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Roger Stone will have a trial at some point, he's still being provocative, and well, he's so very Roger Stone, so I think he should have his own thread.  Here's the latest. 

Plus, we need a place to speculate on why this asshat has not been grabbed off the street and thrown in a dank, nasty cell.  

I'd also like to note that "shifty, duplicitous con man" are not attributes of Shiff, but do apply to a certain shifty, duplicitous conman in the WH. 

These are the terms of Stone's current gag order (from Judge imposes full gag order on Roger Stone, The Hill, Feb 21, 2019)

Quote

Under the new order, Stone is barred from speaking publicly, giving any media interviews, commenting about his case on social media or indirectly commenting by having statements made on his behalf.   Jackson, however, told Stone he can send out as many tweets or posts as he wants asking for donations to his legal defense fund and can therein deny the charges against him or claim innocence — but that’s it.

We watch Ari Melber in the evenings. He has a pretty amazing range of people on his show, including, on occasion, Stone associates Jerome Corsi, Sam Nunn and sidekick/frenemy Randy Credico, where their bat-shit eccentricity is on full display.  Truly, it never disappoints.  Michael Caputo and Carter Page were on this past week. 

There's this thing where Roger Stone has been threatening to dog nap Randy's "therapy" dog Bianca for YEARS because Stone doesn't think Randy (who has a history of drug and alcohol abuse) can care for her properly.  This flared up in late January, when Stone's threat to dog nap Bianca was an element of Mueller's indictment. 

I can't remember who said it, but there was a reference by one of Ari's guests to Roger Stone's houseful of three-legged dogs.  

Edited by Howl
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@Howl I'm with you on this, all of it.

I also am shocked that he isn't already in a cell. Apparently he thinks no rules apply to him.

It also says a lot about Trump that he and Trump remain - apparently - good buds.

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1 hour ago, apple1 said:

I also am shocked that he isn't already in a cell. Apparently he thinks no rules apply to him.

Which makes me think that he will end up in jail awaiting trial at some point.  He seems unable to restrain himself. 

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I'd like to see Adam Schiff run for President.  Am so impressed by him.

Stone seems to be borrowing from the Trump (stir it up) playbook, but the circumstances may not permit...

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We knew this, but a concise reminder at how consistently Roger Stone hits a lot point never hurts: 

 

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"Roger Stone asks for full copy of Mueller report and to have his indictment dismissed"

Spoiler

Roger Stone’s defense fired a volley of legal attacks at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, asking a federal judge to dismiss Stone’s indictment for lying to Congress and obstructing justice and to order that Stone receive a full unredacted copy of Mueller’s recently completed report.

“No other person, Committee, or entity has Stone’s constitutionally based standing to demand the complete, unredacted Report,” Stone’s attorneys argued in court filings late Friday on behalf of the longtime confidant of President Trump. Only then “can he determine whether the Report contains material which could be critical to his defense,” or if he was selectively prosecuted, they wrote in a series of motions.

Stone, 66, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied about his efforts to gather information about Democratic Party emails hacked by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign and released through anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and others.

He has been released on ­personal recognizance pending trial Nov. 5 scheduled in Washington.

Stone’s Jan. 25 indictment marked the last criminal charges brought by prosecutors in Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Mueller on March 22 notified Attorney General William P. Barr of the investigation’s end.

Prosecutors have until May 3 to answer Stone’s flurry of legal objections, which are typical at this stage of a criminal trial and included challenges to the funding of Mueller’s office and to Mueller’s authorization as special counsel — an objection courts have rejected several times when raised previously by other defendants in Mueller’s probe.

The blast of motions suggests how Stone’s case could grind on this summer, even as prosecutors with U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, Virginia and Washington continue to tie up loose threads from the special counsel’s probe, including other referrals by Mueller’s office and investigations that remain under seal.

Stone’s filing came one day after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was expelled from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London and arrested on unsealed, year-old U.S. charges of conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network before his organization in 2010 published a historic trove of classified U.S. documents online.

