Today’s sentencing hearing for political activist Roger Stone was preceded by quite an unusual amount of drama, and we surely aren’t finished with it just yet.
Stone, a longtime friend of President Donald Trump, had been convicted of lying to Congress and manipulating witnesses during the investigation into the theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. At the end of that probe, no new charges were handed down to the President, but Stone and others found themselves indicted on account of how they handled themselves with investigators – not with the Russians.
At first, Stone was facing up to nine years in prison; a sentence that was unacceptable to President Trump, as he made clear via tweet.
That insinuation kicked off a whole slew of other issues within the Department of Justice, that eventually led to Attorney General Bill Barr threatening to resign.
On Thursday, Stone was sentenced, and it appears as though the President’s tweet may have played a role in how it all shook out.
A federal judge sentenced President Donald Trump’s friend, longtime Republican operative Roger Stone, on Thursday to more than three years in prison for lying to Congress and tampering with a witness in an effort to protect Trump.
“He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the president, he was prosecuted for covering up for the president,” said Judge Amy Berman Jackson about Stone, who showed no visible emotion when he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
“The truth still exists, the truth still matters. Roger Stone’s insistence that it doesn’t … are a threat to our most fundamental institutions,” Jackson said in a blistering denunciation of Stone, who lied about efforts to obtain damaging emails related to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign that were stolen by Russian agents.
The judge said that Stone’s crimes should arouse “dismay and disgust” that “transcend” political affiliation, before ordering him to serve 40 months in prison, pay a $20,000 fine, spend two years of supervised release and perform 250 hours of community service.
Stone won’t be reporting to prison until another procedural hearing, as the agent provocateur has now requested a new trial.
It is widely believed that President Donald Trump is considering pardoning Stone, which was made all the more obvious by the Commander in Chief’s retweeting of a video depicting Tucker Carlson rallying for just such an outcome.
