions? I don't think so.

    Are you saying that the post is so great that it must have been written by a team of ghostwriters?

    Is it so good, that you can't respond substantively? Why respond at all? Is there any point to you?
     
    Was Holder independent?


    I never said an AG is supposed to be wholly independent of the president's interests - nor is there a tradition of independence, per se. There is, however, a tradition of law above politics and keeping the White House's hands off of individual cases (especially criminal cases) for the purpose of avoiding legal results becoming driven by politics rather than the law. Yes, when it comes to broad legal issues that are part of the political landscape, the administration's viewpoint about the law is inseparable from politics. That's why you may see the position of the United States changing across administrations (on issues such as labor, environmental protection, etc.). But particularly in an individual criminal case, those kinds of issues aren't at play - and there is a tradition of 'law enforcement' being about the law and not politics.

    The Attorney General is the chief legal officer of the United States - not the President (White House counsel is the President's lawyer). When a DOJ attorney makes representations in court, it is on behalf "of the United States", which includes federal law. If federal law wholly ceases to carry any meaning other than what the president insists it means for his/her own political interests, we become a banana republic.

    (To be clear, I'm not saying that no president has ever tried to manipulate DOJ's positions through an aggressive partisan AG, I'm just saying that isn't the tradition - which is based on a certain ideal).
     
    I never said an AG is supposed to be wholly independent of the president's interests - nor is there a tradition of independence, per se. There is, however, a tradition of law above politics and keeping the White House's hands off of individual cases (especially criminal cases) for the purpose of avoiding legal results becoming driven by politics rather than the law. Yes, when it comes to broad legal issues that are part of the political landscape, the administration's viewpoint about the law is inseparable from politics. That's why you may see the position of the United States changing across administrations (on issues such as labor, environmental protection, etc.). But particularly in an individual criminal case, those kinds of issues aren't at play - and there is a tradition of 'law enforcement' being about the law and not politics.

    The Attorney General is the chief legal officer of the United States - not the President (White House counsel is the President's lawyer). When a DOJ attorney makes representations in court, it is on behalf "of the United States", which includes federal law. If federal law wholly ceases to carry any meaning other than what the president insists it means for his/her own political interests, we become a banana republic.

    (To be clear, I'm not saying that no president has ever tried to manipulate DOJ's positions through an aggressive partisan AG, I'm just saying that isn't the tradition - which is based on a certain ideal).
    When a DOJ Attorney makes representations in court, do they normally tell the Justice Department one thing and tell the court something else?


    Why do you think the DOJ Attorney on the Stone case briefed the Justice Department on what they sentencing recommendation would be and then tell the court something different? It seems like they did it on purpose to try to create a controversy. This guy called it 2 hours before the attorney's started quiting.



    Also:



     
    So when a DOJ Attorney makes representations in court, do they normally tell the Justice Department one thing and tell the court something else?
    Why do you think the DOJ Attorney on the Stone case briefed the Justice Department on what they sentencing recommendation would be and then tell the court something different?
    Why do you think the senior DOJ officials are being truthful? It seems that they weren't shocked until trump told them they should be shocked.
     
    You seem to have left out this important point.



    IMG_20191116_155101.jpg


    I appreciate you responding to the substance of this.

    I think what you're getting at -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that if Stone did not have "real ties" with Wikileaks (not entirely sure exactly what the writers meant by that), then the behavior Stone was convicted of still does not conclusively establish some specific, tangible pre-election agreement between Trump and Russia. If so, I tend to agree with that. I don't think -- and have never thought -- that the evidence establishes a conspiracy that specific. That's not inconsistent with anything in my post.

    Remember, none of us, including Mueller, could have known exactly what the investigation would reveal. Instead of finding a videotaped meeting where Putin pees on Trump's hotel bed and Trump says "I'm your asset and this video is kompromat," Mueller found a bunch of contacts with Trump's people and Russia that both sides lied about extensively; he found that Russia wanted to help Trump, communicated that to Trump, and Trump welcomed it. The investigations of all the tangents that spun from those contacts are ongoing, many under Barr's... uh... "watchful" eyes.