Attorneys for Stone asked a judge Friday to toss out a seven-count indictment in which Mueller’s prosecutors alleged Stone was in frequent contact with members of Trump’s campaign about the WikiLeaks effort to release materials damaging to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election.

A focus of Mueller’s probe of Stone, court filings show, was whether he coordinated with Assange or WikiLeaks as it published thousands of Democratic emails that prosecutors say were hacked by Russian operatives. Barr said last month in a brief summary of Mueller’s report that the special counsel reported its investigation did not establish that Trump campaign members “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government’s interference activities.

Stone was not charged with any crimes related to communicating with WikiLeaks about its activities, and he has repeatedly denied that he conspired with the group.

The 24-page indictment of Stone alleged that a senior Trump campaign official was ­directed by an unnamed person to contact Stone as soon as WikiLeaks began publishing Democratic emails.

The indictment also asserts Stone communicated about WikiLeaks with “a high ranking Trump Campaign official,” whose emails in the filing match those of former campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon. And, according to prosecutors, Stone received a query about the group’s activities from a “supporter involved with the Trump campaign.”

Stone in past interviews denied discussing WikiLeaks with Trump campaign officials or having advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans and said he was just passing on public information and tips.

In Friday’s filings, Stone’s defense, led by attorney Robert C. Buschel, argued that in the absence of a congressional referral, his indictment by the special counsel’s office for lying to Congress violated the Constitution’s separation of powers clause; that his prosecution was not constitutionally funded because Congress did not specifically appropriate funds for special counsel offices; and that Congress has not explicitly provided that the special counsel can investigate a president or his presidential campaign.

“Nothing could encroach more upon the President’s duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed than having a Special Prosecutor continually looking over his shoulder, threatening him or the members of his executive branch with potential prosecution for every act they take,” Stone’s lawyers wrote.

The president’s powers are at their “zenith” in dealings with hostile powers, such as Russia, they added, in arguing for Mueller’s appointment to be struck down and all evidence gathered to be suppressed.

Stone also brought anew claims that Mueller’s May 2017 designation by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself, violated the appointments clause of the Constitution, because the special counsel should have been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

A three-judge appeals court panel in Washington in February unanimously rejected a similar challenge brought by Andrew Miller, an associate of Stone’s who has been trying to block a grand jury subpoena. Miller on Friday filed a petition seeking a rehearing before a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals by the District of Columbia Circuit.

Also on Friday, U.S. prosecutors filed their opposition to a petition by news organizations, including The Washington Post, to unseal materials for search warrants in Stone’s case, arguing that the materials “concern investigations that remain ongoing,” Stone’s trial and uncharged third parties.

 

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Interesting development. I wonder why Miller decided to cooperate with this grand jury, but fought tooth and nail to not have to testify with Mueller’s grand jury — for which he is held in contempt?

 

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Read the Emails: The Trump Campaign and Roger Stone

Quote

Newly revealed messages show how the political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. sold himself to Trump campaign advisers as a potential conduit to WikiLeaks, which published thousands of emails in 2016 damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

When WikiLeaks published a trove of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman a month before the 2016 election, it was widely viewed as an attempt to damage her standing, even as WikiLeaks defended the release as an effort to bring greater transparency to American politics.

We have since learned that the emails were originally hacked by Russian intelligence operatives. What is still not clear is how much Trump campaign advisers knew about the hacks at the time — a subject of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — or the extent of their interactions with far-right figures eager to undermine Mrs. Clinton.

Emails obtained by The New York Times provide new insight into those connections, as well as efforts by Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump and political operative, to seek funding through the campaign for his projects aimed at hurting Mrs. Clinton. The emails are verbatim, typos and all, save for email addresses deleted to protect the emailers’ privacy.

