Today, the long-time friend and Trump campaign consultant Roger Stone was sentenced to 40 months in a federal prison for multiple charges relating to his Congressional testimony and Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued Stone’s sentence after his lawyers had first requested that he receive no prison time.
After the sentence was handed down, Stone refrained from making a personal statement to the court.
Normally, one might refrain from criticizing a judge too harshly, but this was no ordinary closing remarks performance, as Judge Jackson seemed to go on forever, attempting to address all of her critics, and seemed compelled to want to justify the premise of the legal proceedings.
After reviewing her statements, to say (and I don’t say this lightly) that she had personal axe to grind is an understatement, and her extended diatribe appears to point to an obvious political agenda.
Judge Jackson wasn’t shy about showing her bias either, remaining in lockstep with the original RussiaGate narrative – even though it’s been proven to be hoax after a 3 year-long Mueller Investigation produced no evidence of alleged ‘Trump-Russia Collusion.’ She clearly attempted to do this here:
“He was not prosecuted for standing up for the president,” said Judge Jackson during her closing remarks. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Only the President did nothing which required covering for.
As that wasn’t enough, the judge went on during her hours-long sentencing hearing to claim that what Roger Stone did was somehow “a threat to our democracy”.
We’re still trying to work out exactly what she is talking about there, or how the 67 year-old Stone became so powerful as to bring down democracy in the United States. I mean, he has certain skills, but take down the United States of America? Here Jackson is dog whistling to the RussiaGate consensus – when in fact there was no collusion between Stone, Trump, WikiLeaks and Russia – nor did Stone have any ‘back channel’ to WikiLeaks. Any rational, objective professional might look at that and conclude that there was no underlying conspiracy which this entire Russia Investigation effort was supposed to uncover.
The truth is, Stone’s entire case was erected to help maintain the RussiaGate narrative, but to help towards delegitimizing Trump’s historic 2016 upset victory. Validating the hoax also helps to fortify a hawkish US foreign policy against Russia, and all the political, geopolitical and military industrial spoils that go with it.
In response to public comments made by Trump about the trial being a farce, Judge Jackson felt compelled to defend her political show trial, exclaiming that, “There was nothing unfair, phony or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution.”
If only it ended there. She kept going, insisting that the Stone case was ‘serious’ and not a joke, which Trump had publicly intimated. “The problem is nothing about this case was a joke,” said Jackson just prior to sentencing Stone. “It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t a stunt and it wasn’t a prank,” said Jackson.
That old Hamlet adage comes to mind, The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Due to the President’s insistence on weighing-in with such vigour, it seems likely that Stone will eventually be pardoned by Trump, but it’s not certain when. Some have speculated that the White House would be better served to wait until after the General Election, but then again, Trump tends to defy the experts on conventional logic.
As I wrote in a feature published this morning at RT International, Roger Stone was simply the last available scalp for the Mueller brigade in order to lend credence to the underlying RussiaGate narrative upon which Stone’s criminal case is built on top of. His criminality was assumed under the guise ‘Trump-Russia Collusion’ which is predicated on the as yet evidence-free official conspiracy theory that Russian GRU operatives hacked the DNC and Podesta and then gave those emails to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. I explained how the underlying assumptions are fallacies and why the underlying assumptions in this case never did raise to the standard of criminality, while all of the little process crimes and reprimand which came during the legal circus was what this judge was compiling to build up Stone’s charge sheet.
In the end, all of this is just more grist to the mill. But for how much longer? The level of panic and desperation surrounding this case, as well as the politicized behavior of the judge and prosecutors – really demonstrated how deeply infected the federal judiciary with partisan propaganda and conspiracy theories of Russian interference which were debunked long ago.
Any reasonable, objective judge or jury would look at this picture and deduce that there were definitely a lot of things going on here (like things that happen during elections, leaks and campaign bluster), but not a crime. For the prosecution, of the supposed ‘crimes’ came long after 2016, as part of the process of trying to prove there was Trump-Russia Collusion, which there wasn’t.
So one should consider Roger Stone as collateral damage in what is perhaps the greatest political hoax in American history.
As @JonathanTurley noted in 2018, “Even if Stone received early word of the WikiLeaks release, it would not necessarily be a crime for Trump, his campaign, or Stone himself.”
That and fact his case assumed #Mueller would get something substantiative. It never did. #RogerStone
— Patrick Henningsen (@21WIRE) February 20, 2020
Of course, very few will step forward and stand-up for a character like Roger Stone, and why would they? He’s a flamboyant political operative who cut his teeth working under Richard Nixon of all people. He’s guy everyone loves to hate, so the support is sparse.
But let’s not forget that back when this all began – it was Stone who told Congress that there was never any Russian involvement. Of course, Stone was right, and the evidence is on his side. Official Washington on the other hand, was wrong. Yet, here we are three years later, still re-litigating an election which happened four years ago.
When will American exercise its 2016 collective trauma and return to some semblance of sanity?
Reprinted with permission from 21st Century Wire.