    Downplaying this or that contact starts to lose credibility if you have to do it over and over and over again. Stone working overtime to get to Russian cut-outs with stolen emails, and lying about his efforts and what he communicated to Trump's people about it, is yet another part of that picture that makes the campaign look really, really bad. We wouldn't know about any of these bad acts if Mueller had not investigated them. It's misleading when you keep saying things like "there has been zero evidence that anyone was in contacts with Wikileaks" if you don't acknowledge what the prosecution proved about Stone and how it relates to the Trump campaign. And if you don't acknowledge Don Jr. was literally privately messaging Wikileaks on Twitter (start p. 59 of the Mueller report).

    But the crux of my post focused more on how Stone's legal liability impacts Trump's legal liability, which is not dependent on whether or not Stone had "real ties" to Wikileaks. The extent to which Trump was aware that campaign surrogates and associates were attempting to obtain emails stolen by Russians and/or coordinate the timing of releases by Russian cut-outs is problematic for Trump either way.

    Stone's efforts were ongoing at a time when multiple people in the Trump campaign had been in secret contact with Russians who were offering illegal assistance to the campaign, and at a time when it was known to Trump via intelligence briefings and public reporting that Russians were behind the DNC hacks. If Stone's actions were actually at Trump's direction, or if Trump was kept apprised of Stone's actions after his campaign was told Russia wanted to help him, then Trump would have contemporaneously been aware that Stone's overtures to Assange would be expected to encourage Russia to continue doing what it had been doing, sending the signal that they were willing to play ball. That's legally bad for Trump, and it's politically bad because more than half of the country dislikes the idea of a president who encourages our enemy to cyber-attack our elections. That likely helps explain why Trump's lawyers were fine with Trump recalling nothing of his 2016 discussions with Stone, despite Trump's self-professed "perfect memory."

    To be clear, I don't claim to know exactly what Stone has on Trump. But if your point is that there's no "there there" because Stone exaggerated or fabricated some of his ties to Assange and Wikileaks, that point is severely undercut by Stone risking a decade of freedom to conceal what he did, and Trump's apparent attempts to keep it all under wraps.
     
    Post your sources, then. If you took the time to cobble together all this information, just share where you got it from. Otherwise, you're passing all this off as totally original. Obviously, the .pdf isn't.

    You want people to consume all information for whatever reason, but you won't name the sources?

    I don't eat Chinese crawfish and I don't read political diatribe from Lord-knows-where.
    OK, Dadsdream, let's put and end to this nonsense. I went back and sourced every fact. I left out the end of my post which was mostly my opinion, but I can explain particulars of those statements if need be. I did not necessarily use these specific sources for each specific fact, as many of the facts I cited have many sources supporting them, and I didn't expect to have to show my work. Now that you are going to re-read the post because I've proven it to be original and well-sourced, we can discuss what it actually says, but first, here's the post with embedded links:

    Stone is a longtime Trump friend, and one of the first people Trump told he was running for POTUS in 2016.

    https://www.aol.com/article/news/20...ld-me-hed-run-on-new-years-day-2013/21708154/ (showing he told Stone on 1/1/2013)

    Stone was also a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black,_Manafort,_Stone_and_Kelly

    Trump's now imprisoned campaign manager who made millions between 2006 and 2014 working for a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort (CTRL F and search “party of regions”) (Also, I can do a whole separate thread on Manafort if you don't think he's a bad guy)

    Stone was also a friend and neighbor of Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who worked for the Trump campaign,

    https://www.politico.com/states/flo...and-former-scott-adviser-tony-fabrizio-101771

    and whose proprietary polling data on key battleground states was ultimately shared with the Russians by Manafort.

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (Mueller report - p. 136)

    Stone had done consulting work for Trump for years, and their relationship was such that Manafort recently said "it's hard to define what's Roger and what's Donald."

