The trial in federal court in Washington turns on accusations that Stone lied to Congress about his attempts to learn more about what WikiLeaks would publish and when it would do so. But some testimony also raises questions about the president’s written assertions under oath that he did not recall being aware of communications between Stone and WikiLeaks or recall any conversations about WikiLeaks between Stone and members of his campaign.
Tag: Roger Stone
Ex-Trump campaign official testifies Stone gave updates on WikiLeaks email dumps
President Trump‘s former deputy campaign manager told a jury on Tuesday that Roger Stone was giving the campaign updates on WikiLeaks’s plans to release damaging emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s campaign chairman.
Richard Gates, who is facing up to ten years in prison under a plea agreement for various fraud charges, testified in Stone’s criminal trial on Tuesday, saying that the longtime Trump associate was telling the campaign about WikiLeaks’s plans as early as April 2016, months before the DNC had announced it was hacked.
It had not been previously known that Stone was updating the campaign about WikiLeaks that early.
View the complete November 12 article by Harper Neidig on The Hill website here.
Bannon testifies that Trump campaign saw Stone as link to WikiLeaks
Stephen Bannon, President Trump‘s former White House adviser and campaign CEO, testified in court on Friday that the campaign saw Roger Stone as a potential intermediary with WikiLeaks.
“I think it was generally believed that the access point or potential access point to WikiLeaks was Roger Stone,” Bannon testified at Stone’s criminal trial.
“I was led to believe he had a relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange,” he added, referring to the site’s founder.
View the complete November 8 article by Harper Neidig on The Washington Post website here.
Alex Jones threatened to name a Roger Stone juror. Experts say that might be jury tampering.
On the first day of political consultant Roger Stone’s trial in federal court in Washington, D.C., on charges of false statements and witness tampering, Judge Amy Berman Jackson cautioned people in the courtroom against releasing jurors’ names.
But Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was undeterred, the Daily Beast first reported. Ignoring her warning, Jones broadcast on his show the name and face of an individual who he believed had been seated on Stone’s jury, calling the person an anti-Trump “minion” and launching a flurry of witness tampering and obstruction of justice allegations.
Although Jones held up a photo of a person who had no connection to the Stone trial, legal experts maintained the effect was the same as if the person had been a juror.
View the complete November 7 article by Deanna Paul on The Washington Post website here.
‘The truth looked bad for Donald Trump’: Here are 5 stunning moments from the first day of Roger Stone’s trial
Roger Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, finally faced a jury of his peers on Wednesday as the first full day of his trial began.
He stands accused of lying to Congress, obstructing Congress, and witness tampering in the course of the Russia investigation. Stone, who has spent a career billing himself as a political “dirty trickster” and is known for, among other things, proudly showing off a Richard Nixon tattoo on his back, denies the allegations.
But the U.S. Justice Department maintains it has substantial documentary evidence to prove its allegations, and it began to make its case to the jury on Wednesday, some of which had already been laid out in Stone’s indictment.
View the complete November 7 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
Stone Trial Links Trump More Closely to 2016 Effort to Obtain Stolen Emails
Newly revealed calls between President Trump and Roger Stone dovetailed with key developments in the theft of Democratic emails, prosecutors said.
WASHINGTON — President Trump was more personally involved in his campaign’s effort to obtain Democratic emails stolen by Russian operatives in 2016 than was previously known, phone records introduced in federal court on Wednesday suggested.
Federal prosecutors disclosed the calls at the start of the criminal trial of Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime friend, who faces charges of lying to federal investigators about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. Russian intelligence officers had funneled tens of thousands of emails they stole from Democratic computers to WikiLeaks, which released them at critical points during the presidential race.
The records suggest that Mr. Trump spoke to Mr. Stone repeatedly during the summer of 2016, at a time when Mr. Stone was aggressively seeking to obtain the stolen emails from Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. The prosecutors noted that they did not know what Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump had discussed. But they stressed that the timing of their calls dovetailed with other key developments related to the theft and release of the Democratic emails.
View the complete November 6 article by Sharon LaFraniere on The New York Times website here.
Prosecutor says Roger Stone lied ‘because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump’
Stone’s trial is the last case filed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and prosecutors wasted little time drawing a straight line from Stone’s alleged crimes to Trump’s political interests.
Judge Slaps Roger Stone With Social Media Restriction For Violating Order
Roger Stone has repeatedly risked his pre-trial freedom as he awaits the court battle over the charges brought against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And once again on Tuesday, he skirted free of ending up in jail even as Judge Amy Berman Jackson found that he had violated her court order limiting his public comments about the case against him.
Instead of revoking his bail, Judge Jackson banned him from posting on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook while his trial is pending.
“The clarity of my order is undisputed,” said Jackson. “It didn’t take a week before the defendant was emailing BuzzFeed, calling a witness in this investigation a liar.”
View the complete July 16 article by Cody Fenwick from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.
How Roger Stone’s Trial May Expose Trump’s Wrongdoing
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office is no more, but the legacy of his office lives on.
One major component of that legacy is the prosecution Roger Stone, President Donald Trump’s longtime ally and friend, who is facing charges of misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness. He is currently scheduled to go to trial in November 2019, an event that could refocus the nation’s attention on Trump’s complicity with Russia’s attacks on the 2016 election. It could also expose troubling new details about Trump’s connections to WikiLeaks.
As reporter Marcy Wheeler noted in a new blog post Thursday about the Stone case, many of the most intriguing redactions in the Mueller report relate to right-wing firebrand. The Justice Department, with good reason, redacted information related to Stone to preserve his right to a fair trial.
View the complete May 30 article by Cody Fenwick from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.
Roger Stone’s lawyers tell judge: We didn’t try to hide anything
Lawyers for longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone told a federal judge Monday that they were not trying to hide anything from the court at a gag-order-related hearing last month where they failed to mention that Stone was in the midst of releasing a book trashing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
In a submission ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, Stone attorney Bruce Rogow said it did not occur to him until after the Feb. 21 hearing that the newly crafted introduction for a paperback edition of Stone’s book on the 2016 campaign might land him in hot water.
“Reading for the first time the New Introduction, while waiting for a plane back to Fort Lauderdale, brought the issue home and led to the Motion to Clarify,” wrote Rogow and other lawyers defending Stone against false-statement and witness-tampering charge.
View the complete March 11 article by Josh Gerstein on the Politico website here.