The picture I get from reading this article by Jeffrey Toobin, is that
Roger Stone is cloned from the same pile of Bull Shit that Donald
Trump comes from.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/16/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This author usually explains legal stuff. That's why I read the article.
I've been trying to figure out what Roger Stone really did, what did they
find him guilty of. So now I've read the article, and I'm more confused
than
I was before. Is he going to jail because he lies a lot?
Miriam
Roger Stone's Crimes
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
16 November 19
Roger Stone is now a convicted felon, which is one honorific he had avoided
during his decades of tumultuous public life. He was convicted on Friday of
witness tampering and making false statements to the House Intelligence
Committee, on an indictment obtained earlier this year by the office of the
special counsel Robert Mueller. Stone has a tattoo on his back of Richard
Nixon, his first political hero, and I suspect Stone is about to discover
the difference between Nixon and the other President whose interests he has
served, Donald Trump.
Through more than a decade of covering Stone, writing several stories about
him, I've learned that government policy has never been a particular
interest of his. "I'm a libertarian and a libertine," he once told me,
which
seemed to sum up both his ideology and his life style pretty well. What
interests him is the cacophony of politics-the struggle of one party, or
one
candidate, to crush another. He talked often about the concepts of
toughness
and loyalty, which are his highest values, and the ones he associates most
closely with Nixon. Trump's fortunes have always waxed and waned, but Stone
has stayed loyal to him; Trump's first flirtation with a Presidential run,
in the late nineteen-eighties, was midwifed by Stone.
Stone's troubles-and now his downfall-came about because he is, to put it
charitably, a bullshit artist. He is a rare political figure who
exaggerates
his evil deeds rather than his good ones. When I first profiled him, in
2008, he claimed major roles in such varied scandals as the so-called
Brooks
Brothers riot, during the 2000 Florida recount, and the prostitution bust
that brought down the New York State governor Eliot Spitzer, in 2008. (His
role in both remains unclear.) It was this perverse kind of boastfulness
that led to Mueller's case against him.
Stone was a peripheral player in Trump's 2016 campaign. Like so many people
associated with Trump, he was publicly fired but remained a phone pal of
the
candidate. After his firing, Stone found his way back into the campaign's
inner circles thanks to his purported familiarity with WikiLeaks, which, in
July, 2016, released thousands of e-mails that had been stolen from the
Democratic National Committee. That kind of dirty trick was deeply
appealing
to Stone, and he tried to become a conduit between WikiLeaks and the
campaign. Notably, as came out in the trial, he apparently had several
conversations with Trump himself about the WikiLeaks disclosures-something
Trump denied under oath, in his written answers to Mueller.
The lies for which Stone was convicted reveal his longing to be involved in
the Trump campaign more than any real connection he might have had to it.
He
was asked by the House Intelligence Committee whether he had any e-mails
regarding the hacked documents released by WikiLeaks. "Not to my
knowledge,"
he answered. In fact, he had exchanged dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails
about WikiLeaks, many with Randy Credico, an eccentric radio host and
comedian in New York. Those e-mails showed Stone puffing about his
connections to the group-which he exaggerated significantly. Still, his lie
about the e-mails doomed him in court. Another lie involved his denial that
he had tried to get more information from WikiLeaks. Clearly, Stone did
try-but he failed to get the information he sought.
After Stone's conviction, Trump released an indignant tweet complaining
that
Stone had been prosecuted though many of the President's enemies had not.
No
one should expect that Stone, now facing the prospect of a prison sentence,
will turn on Trump and provide incriminating evidence. That's against the
code by which Stone has lived his life; more important, Stone was so far
outside Trump's inner circle that it's unlikely that he has much evidence
to
provide.
President Trump has also hinted that he will consider pardons for all of
his
associates who have been convicted or pleaded guilty as a result of the
Russia investigation. This includes Paul Manafort, Trump's onetime campaign
chairman (and Stone's onetime business partner). But Stone, as a veteran of
Trump's world, knows that loyalty is a one-way street for the President:
Trump expects it but does not provide it. A pardon might impose a political
cost on Trump, and he almost certainly won't be willing to pay it, at least
until he's a lame duck. It's a lonely feeling to be convicted by a jury,
and
Stone is likely to remain on his own-as least as far as the President is
concerned-for the foreseeable future.
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