The Players

  • Stephen K. Bannon, Trump campaign chairman and co-founder of the far-right Breitbart News, who ran the website until he joined the campaign
  • Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington editor
  • Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime conservative operative and confidant of President Trump
  • Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks

The Context

A month before the election, Mrs. Clinton looked to be cruising to victory. Mr. Trump’s surrogates, including Mr. Stone, were trying to come up with ways to attack her to help Mr. Trump gain ground.

Mr. Stone had long claimed both publicly and privately that he had foreknowledge of the information that WikiLeaks planned to release about Mrs. Clinton and her political allies. In early October, Mr. Stone predicted on his Twitter account, which was suspended after a string of expletive-laden tweets, that the documents that Mr. Assange promised to make public would hurt Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

Oct. 2, 2016 @rogerjstonejr: “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done.”

Oct. 3, 2016 @rogerjstonejr: “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon. #LockHerUp”

The Emails

On the night of Oct. 3, Mr. Boyle emailed Mr. Stone. Mr. Assange had scheduled a news conference for the next day where he would announce he was releasing a new cache of documents. The emails show how closely intertwined Breitbart News and the campaign were and how people in Mr. Bannon’s orbit saw Mr. Stone as a direct link to WikiLeaks.

Monday, October 3, 2016 
FROM: Matthew Boyle
TO: Roger Stone
EMAIL:

Assange — what’s he got? Hope it’s good.

Thanks,

Matthew Boyle 
Washington Political Editor, Breitbart News 
http://twitter.com/mboyle1
http://www.breitbart.com/Columnists/matthew-boyle

Mr. Stone had apparently been trying to get in touch with Mr. Bannon to tell him about Mr. Assange’s plans. Mr. Boyle, a protégé of Mr. Bannon’s, forwarded to him Mr. Stone’s email. But Mr. Bannon appeared uninterested in engaging.

Monday, October 3, 2016
FROM: Roger Stone
TO: Matthew Boyle
EMAIL:

It is. I’d tell Bannon but he doesn’t call me back.

My book on the TRUMP campaign will be out in Jan.


Many scores will be settled. 

R

Monday, October 3, 2016 
FROM: Matthew Boyle
TO: Steve Bannon
EMAIL: 
You should call Roger. See below. You didn’t get from me.

Monday, October 3, 2016 
FROM: Steve Bannon
TO: Matthew Boyle 
EMAIL: 
I’ve got important stuff to worry about

Tuesday, October 4, 2016 
FROM: Matthew Boyle
TO: Steve Bannon
EMAIL: 


Well clearly he knows what Assange has. I’d say that’s important.

The next morning, Mr. Assange told reporters in Berlin, by teleconference, that he planned to release “significant material” in the coming weeks, including some related to the American presidential election. He said WikiLeaks hoped to publish a trove of documents each week in the coming months. Mr. Assange’s comments were reported extensively in the United States.

Mr. Bannon then contacted Mr. Stone directly, asking for insight into Mr. Assange’s plan. Notably, Mr. Stone did not tell Mr. Bannon anything that Mr. Assange had not said publicly. He did explain that Mr. Assange was concerned about his security, and he said in an interview that Randy Credico, a New York comedian and activist whom Mr. Stone has identified as his source about WikiLeaks, also gave him that information.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016
FROM: Steve Bannon
TO: Roger Stone
EMAIL:

What was that this morning???

Tuesday, October 4, 2016 
FROM: Roger Stone
TO: Steve Bannon
EMAIL: 
Fear. Serious security concern. He thinks they are going to kill him and the London police are standing done. 

However —a load every week going forward.

Roger stone

Tuesday, October 4, 2016 
FROM: Steve Bannon
TO: Roger Stone
EMAIL: 

He didn’t cut deal w/ clintons???

The final email in the exchange is vintage Stone. He demanded that Trump campaign surrogates convey his accusations, made without evidence, about Bill Clinton’s having a love child named Danney Williams. And he told Mr. Bannon to have the wealthy Republican donor Rebekah Mercer send money to his political organization — a 501(c)(4) group sometimes called a C-4 — which was structured to keep its donors secret. No evidence has emerged that Mr. Bannon asked Ms. Mercer to send money.

