Trump associate Stone guilty
Ex-aide faces possible 20 years in prison
WASHINGTON >> Roger Stone, a former aide and longtime friend of President Donald Trump, was found guilty on Friday of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election in what prosecutors said was an effort to protect Trump.
Stone, 67, was charged with lying to the House Intelligence Committee, trying to block the testimony of another potential witness and concealing reams of evidence from investigators. Prosecutors claimed he tried to thwart the committee’s work because the truth would have
“looked terrible” for both the president and his campaign. He was found guilty of all seven counts he was charged with.
The government built its case over the past week with testimony from a friend of Stone and two former Trump campaign officials, buttressed by hundreds of exhibits that exposed Stone’s disdain for congressional and criminal investigators. Confronted with his lies under oath by one associate, prosecutors said, Stone wrote back: “No one cares.” They asked the jurors to deliver a verdict proving him wrong.
The evidence showed that in the months leading up to the 2016 election, Stone strove to obtain emails that Russia had stolen from Democratic computers and funneled to WikiLeaks, which released them at strategic moments timed to damage Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent. Stone briefed the Trump campaign about whatever he had picked up about WikiLeaks’ plans “every chance he got,” Jonathan Kravis, a lead prosecutor, said, but denied to congressional investigators that he did so.
The trial revived the saga of Russia’s efforts to bolster Trump’s chances of winning the White House at the same time that House impeachment investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine, a foreign ally, for help with his 2020 election.
Unfolding in a courtroom just blocks from the
impeachment hearing room on Capitol Hill, the case resurrected a narrative that dogged Trump’s presidency until the two-year investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, ended last spring. Stone was accused of lying to the same House intelligence panel that is now leading the impeachment inquiry.
The jury of nine women and three men deliberated for about seven hours over two days before convicting Stone, a 40-year friend of Trump and well-known political provocateur. Stone listened impassively to the verdict, eyebrows arched and one hand in his pocket. He and his lawyers, still under a gag order imposed by the judge months ago, left the courthouse without comment.
Within minutes of the verdict, Trump protested on Twitter that it was unfair. “So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” Trump
wrote, though his own administration’s Justice Department waged the prosecution.
“Didn’t they lie?” he added before naming nearly a dozen favorite targets of his ire and suggesting they had lied without punishment, including Hillary Clinton, Mueller, the former FBI director James B. Comey and Rep. Adam B. Schiff, who heads the House Intelligence Committee.
Testimony by Rick Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, called into question Trump’s answers to queries from Mueller. Trump, who agreed to respond to questions only in writing rather than sit for an interview, said he could not recall the specifics of any of 21 conversations he had with Stone in the six months before the election. Stone told House investigators that he never discussed his conversations with an intermediary to WikiLeaks with anyone involved in the Trump campaign.
But in one of the trial’s most revealing moments, Gates recounted a July 31, 2016, phone call between Stone and Trump, just days after WikiLeaks had released a trove of emails embarrassing the Clinton campaign. As soon as he hung up with Stone, Gates testified, Trump declared that “more information” was coming, an apparent reference to future releases from WikiLeaks that would rattle his political rival.
Stone, 67, joins a notable list of former Trump aides convicted of lying to federal authorities. It includes Gates; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, and George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide. And his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was also once Stone’s partner in a political consulting firm, was convicted of a string of financial crimes and is serving a 7
½-year prison term.
The most serious charge against Stone, witness tampering, carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. The other charges carry a maximum of five years. But the punishment for a first-time offender like Stone will almost certainly be much lighter.
Working against Stone could be his multiple runins earlier this year with Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the case and will preside over sentencing, set for Feb. 6. After a series of infractions, including posting a photo of the judge with an image of crosshairs next to her head on Instagram in February, she banned him from social media.
After the verdict was announced, prosecutors asked Jackson to order Stone into custody, saying he had violated her gag order by making comments the previous day in a broadcast by Infowars, a far-right website run by Alex Jones. But the judge rejected their motion, saying that in recent months Stone had complied with her orders and proof of a new infraction was not entirely clear.
In a video posted to Infowars, titled “Roger’s Emergency Message To America,” Jones said that Stone had told him that he expected to be convicted and wanted Trump to pardon him. “I appeal to the president to pardon me, because to do so would be an action that would show these corrupt courts that they’re not going to get away with persecuting people for their free speech or for the crime of getting the president elected,” he said Stone told him.