Roger Stone trial set to begin (Update: Stone found guilty on all 7 counts)(Update: Trump commutes sentence) (5 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

 

[superchuck500]

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:

We don't know what the staff attorneys briefed to DOJ officials - or who was actually involved in that briefing (e.g. was it the actual trial team or was it conveyed through a chain). The fact that the recommendation memo was in line with federal sentencing guidelines makes me patently suspicious of any characterization that the trial team was "unjust" or "grossly disproportionate". I think being consistent with the sentencing guidelines makes them presumptively reasonable - at least among DOJ officials. Yes, there is room to disagree and to think the team should have skewed to the lower end but resorting to such inflammatory characterization (of what is generally fairly routine) strongly suggests White House direction.

I don't have an opinion on the Jessie Liu business. I think she had a pretty good reputation as the US Attorney in DC, but I really don't know. And I certainly don't know enough about her nomination at Treasury to make any comment on that.

 

[Dadsdream]

OK, Dadsdream, let's put and end to this nonsense . . .

Thank you. I will review and respond as time and resources permit.

 

[TaylorB]

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.

I missed this post before, but it's really spot on.

 

[SaintForLife]

We don't know what the staff attorneys briefed to DOJ officials - or who was actually involved in that briefing (e.g. was it the actual trial team or was it conveyed through a chain). The fact that the recommendation memo was in line with federal sentencing guidelines makes me patently suspicious of any characterization that the trial team was "unjust" or "grossly disproportionate". I think being consistent with the sentencing guidelines makes them presumptively reasonable - at least among DOJ officials. Yes, there is room to disagree and to think the team should have skewed to the lower end but resorting to such inflammatory characterization (of what is generally fairly routine) strongly suggests White House direction.

I don't have an opinion on the Jessie Liu business. I think she had a pretty good reputation as the US Attorney in DC, but I really don't know. And I certainly don't know enough about her nomination at Treasury to make any comment on that.

The enhancement brought the recommended sentence from 3-4 years base offense level to the 7-9 years. The enhancement that looks questionable is the one that relates to threatening the witness.

In Stone’s case, the government’s calculation relies on several guidelines enhancements. Generally speaking, certain conduct can increase the offense level guidelines calculation. Here, the base offense level is 14, but with all of the enhancements the government argued for, it jumped to 29.

One enhancement the government recommended jumped out. The government argued that an eight-point enhancement is warranted because Stone’s obstruction of justice “involved causing or threatening to cause physical injury to a person, or property damage.” The government pointed to two particular comments by Stone to a witness: “Prepare to die, c-cksucker” and him threatening to “take that dog away from you.”

Standing alone, it’s not clear these rise to the level of a “violent threat” as required by the enhancement. In fact, I would argue that this is not a case where “reasonable minds” can disagree. This enhancement is a stretch. Particularly significant is that the individual who was the recipient of these “threats” testified at trial that he did not seriously believe Stone would follow through on his so-called threats.

When I did a quick search of D.C. Circuit cases applying this enhancement, I couldn’t find anything. That’s not to say it would never apply, but the infrequency which with the enhancement seems to be used is somewhat telling.



Chuck I believe you posted one of this guys tweets earlier in the thread. What's your opinion on his tweet here:

 

[SaintForLife]

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.

Yes I agree although many on the left and in the media still think or claim that to be the case.

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.

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

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

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).

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

The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks

The transparency organization asked the president’s son for his cooperation—in sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia’s ambassador to the United States.

amp-theatlantic-com.cdn.ampproject.org

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.

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

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.

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.

 

[SaintForLife]

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?

You do know that many of you on the left here had set the standard of constantly asking people to cite where something came from right? It was done many times so it's a little ironic that you guys are complaing that Dadsdream asked for the same thing.

 

[SaintForLife]

So, obstructing Congress is a crime? j.k.

There's a huge difference between the President and a private citizen in regards to obstructing Congress.

 

[samiam5211]

You do know that many of you on the left here had set the standard of constantly asking people to cite where something came from right? It was done many times so it's a little ironic that you guys are complaing that Dadsdream asked for the same thing.

He wasn’t asking about a specific fact.

He was making an accusation of plagiarism.

I’m sure DD will come in to politely tell me that I am mistaken and he just wanted to read up on the topic before responding.

 

[SaintForLife]

He wasn’t asking about a specific fact.

He was making an accusation of plagiarism.

I’m sure DD will come in to politely tell me that I am mistaken and he just wanted to read up on the topic before responding.

Translation: It's okay when we do it, but not you guys.

 

[samiam5211]

Translation: It's okay when we do it, but not you guys.

I’m sorry that you took it that way.

 

[FullMonte]

Yes I agree although many on the left and in the media still think or claim that to be the case.

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.

No, it isn't. But it IS illegal to solicit, accept, or receive opposition research from a foreign national. So, when Trump's team met with a lawyer to get dirt on Hillary, they were getting very close to breaking that law.

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.