In response to Mr. Bannon’s request for insider information into whether Mr. Assange had cut a deal with the Clintons not to release the emails, Mr. Stone said he did not know.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016 
FROM: Roger Stone
TO: Steve Bannon
EMAIL:

Don’t think so BUT his lawyer Fishbein is a big democrat .

I know your surrogates are dumb but try to get them to understand Danney Williams case 

chick mangled it on CNN this am 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3819671/Man-claiming-Bill-Clinton-s-illegitimate-son-prostitute-continues-campaign-former-president-recognize-him.html

He goes public in a big way Monday— Drudge report was a premature leak.

I’ve raise $150K for the targeted black digital campaign thru a C-4

Tell Rebecca to send us some $$$

 

 

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Will try to confirm if this is true, other than this random tweet without back up.

 

And here is confirmation:

 

Oooh, he's the focus counterintelligence investigations too!

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I think Roger Stone finally got the point that he WOULD be in jail if he didn't STFU.  We haven't heard from Roger in awhile. 

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"Judge rejects Roger Stone request to suppress search warrant evidence ahead of November trial"

Spoiler

A federal judge Tuesday rejected Roger Stone’s request to suppress all evidence gathered through 18 search warrants at his November trial, finding that the Justice Department properly obtained court approvals before charging the longtime confidant of President Trump with lying to Congress and witness tampering.

Stone, 67, has pleaded not guilty to a seven-count indictment connected to his efforts to gather information about Democratic emails that prosecutors say were stolen by Russia during the 2016 campaign and released through the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and other groups.

Attorneys for Stone had argued that prosecutors illegally relied on unproven assumptions about Russia’s involvement and sought to force them to prove in court the role of Russian operatives in hacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta, among others.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Stone had “not come close” to showing the government misled the magistrates or judges who approved the warrants, that federal agents knowingly or intentionally lied to them or that the warrants were premised on Russia’s role in the hacking.

“Even absent any representation that it was believed to be Russia that was behind the intrusion, there was probable cause for the issuing courts to conclude that the requested searches of defendant’s premises, records, and electronic accounts, would uncover relevant evidence about the unlawful intrusion and related offenses,” Jackson, of Washington, wrote in a 14-page opinion.

“The officers executing the searches relied in good faith on valid warrants, and there is no basis to suppress the evidence they obtained,” Jackson concluded in a decision issued Sept. 19 and unsealed Tuesday.

Jackson’s ruling was made public one day before Stone and his defense team are due in court for a hearing in the run-up to his Nov. 5 trial date.

In clearing the way for prosecutors to mount their case, Jackson swept aside Stone’s invocation of a theory backed by some Trump supporters that denies a central finding by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that Moscow had a primary role in “sweeping and systemic” cyber-interference in the 2016 election.

The Mueller probe in July 2018 publicly indicted members of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU in the hack.

The FBI and U.S. intelligence community have made similar assessments about Russian intelligence agencies’ roles.

Stone’s filing alleged that redacted versions of Mueller’s report and reports by CrowdStrike — the private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the June 2016 attack — that have been turned over to his defense team lack the necessary authentication to be admitted as evidence in a U.S. criminal court.

“The government does not have the evidence, and it knew it did not have the evidence, when it applied for these search warrants” for Stone’s papers, emails, cellphones, computers and other devices, his attorneys argued, adding, “If that foundation collapses, then the warrants must fail for lack of probable cause.”

Jackson said that Stone’s allegations were conclusory and that he had not shown that federal agents made any statements that were deliberately false or in reckless disregard of the truth.

“Defendant has not offered any grounds to find that it would be reckless for an FBI agent to recite a finding of the U.S. intelligence community,” a declassified version of a classified assessment provided to the president, drafted by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency and released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Jackson wrote.

