Roger Stone Just Got Sentenced to 3 Years and 4 Months in Prison
Credit to Author: Greg Walters| Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:42:48 +0000
WASHINGTON — Roger Stone just got three years and four months in prison for lying about his attempts to establish a backchannel between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and WikiLeaks, the group that leaked Democratic emails hacked by Russian spies before the election.
Stone, the infamous GOP political trickster, was charged by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and convicted on all seven counts against him, including false statements and witness tampering. But speculation is rife that he may soon get a pardon from his friend, Trump, the man prosecutors and the judge said Stone lied to protect.
In sentencing Stone, Judge Amy Berman Jackson slapped down Trump and Stone’s argument that he was merely targeted because of his support for Trump.
“He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the president,” Jackson told the court. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Stone was charged with lying to Congress during Mueller’s two-year Russia investigation, and arrested in a pre-dawn raid of his Florida home in January 2019. His trial quickly devolved into weird drama thanks to Stone’s predilection for provocative posts on social media about his own case — resulting in a gag order from the judge, a total ban on using Instagram or Twitter, and repeated hearings over whether he’d violated his gag order or not.
All four prosecutors quit the case last week after Trump’s attorney general William Barr personally intervened to ask the judge for a lighter sentence for the president’s friend. Prosecutors originally asked for 7-9 years. But in a revised filing, Barr’s new team asked for “far less.”
The sentence caps a turbulent and occasionally bizarre trial that began with flamboyant courtroom antics by Stone and ended in a titanic dispute over his sentencing that raised troubling questions about the rule of law in America.
Cover: Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, center, and his wife Nydia Stone arrive at federal court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. (Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This article originally appeared on VICE US.