But again, investigators have no way of knowing whether or not those particular contacts were providing information that was illegal to the campaign team. And, when the investigators ask about those contacts, and the individuals lie about their contact, what is the investigator supposed to do? I would think any good investigator would assume that the person is lying because they feel that the truth is something they shouldn't say.

 

[SaintForLife]

No, it isn't. But it IS illegal to solicit, accept, or receive opposition research from a foreign national. So, when Trump's team met with a lawyer to get dirt on Hillary, they were getting very close to breaking that law.

According to your logic, it was illegal for the Clinton campaign to pay for opposition research from the foreign national Steele right?

Actually a former FEC commissioner disgrees with you.

Here’s the bottom line: a federal candidate who is freely given information is not receiving a “contribution” or “thing of value” and is thus not violating federal campaign finance law or the regulations issued by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). I know. I served as an FEC Commissioner.

If getting dirt on an opponent were a “thing of value,” then any adverse information concerning a candidate—even informed criticism of a rival’s policy proposals—would also have to be considered a “thing of value,” and both would have to listed as a financial “contribution” to a campaign. Such a broad interpretation of the law would be potentially unconstitutional and impractical to administer or enforce. Moreover, it is not a position that has been taken by the FEC.

...Federal law (52 U.S.C. §30121) prohibits a foreign national from contributing or donating money or a “thing of value” to a federal, state, or local candidate or political committee. Foreigners are also banned from engaging in independent political expenditures. That means that the Chinese government, for example, can’t give money directly to a candidate, nor can it buy an ad in the New York Times telling Americans they should vote for or against a particular candidate.

This ban doesn’t prevent foreign nationals from volunteering to help a campaign, as long as the foreigner does not “dictate, control, or directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process” of the campaign under a regulation issued by the FEC (11 CFR §110.20). The federal statute also says that the term “contribution” does not include an “individual who volunteers to behalf of a candidate.” The FEC specifically notes that a foreign national “may volunteer personal services to a federal candidate or federal political committee without making a contribution.”

Sorry, Media — Talking to Foreigners Does Not Violate Federal Campaign Laws

It was a hypothetical question about getting information on a political opponent from a foreign national. Yet President Trump’s response sparked a furor—one that was long on accusations and short on the actual law governing federal campaigns.

www.heritage.org

But again, investigators have no way of knowing whether or not those particular contacts were providing information that was illegal to the campaign team. And, when the investigators ask about those contacts, and the individuals lie about their contact, what is the investigator supposed to do? I would think any good investigator would assume that the person is lying because they feel that the truth is something they shouldn't say.

Investigators can assume all they want, but unless they have evidence they can't claim something to have happened. If people lie to investigators then they should be charged and face the consequences for lying.

 

[FullMonte]

According to your logic, it was illegal for the Clinton campaign to pay for opposition research from the foreign national Steele right?

The Clinton Campaign hired Steele? I could have sworn the Campaign hired US based FusionGPS. It was FusionGPS that contacted Steele, wasn't it? Is there any evidence that the Clinton Campaign directed FusionGPS to contact Steele (or was aware that they were doing so before the fact?)

Actually a former FEC commissioner disgrees with you.

Here’s the bottom line: a federal candidate who is freely given information is not receiving a “contribution” or “thing of value” and is thus not violating federal campaign finance law or the regulations issued by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). I know. I served as an FEC Commissioner.

If getting dirt on an opponent were a “thing of value,” then any adverse information concerning a candidate—even informed criticism of a rival’s policy proposals—would also have to be considered a “thing of value,” and both would have to listed as a financial “contribution” to a campaign. Such a broad interpretation of the law would be potentially unconstitutional and impractical to administer or enforce. Moreover, it is not a position that has been taken by the FEC.

So, he says "Here’s the bottom line: a federal candidate who is freely given information is not receiving a “contribution” or “thing of value," but this document posted on the FEC website, written by the Chair of the FEC clearly states that opposition research IS a thing of value.
Page two starts with: "The Commission has held a long a diverse list of goods and services (both tangible and intangible, both easy and difficult to value) to qualify as contributions, including
--Opposition research"

https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2019-10-ELW-the-law-of-a-thing-of-value.pdf

So, who do we believe? The document that currently explains the law, or a man who stated "I served as an FEC Commissioner," but who actually withdrew his name from consideration before his confirmation hearing?

Nominee for F.E.C. Withdraws (Published 2008)

The nominee to the Federal Election Commission, Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official, did not have Democratic support to win confirmation.

www.nytimes.com

...Federal law (52 U.S.C. §30121) prohibits a foreign national from contributing or donating money or a “thing of value” to a federal, state, or local candidate or political committee. Foreigners are also banned from engaging in independent political expenditures. That means that the Chinese government, for example, can’t give money directly to a candidate, nor can it buy an ad in the New York Times telling Americans they should vote for or against a particular candidate.

Please see the previous document, titled "The Law of a 'Thing of Value' which states quite clearly, that the first item listed as a 'thing of value' is opposition research.

 

[samiam5211]

Actually Rubio supporter and conservative website Washington Free Beacon founder, Paul Singer, hired Fusion GPS to create what became the Steele dossier, and Hillary’s people just bought the finished product since Rubio certainly had no use for it.