Even if false, she added, such statements “were not necessary” to the courts’ decisions to issue the warrants, which were based on the theft and release of the DNC data and Stone’s alleged actions to impede a House Intelligence Committee investigation into foreign interference in the election, Jackson found.

 

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Roger Stone has violated his gag order. Fingers crossed Judge Amy Berman Jackson will finally send him to jail. ?

 

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Also, Bannon is set to testify as a government witness in Stone's trial, which I think begins Nov. 4. 

What could possibly go wrong?

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"5 takeaways from Roger Stone’s first major day in court"

Spoiler

Call it the Cliff Notes version of the Mueller report.

That’s what a new panel of Washington, D.C., jurors heard Wednesday morning as federal prosecutors delivered a tight synopsis of how Roger Stone came to be a defendant in the last indictment to come from the special counsel’s office.

It was a powerful moment delivered exclusively to a courtroom audience. Anyone who’s been following Robert Mueller’s work closely would recognize all the pieces of the story. But to the 12 jurors who might be coming in cold, it was a stark and concise opening narrative explaining how the colorful characters in Trumpworld gossiped and plotted around Russia’s digital thefts of Democratic emails during the 2016 election — and the role Stone played in that story.

The longtime Donald Trump associate is facing charges that he lied to congressional investigators trying themselves to untangle the complex web of Russia’s election meddling. Prosecutors say Stone also tampered with a witness in that probe.

For their part, Stone’s attorneys tried to tell the story of a fabulist who walked into the House Intelligence Committee not fully realizing what they wanted to ask him about. If Stone wasn’t forthcoming or overstated his knowledge, they argued, it was not intentional or malicious, and perhaps just for show.

Here are POLITICO’s five takeaways from the first major day of the trial.

Trump takes it hard

If Trump thought he was off the hook after Mueller closed up shop in May, well, Wednesday was a rude awakening.

As the case against Stone kicked off, ex-Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky took the baton and seemed to relish the opportunity to weave the president’s name into the prosecution’s narrative on as many occasions as possible.

Less than two minutes into his opening statement, Zelinsky told jurors Trump was a “longtime friend and associate” of Stone.

While prosecutors could’ve portrayed Stone as a freelancer on a lark that might help his ally, Zelinsky instead suggested that Stone was wired to the candidate himself — and at the highest levels of the Trump campaign, “regularly” providing updates on his activities to senior campaign staffers Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon.

Zelinsky never quite accused Trump of directing Stone to lie — the prosecutor said he did not know precisely what the two men said to each other in a series of phone calls that summer. But the implication was that Stone lied to Congress on Trump’s behalf.

“Roger Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committees because the truth looked bad for the Trump campaign and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump,” Zelinksky said.

Other aspects of the testimony could also anger Trump. One exhibit introduced near the outset of Stone’s trial Wednesday appeared to be a redacted list of phone calls made from Trump’s home in New York City. The fact that investigators were rummaging through details of the president’s personal phone calls seems like the kind of thing that could get the president tweeting.

The trial will be rated R

Stone is known for his brash style and crass language. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that his trial is already full of expletives and hissed threats.

The curse words came quickly as the government prosecutors started making their case, quoting extensively from Stone’s text messages and emails.

There was this Aug. 16, 2016, email Stone sent to Bannon about the prospect of more damaging documents released about the Clinton campaign, which Zelinsky read aloud in court: “I have an idea….to save Trump’s ass.”

There was also this Oct. 3, 2016, text message exchange that an FBI agent on the witness stand helped narrate, illustrating Stone’s attempt to calm down Randy Credico, the therapy dog-toting liberal talk show host who thought Stone was using him to advance a false narrative.

“No one is using your name stop being an asshole,” Stone wrote in one message. Later on in the same exchange, Credico replied with a reference to a character from the Godfather movies, calling Hillary Clinton “a scary serious and dangerous person who will kill without conscious the same way Luca Brasi did.”

