If anything is true about 2020 it is that this entire endeavor is being steered by quite the cast of characters, and they get stranger the closer that you get to Washington DC.
Of course, this has always been true. Some of the stories that they would tell about LBJ were so lewd that they’d be difficult to print here without first deftly explaining an entire secret code of words and meanings.
But, of all the strange cookies that we’ve seen over the years, none has had the enduring, and sometimes endearing, eccentricity of Roger Stone: The longtime political provocateur who first become a household name several decades ago, during the Nixon administration.
Almost too coincidentally for words, Stone was also intimately involved in the affairs of the Watergate scandal – and now, too, he finds himself acquainted with an impeached man.
Except, this time go-round, Roger Stone is set to go away for a long time – a death sentence according to him – and he is practically begging for the President to pardon him.
“I’m looking at a virtual death sentence in two weeks,” declared Stone, of his prison sentence scheduled to begin on July 14. “Wayne County has five hundred employees who work in the correctional facility. The infection rate in Wayne County today is 25 percent of the the population and growing.”
Stone continued, “There’s no use of masks or gloves in [Federal Correctional Institution, Jesup]. There is no mandatory washing, and obviously there is no social distancing. This is a death sentence. It’s purposeful. There’s no question.”
“I’m 69 years old,” added Stone. “I’ve had asthma my entire life. Sending me to Georgia, to Jessup, immediately, is a death sentence. Actually, that’s the idea, and here’s why, Judge Amy Berman Jackson cannot afford to have my appeal get to a hearing, because when I do get to a hearing, I will expose her [and] the epic corruption of the clerks, and the epic corruption of the prosecutors. It’s the end of the line for them. They need Roger Stone to die in a squalid hellhole of coronavirus.”
President Trump has made no indication that a possible pardon was coming for Stone, despite their deep and lengthy friendship.
