by George Ralsey, CHQ Editor
Roger Stone, our old friend and former colleague at the Viguerie organization, has been in the Democrats’ crosshairs for many years, and through the vehicle of the Trump – Russia hoax, and its illegitimate spawn, the Mueller investigation, they found the perfect vehicle to destroy our old friend and one of the great warriors of conservative politics.
Mr. Stone was hauled before Congress to testify about his communications with Wikileaks regarding the leaking of Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign emails.
Mind you, he wasn’t accused of being the hacker or leaker (God bless you Seth Rich) he was merely suspected of being in touch with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and perhaps getting a heads-up about when the leaks were going to hit the media.
None of that was illegal or improper; especially in the context of the Democrats’ use of the foreign actor-produced, Hillary Clinton-paid-for, Steele dossier to defame President Trump.
But Roger failed to correctly recall the details of some email traffic he had with others who may or may not have been in communication with Assange, and he communicated with another witness involved in this perfectly legal conduct.
Eager for payback for Stone’s decades-long association with President Trump and the many other times Roger had a hand in humiliating the Democrats, Mueller’s 12 angry Democrats (or was it 20) charged him with lying to Congress when he appeared voluntarily as a witness in 2017 and added a trumped-up charge of witness tampering for communicating with a long-time associate about the case.
Roger Stone’s subsequent trial was a complete travesty of justice. As former Congressman, attorney and insightful legal mind Bob Barr wrote in the Daily Caller:
The federal judge assigned to preside over Stone’s federal trial was the same Obama-appointed judge who handled Mueller’s case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the still-languishing cases Mueller brought against several Russians accused of hacking Democrat National Committee computers in 2016. The appointment of Judge Amy Berman Jackson was far from a random assignment, as is supposed to be the norm.
It is noteworthy that aspects of the government’s prosecution of Stone bear an eerie resemblance to those of the Ukraine telephone-call controversy that lit the fuse for the Democrats’ impeachment of Trump.
For example, the individual who Stone allegedly threatened, and which formed the basis for the witness tampering charge against him, denied under oath at the trial that he ever felt threatened by Stone – precisely how Ukraine President Zelensky described the July 25, 2019 phone call with President Trump that the Democrats claimed was coercive and threatening.
Also, some of the government’s evidence against Stone was based on an uncorroborated, allegedly incriminatory 2016 phone call between Stone and President Trump involving leaks of information to Wikileaks. Former Manafort associate and convicted felon Rick Gates testified that he overheard the alleged call, even though he was not a party to it and could not hear the actual conversation. Both President Trump and Stone denied the conversation ever took place, but Judge Berman Jackson permitted the government to use it to convict Stone based on the second-hand, non-party testimony of Gates.
What’s more, in another eerie similarity to the impeachment of President Trump, Judge Amy Berman Jackson stacked the jury with anti-Trump Democrat activists.
As independent journalist Mike Cernovich reported via his Twitter feed, and Debra Heine explained in an article for American Greatness, the jury foreman on the Roger Stone trial came forward on social media Wednesday to defend the four prosecutors who withdrew from the case after the Department of Justice overruled their excessive sentencing recommendation.
A Facebook post written by Tomeka Hart, the senior program officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was picked up by multiple news outlets. But, as Ms. Heine wrote, the reports left out some highly pertinent details about her background—namely that Hart is a hyperpartisan Democratic Party activist who is rabidly anti-Trump and a Russia-collusion truther.
Hart, who has a law degree from the University of Memphis and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, also posted pictures of herself hanging out with Donna Brazile, the former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee; as Shem Horne (@Shem_Infinite) tweeted, “This isn’t just an average person that dislikes the President, she was marching past his hotel with a crowd chanting “SHAME” and booing.”
Mike Cernovich plowed through Hart’s social media and found there are dozens of posts expressing hatred for Trump, which is her right as a citizen, but how did she get on a jury involving Trump’s longtime close friend?
That’s a very good question that some are now beginning to investigate.
Some have questioned why Stone’s legal team didn’t raise objections to jurors like Ms. Hart during voir dire, but, according to numerous sources, federal criminal trials have limited voir dire, and Stone’s attorneys were allegedly not allowed to question jurors about political bias. However, a review of the voir dire transcript would certainly reveal if Ms. Hart lied about her politics or her obvious bias against President Trump and his associates.
Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano, certainly no friend of President Trump, and civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz, who was on Trump’s impeachment defense team, have both advanced arguments that Tomeka Hart’s post-trial statements are clear grounds for a new trial.
“[Stone is] absolutely entitled to a new trial with a member of a jury making these types of revelations about the politics involved in the decisions to prosecute him,” Napolitano said on “Fox & Friends.”
“It is the duty of the judge to ensure that both the government and defendant get a fair trial, and if the judge discovers afterward that there was a built-in inherent bias on the part of a member of a jury against the defendant, that is an automatic trigger for a new trial,” he later explained. “[U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson is] going to have to call those jurors back in and interrogate them or make a decision on the spot.”
But a new trial, with the potential for exoneration, is hardly a win for Roger Stone. Mr. Stone and his wife, like Gen. Mike Flynn, Michael Caputo, Hope Hicks and other innocent Americans caught up in the Trump – Russia hoax, have been nearly bankrupted by the cost of his defense. At age 67, forced to sell his home and spend his life savings defending himself, sustaining the cost of another trial may not be in the cards for Roger Stone.
But maybe that’s part of the punishment Democrats had in mind, when they trumped-up the charges against Roger.
Serious and credible questions about the government’s motives and conduct of the investigation and prosecution of Roger Stone, including seating a tainted jury, have been raised. The vehemence by which the Mueller prosecutors continued to pursue Stone, including demands that he be taken into custody immediately upon sentencing later this month, belies its claims of fairness and due process.
We urge President Trump to step in and exercise his pardon power to right the wrongs perpetrated against Roger Stone.
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Photo “Roger Stone” by Roger Stone.