 

[brandon]

Breaking with my liberal brethren. More citations is never a bad thing.

@TaylorB’s post was never in doubt, but if we can call out non-cited or dubiously cited work, then the other team has a right to ask for citations when they think it’s appropriate.

 

[MT15]

You do know that many of you on the left here had set the standard of constantly asking people to cite where something came from right? It was done many times so it's a little ironic that you guys are complaing that Dadsdream asked for the same thing.

Actually the hypocrisy comes into play when those of us who have seen DD have a hissy fit when he was asked for sources see him do the exact thing he threw said hissy fit about.

And not only did he ask for Taylor to “show his work”, he did it in a rude and demeaning way by insinuating that Taylor hadn’t written his own post. And he has never apologized for that as of yet that I have seen.

So it’s not the act of asking for sources that I objected to, it was rather the overall demeanor and the double standard that was used.

 

[Dadsdream]

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.

Intel officials told Trump the Russians were behind the election hacks

On Sunday, Trump again said he didn't know if Russia was behind the U.S. election hacks, but U.S. intel officials had already told him so in private.

www.google.com

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.

Thank you for your patience. I've been doing an edit and rewrite on a technical manual that's three years out of date. Tedious.

Your original post was 1,114 words of unattributed narrative, which you have now confirmed was cobbled together from at least 15 Internet sources, some of which was original documentation. This is essentially background information that anybody can look up on their own.

Only the 126 words (10% of the content) in the first and last paragraph appear to have been your own original thoughts, ideas and opinion, so that's what I'll address.

For anyone who needs context on what's happening with Roger Stone:
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.

The Russians have been attempting to influence or change our elections for decades. This is not new. It's been an accepted fact for a very long time.

EVERYONE knew Russian election interference was going on in every U.S. national election since the 1950s.
No one brought the specifics of it to the fore because Soviet/Russian election interference was/is a highly classified national security item.

It's a serious mistake to heap criticism on people for not reporting Russian election interference. If it was reported, then it was reported to the national security apparatus, never to be published, at least not in my lifetime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/13/the-long-history-of-the-u-s-interfering-with-elections-elsewhere/

“Active measures”: a history of Russian interference in US elections - Prospect Magazine

Interconnectivity has made it easier than ever—but recent meddling has precedent

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk

EDIT: Here's a better piece on the subject of the history Russian election interference, which I posted back on Page 86 of this thread:

The Soviet Roots of Meddling in U.S. Politics - PONARS Eurasia

(PONARS Policy Memo) The release on January 6 of an unclassified version of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s report describing efforts by Russian security services to influence last year’s U.S. presidential campaign in favor of Donald Trump evoked a sense of deja vu. Despite the advent of...

www.ponarseurasia.org

Stone's an over-the-top jerk. Agreed. His behavior drew attention and he's paid a price for it.

Was it criminal? The courts have spoken and now a flag has been thrown and the play is under review.

We'll see how that plays out.

Thank you for taking the time to separate the Internet-sourced background information (90% of your post) from your actual personal thoughts and ideas (10% of your post).

Doing so allowed me to correctly address your post, your concerns, your ideas.

 

[superchuck500]

The enhancement brought the recommended sentence from 3-4 years base offense level to the 7-9 years. The enhancement that looks questionable is the one that relates to threatening the witness.

In Stone’s case, the government’s calculation relies on several guidelines enhancements. Generally speaking, certain conduct can increase the offense level guidelines calculation. Here, the base offense level is 14, but with all of the enhancements the government argued for, it jumped to 29.

One enhancement the government recommended jumped out. The government argued that an eight-point enhancement is warranted because Stone’s obstruction of justice “involved causing or threatening to cause physical injury to a person, or property damage.” The government pointed to two particular comments by Stone to a witness: “Prepare to die, c-cksucker” and him threatening to “take that dog away from you.”

Standing alone, it’s not clear these rise to the level of a “violent threat” as required by the enhancement. In fact, I would argue that this is not a case where “reasonable minds” can disagree. This enhancement is a stretch. Particularly significant is that the individual who was the recipient of these “threats” testified at trial that he did not seriously believe Stone would follow through on his so-called threats.

When I did a quick search of D.C. Circuit cases applying this enhancement, I couldn’t find anything. That’s not to say it would never apply, but the infrequency which with the enhancement seems to be used is somewhat telling.



Chuck I believe you posted one of this guys tweets earlier in the thread. What's your opinion on his tweet here:

- The enhancement analysis is interesting thanks.

- Commutation (e.g. Obama's of Manning) is very different from White House direction on sentencing. Trump could commute or pardon anyone - well within his discretionary power.

- Yes, I think Popehat is generally pretty astute. It's Ken White, he's a former white-collar prosecutor now on the defense side. He writes for Atlantic and GovExec. He knows what he's talking about (doesn't mean he's always right but I think he's bright and experienced). I agree with him that it was very unlikely that Judge Jackson would have given Stone 7 to 9 years.