    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/25/roger-stone-last-dirty-trick-224217

    In mid-2016 -- just a few days after Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner met with Russians in Trump Tower to get "dirt" on Hillary Clinton -- it was revealed that Russia hacked the DNC and obtained stolen emails.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting (June 9, 2016)

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (Mueller report p. 42 – DNC announcement June 14, 2016; Trump Tower meeting discussed on p. 116 if you don't like Wikipedia)

    Russia began publicly releasing the stolen materials through "cut-outs" to give themselves plausible deniability over the hacks. The primary cutouts were an online persona named "Guccifer 2.0," and Wikileaks, founded by Julian Assange.

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (Mueller report p. 4 (Guccifer), p. 44 (Wikileaks / Assange))

    Stone spent much of the second half of 2016 attempting to contact Guccifer and Assange (Wikileaks), trying to either obtain access to the stolen emails, or to find out the timing of the releases to get the information to Trump's campaign. Stone had his own "cutouts", including Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico, but also communicated some on his own.

    Stone tweeted publicly about Guccifer (calling him a "hero"), and wrote an article at one point claiming that Guccifer, not Russia, was responsible for the hacks. Stone also exchanged private messages with Guccifer on Twitter.


    https://www.documentcloud.org/docum...r-00018-Dckt-000279-000-Filed-2020-02-10.html (DOJ sentencing memo)

    https://www.justsecurity.org/45435/timeline-roger-stone-russias-guccifer-2-0-wikileaks/

    In 2017, Stone was interviewed under oath by the House Intelligence Committee in its investigation into Russia's interference into the 2016 election. From that interview, Stone was later indicted, then a jury of his peers found him guilty of (1) lying to Congress about 5 separate topics, (2) obstructing a congressional investigation, and (3) witness tampering. All pertaining to his lies about contacts with Russian cutouts.

    The DOJ sentencing memo is a document wherein the government's prosecutors handling the Stone case makes recommendations to the judge about what Stone's sentence should be, within certain sentencing guidelines for federal judges' consideration in issuing a sentence. The judge is not bound by the DOJ recommendation, but their recommendations can be influential. The defendant also files his own sentencing memo.

    The DOJ's original sentencing memo on Stone shows that he lied about five topics, all designed to conceal his communications with the Trump campaign and his own associates about Wikileaks:

    • Stone lied when questioned about who his back-channel was to Wikileaks during an important time-frame, claiming it was Credico, when it was really Corsi;
    • Stone lied about the fact that he had directed Corsi to “get to Assange” and to “get the pending Wikileaks emails”;
    • Stone falsely claimed he did not tell members of the Trump campaign about his conversations with the Corsi and Credico regarding Wikileaks, when in fact he had communicated with Rick Gates, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Erik Prince about Wikileaks;
    • Stone lied about whether he discussed Wikileaks with Corsi or Credico;
    • Stone lied about whether he had emailed third parties about Assange, and whether he had documents, texts, or emails about Assange;
    Stone knew Credico was not the cut-out during the time frame -- Corsi was -- and knew Credico's testimony on that issue would take him down. Stone falsely telling the House that it was Credico also allowed for the destruction of numerous texts that further impeded the House's investigation. Stone then engaged in an aggressive pressure campaign to convince Credico to lie or take the 5th -- witness tampering -- culminating in this lovely exchange:
    [PDF omitted]
    The DOJ's original sentencing memo asked for 7-9 years for Stone.


    https://www.documentcloud.org/docum...r-00018-Dckt-000279-000-Filed-2020-02-10.html (DOJ sentencing memo)

    The guilty pleas and convictions of other Trump associates have resulted in cooperation arrangements whereby the convicts provide prosecutors information on "bigger fish" in exchange for leniency.

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (Mueller report, p. 130, as an example showing Manafort's cooperation agreement)

    With respect to the information Stone has to offer, Trump is likely the only bigger fish the feds are interested in. Trump knows this.

