During the break in Yovanovitch’s testimony, the jury in Roger Stone’s trial came back with a verdict. They found him guilty on all seven counts. That includes a witness tampering charge for Stone’s efforts to dissuade Randy Credico from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, the very same committee leading this impeachment hearing.
The courts are just now imposing consequences for Trump’s efforts to cheat to win the 2016 election, even as he attempts to prevent the one court that can try him for imposing consequences for cheating to win the 2020 election.
To the official records well okay reporting from Spencer Hsu, Rachel Weiner and Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post for the full count.
The panel of nine women and three men deliberated for less than two days before finding Stone, 67, guilty on all seven counts resulting from his September 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, which was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Kremlin’s efforts to damage Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton...
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson set Stone’s sentencing for Feb. 6 and allowed him to remain free until then. Stone faces a legal maximum penalty of 50 years in prison — 20 years for the witness tampering charge and five years for each of the other counts, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.
Stone’s indictment was the last brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, revealing important details about the Trump campaign’s keen interest in computer files hacked by Russia and made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. He was accused of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness, an associate whom prosecutors said Stone threatened in an attempt to prevent the man from cooperating with lawmakers...
The primary thing you need to realize is that Stone is one of those rare special Republicans who's been at the dirty tricks game for decades and thus deserves every inch of hard karma about to get shoved up his keister (via Andrew Prokop at Vox.com):
Stone has had a reputation for political shenanigans since he was a 19-year-old volunteer carrying out dirty tricks to embarrass Richard Nixon’s 1972 Republican primary opponent — something that earned Stone a minor role in the Watergate hearings...
Some guys go to college to get a reputation. Stone had to go to impeachment hearings (oh the irony) to earn his.
As a Republican campaign operative, he worked for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole; as a highly paid lobbyist, he worked alongside his friend Paul Manafort for a host of seedy clients. And he’s long been known as a colorful character who rejoices in the dark side of politics: scandals, smears, division, and negativity. Journalists have called him “the state of the art Washington sleazeball” and the “boastful black prince of Republican sleaze.”
He's been at this game of dirty politics so long that at his age now - late 60s - even a ten-year stint in jail screws up his retirement plans, and he risks the odds of dying in a jail cell of old age. If only they'd arrested him when he was younger, like when he stirred up that Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami during the 2000 Recount. But then he never would have reached his greatest achievement: Fucking over the United States by giving us the Eternal Shitgibbon, trump himself:
Stone also, incredibly enough, spent nearly three decades trying to get Donald Trump for president before Trump actually went through with it. The two met in the mid-1980s, as Trump hired Stone and Manafort’s firm to do lobbying and PR for him. After Trump released his book The Art of the Deal in 1987, Stone urged him to consider running for president the following year, but Trump demurred. In 1999, Stone ran a presidential exploratory committee for Trump — but Trump again ended up not officially running...trump finally bought into what Stone was selling him - noticeably around the same time Obama publicly humiliated him just before Obama gave the order to take out Bin Laden - and from there Stone was both front-office and back-room dirty operative for his boy.
So for all that, absolutely no sympathy for him. Stone was running around shouting "Lock Her Up" for the last four years. Now Hillary can visit him in lockup and just stare at him with a big shit-eating grin for hours on end.
Today's malicious delight out of all the other scandal coverage - trump's Ukraine impeachment inquiry is digging up serious allegations of extortion and bribery - makes me nostaglic, it brings back a lot of fond memories from January of this year when I honored the moment of Stone's arrest with a sweet little ditty "Stone In Jail."
Tweeted this earlier:
Nice to see he's finally getting there.
Save a cell next to him for his boy donald. Given all the exposure trump is getting now for his crimes, it shouldn't be long to wait.
1 comment:
So it's kinda interesting that on the day Fergus live tweeted intimidation about a testifying witness, Roger Stone was convicted of (along with six other felonies) witness intimidation, for which he might do twenty years.
-Doug in Oakland
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