“Don’t be a pussy- the higher our profile- the safer u will be,” Stone replied.

Jurors also got treated to an f-bomb. That came when Zelinsky read aloud a text message exchange where Stone was offering Credico advice about how to handle a request to speak with Mueller’s prosecutors.

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” Stone said of the special counsel.

Later, Stone attorney Bruce Rogow explained to the jurors that while they may indeed be hearing some “odious” language in messages between his client and Credico, it’s just part of their “strange relationship.”

"This is the way these two men talked to one another,” he said.

Stone’s many media hits are all now evidence

Stone was one of the most familiar characters to mainstream journalists, on the lecture circuit and in the far-right mediasphere during the 2016 campaign.

Now some of those conversations and appearances are resurfacing as evidence in his own trial.

Prosecutors played several short video clips of Stone to back up their claims that he frequently discussed WikiLeaks and his efforts to learn more about what the activist site had on the Democrats.

Jurors saw Stone at his Aug. 8, 2016, appearance before a local South Florida GOP group where he boasted, “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”

They saw Stone speaking eight days later to Infowars host Alex Jones about his “backchannel communications” with Assange and the “political dynamite” that would soon be delivered against Clinton.

And then they saw a clip from Stone’s Aug. 18 interview with C-SPAN where Stone explained he was in touch with WikiLeaks “through an intermediary — someone who is a mutual friend.”

Prosecutors were using Stone’s own words to back up their case that he misled lawmakers a year later when he insisted that his intermediary was Credico. In fact, Stone at that point had actually been communicating about Assange with conspiracy theorist and author Jerome Corsi.

Stone’s defense: It was all a show

When your client is on trial for lying, pronouncing him to be a rather profligate liar is, to say the least, an unconventional approach.

Yet, that’s exactly what Stone’s defense team offered Wednesday as his lawyers argued that their client repeatedly exaggerated his knowledge about the content and timing of forthcoming WikiLeaks releases.

“It’s made-up stuff,” Rogow told jurors. “Mr. Stone said those things. He was playing others.”

Stone also contended that what prosecutors described as threats leveled at Credico were not meant literally but as part of crude banter exchanged by two men hailing from opposite ends of the political spectrum. (Neither side mentioned what may be Stone’s most hostile email to Credico, quoted in Stone’s indictment as: “Prepare to die [expletive.]”)

“It is a strange relationship,” conceded the mild-mannered Rogow, whose beard, bow-tie and glasses give him a professorial appearance far from that of his brash client. The defense lawyer said of the messages the pair traded: “They’re profane. They’re rude. … They’re not easy to read, but they’re not evidence of a crime.”

Rogow surprised some courtroom observers by not arguing that forgetfulness or oversight was the cause of Stone’s failure to disclose numerous texts and emails related to his Assange outreach efforts. Instead, the defense attorney insisted that Stone viewed his interview by the House Intelligence Committee as focused on Russia and not WikiLeaks or Assange, despite the fact that Stone was asked directly whether he had any emails or text messages on that topic and said he did not.

“The fact that this was a Russia investigation colored all of his answers,” said Rogow, who also claimed Stone had tried to be forthcoming with Congress. “He goes into this bare naked.”

It’s been widely anticipated that Stone would take the stand in his own defense, but Rogow’s approach Wednesday seemed to leave the door open to the self-described “dirty trickster” not doing so. A defense focused on the announced scope of the House investigation and on Stone’s penchant for provocative boasts might be feasible without testimony from the defendant.

Meet the new Judge Ellis

Close Mueller watchers won’t soon forget U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III, whose gruff manner and blunt orders made for a colorful month as he presided over Manafort’s trial last summer in Alexandria, Va.

Now it’s time to get to know Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a 2011 Obama appointee at the center of the Stone trial.