    (TaylorB's opinion)

    While Stone was contacting Assange via cutouts, Trump was publicly praising Wikileaks and asking Russia to find missing Hillary emails.


    https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ps-call-russian-hacking-after-mueller/585838/ (“Russia, if you’re listening…”)

    Trump was being briefed by the FBI that Russia was behind the hacks, but publicly claiming it was not Russia.


    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...ans-would-try-infiltrate-his-campaign-n830596

    Trump refused to be interviewed under oath by Mueller, but later told Mueller in writing that he "spoke by telephone to Roger Stone from time to time during the 2016 presidential campaign," but that he did not recall any of the specifics of what they discussed This was despite Mueller's determination that they had been in regular contact during that time frame.

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (Mueller Report, C-18)

    Remainder:
    (TaylorB's opinion and/or conjecture)

    This is the last time I'm doing this. It was only so you stop accusing me of plagiarism and trust that I can always back up what I say.
     
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    I appreciate you responding to the substance of this.

    I think what you're getting at -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that if Stone did not have "real ties" with Wikileaks (not entirely sure exactly what the writers meant by that), then the behavior Stone was convicted of still does not conclusively establish some specific, tangible pre-election agreement between Trump and Russia. If so, I tend to agree with that. I don't think -- and have never thought -- that the evidence establishes a conspiracy that specific. That's not inconsistent with anything in my post.

    Remember, none of us, including Mueller, could have known exactly what the investigation would reveal. Instead of finding a videotaped meeting where Putin pees on Trump's hotel bed and Trump says "I'm your asset and this video is kompromat," Mueller found a bunch of contacts with Trump's people and Russia that both sides lied about extensively; he found that Russia wanted to help Trump, communicated that to Trump, and Trump welcomed it. The investigations of all the tangents that spun from those contacts are ongoing, many under Barr's... uh... "watchful" eyes.

    Downplaying this or that contact starts to lose credibility if you have to do it over and over and over again. Stone working overtime to get to Russian cut-outs with stolen emails, and lying about his efforts and what he communicated to Trump's people about it, is yet another part of that picture that makes the campaign look really, really bad. We wouldn't know about any of these bad acts if Mueller had not investigated them. It's misleading when you keep saying things like "there has been zero evidence that anyone was in contacts with Wikileaks" if you don't acknowledge what the prosecution proved about Stone and how it relates to the Trump campaign. And if you don't acknowledge Don Jr. was literally privately messaging Wikileaks on Twitter (start p. 59 of the Mueller report).

    But the crux of my post focused more on how Stone's legal liability impacts Trump's legal liability, which is not dependent on whether or not Stone had "real ties" to Wikileaks. The extent to which Trump was aware that campaign surrogates and associates were attempting to obtain emails stolen by Russians and/or coordinate the timing of releases by Russian cut-outs is problematic for Trump either way.

    Stone's efforts were ongoing at a time when multiple people in the Trump campaign had been in secret contact with Russians who were offering illegal assistance to the campaign, and at a time when it was known to Trump via intelligence briefings and public reporting that Russians were behind the DNC hacks. If Stone's actions were actually at Trump's direction, or if Trump was kept apprised of Stone's actions after his campaign was told Russia wanted to help him, then Trump would have contemporaneously been aware that Stone's overtures to Assange would be expected to encourage Russia to continue doing what it had been doing, sending the signal that they were willing to play ball. That's legally bad for Trump, and it's politically bad because more than half of the country dislikes the idea of a president who encourages our enemy to cyber-attack our elections. That likely helps explain why Trump's lawyers were fine with Trump recalling nothing of his 2016 discussions with Stone, despite Trump's self-professed "perfect memory."

    To be clear, I don't claim to know exactly what Stone has on Trump. But if your point is that there's no "there there" because Stone exaggerated or fabricated some of his ties to Assange and Wikileaks, that point is severely undercut by Stone risking a decade of freedom to conceal what he did, and Trump's apparent attempts to keep it all under wraps.
    You just copied and pasted all of this. Show us your sources with links and proper notations!
     

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