Jackson is no stranger to the special counsel probe. She’s been the judge on more cases from the Russia investigation than anyone else on the federal bench. She had the initial Mueller case against Manafort and grabbed headlines by ordering his bail revoked after he was charged with witness tampering. (Her Manafort case never went to trial because of a plea deal the Trump campaign chairman cut.)

Jackson also oversaw the cases against Trump campaign vice chairman Rick Gates and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney whose 30-day jail sentence made him the first person to go to prison in the Mueller probe. And she spared a D.C. lobbyist, Sam Patten, from serving jail time after he got ensnared on a foreign-lobbying charge related to the Mueller investigation.

So far in the Stone trial, Jackson hasn’t delivered any of the sharp reprimands to counsel that Ellis was known to dish out, though she clearly is on alert for anything she considers problematic. During Tuesday’s jury selection proceedings, Jackson warned those in the courtroom against audible or visible reactions. She said she’d seen some activity of that sort Tuesday, but she didn’t elaborate.

Jackson has also displayed her sense of humor. She warned jurors not to make or read posts about the case on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook “or anything that’s been invented that I haven’t heard of yet.”

Culinary themes often seem to prod judges to humor, or attempts at it. Jackson on Wednesday made her trademark quip about the low-expectations breakfast the court offers to jurors.

“We can’t promise you an omelet maker, but we will have fruit. We will have pastries.”

 

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The question is, what is America going to do with this knowledge?

 

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"Roger Stone found guilty in federal case"

Spoiler

BREAKING: Roger Stone convicted in federal case over statements to Congress related to WikiLeaks. Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser, was on trial in Washington on charges of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction over his remarks about WikiLeaks’ email releases in the 2016 presidential campaign.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

In the last indictment brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump confidant Roger Stone’s slippery brand of political brawling has been put on trial in a case now before a jury due back Friday for a second day of deliberations.

In hopes of keeping himself out of prison, the veteran Republican operative has asked jurors to treat his case as a referendum not on him but on Mueller’s entire Russia investigation — leading to the only defense at trial of that probe’s importance.

Of the 34 people indicted by Mueller, only two have gone to trial.

Stone’s old consulting colleague Paul Manafort, whose defense also insisted his prosecution was political, was convicted on tax and bank charges in a 2018 trial in federal court in Virginia where Russia went unmentioned.

Lead Stone defense attorney Bruce S. Rogow named Russia in his closing argument 54 times at trial in federal court in Washington.

Accused of lying to a House committee about his efforts to get his hands on hacked Democratic emails released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, then threatening a witness to obstruct the House probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference, Stone argued that his behavior was irrelevant because it was “not about Russian collusion.”

Stone’s lawyers conceded that a raft of emails, texts and extensive other documentation showed Stone claiming inside information on WikiLeaks’ releases and wanting to get even more that could be relayed to the Trump campaign. But in its closing, the defense urged jurors to reframe the question from whether Stone lied to whether that issue mattered.

As Rogow put it, “So much of this case deals with that question that you need to ask . . . so what?”

The question echoed some of Stone’s own sentiments in comments as he allegedly bullied a witness out of testifying before the House committee.

“No one cares,” he twice told talk show host Randy Credico in messages shown in court. Credico invoked his Fifth Amendment protections and declined to answer Congress’s questions.

Stone’s defense repeated his position that there was “no collusion” with Russia on the presidential race and thus any of Stone’s misstatements, as his lawyers cast them, about his WikiLeaks pursuits were inconsequential.

As his lawyers urged the jury to size things up: So Stone didn’t tell the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get information from WikiLeaks — the efforts never amounted to anything. So he didn’t tell them he talked to the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks — that’s not illegal. So he told his old friend Credico not to testify — “These two guys tampered with one another for 20 years over all kinds of crazy things,” Rogow said.

None of it matters, Rogow argued, because “it doesn’t have any kind of connection to Russia.”

It was a line of argument that turned the sardonic prosecutors passionate and earnest.

“Roger Stone doesn’t get to choose which facts he thinks are important and lie about the rest of them,” U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis said in closing arguments.

His colleague, Michael J. Marando, more broadly condemned Stone’s defense as corrosive to civil society.

“If that’s the state of affairs that we’re in, I’m pretty shocked. Truth matters. Truth still matters,” Marando told jurors. “I know we live in a world nowadays with Twitter, tweets, social media where you can find any view, any truth you want.” But in “our institutions of self-governance, to a congressional committee, in our courts of law, truth still matters.”

It matters, the prosecutors said, that the House committee put out an incomplete report based on Stone’s misleading testimony. While he was not accused of obstructing the special counsel investigation, they brought up in closing arguments three times a message in which Stone said of Mueller, “tell him to go f--- himself.”

Stone’s lawyers were barred by Judge Amy Berman Jackson from raising claims about a Ukrainian role in the Democratic email hack — a theory raised by Trump in a July phone call to Ukraine’s president that factors in this week’s impeachment hearings.

But Stone’s lawyers took every chance to pick away at the Russia investigation, spending much of their final words to the jury arguing that not just Stone but the Trump campaign had been unfairly maligned.

“There was nothing illegal about the campaign being interested in information that WikiLeaks was going to be sending out,” Rogow said.

It was a gambit they tried repeatedly before trial, pushing without success for dismissal of Stone’s case on the grounds that the Russia probe was fatally flawed.

Rogow earned a rare mid-argument rebuke at trial from the judge for claiming the FBI had “nothing that shows” the hacker who claimed credit for the email leaks, Guccifer 2.0, “is Russian.” The FBI traced the “Guccifer 2.0” persona to Russian intelligence; the agent who testified at Stone’s trial merely said she had no direct insight into that inquiry.

While Stone maintained that none of his WikiLeaks outreach was successful, prosecutors argued otherwise. They pointed to an email from writer and Stone acquaintance Jerome Corsi, saying: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. . . . Impact planned to be very damaging.”

Corsi referred to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had been living under house arrest at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since 2012.

Corsi says he rejected a plea offer from the special counsel and was never charged with a crime. He has denied having any contact with WikiLeaks, saying as Stone did that he was guessing based on Assange’s public statements.

The charge of witness tampering against Stone carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and the other counts up to five-year terms, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.

Stone did not testify during the trial, which began Nov. 6. Instead jurors saw videos of his television appearances and heard scratchy audio of his appearance before the House committee.

The defense argued that Stone’s voluntary testimony, in which he offered to follow up with more details about the journalist he described as his sole intermediary with WikiLeaks, showed his guilelessness. “This was not the voice of a man who was trying to lie, to mislead,” Rogow said.

But jurors also saw texts in which Stone used vulgarity and threats to pressure that person, Credico, to back up his version of events.

“You are a rat. A stoolie,” he wrote. “Prepare to die.”

Kravis read some of those quotes to the jury, and asked: “Are these the words of a man who believes he told the truth?”

Stone’s reputation as a dirty trickster who courts attention, good or bad, left him a fringe figure in the Republican Party until his friend Trump ran for president.

“Roger is an agent provocateur,” former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told jurors, as he testified for the government about Stone’s exchanges with him over WikiLeaks contact and the campaign’s interest. “He’s an expert in the tougher side of politics.” Trump was such a long shot, Bannon said, that the campaign had to “use every tool in the toolbox.”

Stone himself explained his philosophy in a clip from his House testimony played for jurors. Quoting the writer Gore Vidal, he said, “Never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.”

Not one juror smiled.

 

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Yes! Good!

The odds of him flipping on Trump to avoid jail time have now increased exponentially. Just wait until his sentencing in February, and he's faced with significant time in prison and he'll start squealing.

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1 minute ago, Dandruff said:

Don't want to rain on the parade here...but can he be pardoned?

That is what I was thinking. Trump will pardon like crazy if he can. 

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