Can someone give me the simpletons version of events here? Someone told Assange about Hillary’s email server breach? We don’t know who that is, but suspect it was the Russians. Stone caught wind of it from Assange, and asked Wikileaks to publish the account.
In all that I see nothing illegal. Only crime appears to be that now Stone says he never had contact with Wikileaks?
Sure
Someone told Assange about Hillary’s email server breach? We don’t know who that is, but suspect it was the Russians. Stone caught wind of it from Assange, and asked Wikileaks to publish the account.
In all that I see nothing illegal. Only crime appears to be that now Stone says he never had contact with Wikileaks?
No, that's not remotely what happened.
Stone, who was a hanger on to the Trump campaign, was pretending that he was in contact with Julian Assange, but was not.
He was using his make believe contact with Assange to ingratiate himself with the Trump campaign, like he could help them get the dirt early, or could tell them when the dirt was coming, none of which was true.
He was grifting. He was pretending to know things he did not know.
That is not a crime.
Eighteen months later Mueller was investigating whether Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Russians. And the House was conducting a shadow investigation, talking to some of the same players, sometimes in private session, but often in public session to keep the narrative alive.
Someone said, in their deposition or committee appearance to (one of these two groups of) investigators that:
"Well this guy Roger Stone was the Trump campaign conduit to Assange".
And they "knew" this because that's the story that Roger Stone had been telling people, but it was a lie. He'd been pretending that was true. But it was not.
Now, if that had been true, we would still have an argument about whether that constitutes "coordination" or "collusion" or any of the emotionally charged words they get thrown around by anti-Trump zealots. But it was not true. So, that's not even an issue.
At some point the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence decided to ask Stone about his contacts with Assange, who one (or more) reliable people have told them "Said he was in contact with Julian Assange for the Trump campaign".
Now: the truthful answers to the questions he was asked were:
He also doubled down on his "no records claim" saying he never communicated with the intermediary in writing, and therefore had no records of his communication with him. This was a lie.
Stone then made things much worse for himself, by trying to get the intermediary to lie and say he had been acting as a go-between with Assange, when he had not.
In fact in the notes between them the intermediary basically told Stone "I'm not going to lie for you".
SUBJECT: “Back channel bs.”In the email, Person 2 wrote, “Well I have put together timelines[] and you [] said you have a back-channel way back a month before I had [the head of Organization 1] on my show . . . I have never had a conversation with [the head of Organization 1] other than my radio show . . . I have pieced it all together . . .so you may as well tell the truth that you had no back-channel or there’s the guy you were talking about early August.”
This was good free advice. If Stone had followed it he would not be going to jail. But he didn't. He continued to hound the intermediary to try to get him to tell lies to the Mueller prosecutors, who were, by this time, investigating the crime of lying to the HPCI that Stone had engaged in.
The intermediary, wisely, continued to refuse to lie for Stone.
Again, their are written emails of all this, it's not "he said / she said":
On multiple occasions, including on or about December 1, 2017, STONE told Person 2 that Person 2 should do a “Frank Pentangeli” before HPSCI in order to avoid contradicting STONE’s testimony. Frank Pentangeli is a character in the film The Godfather: Part II, which both STONE and Person 2 had discussed, who testifies before a congressional committee and in that testimony claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know.
It got pretty heated between them, and eventually Stone theatened him, again in email:
On or about April 9, 2018, STONE wrote in an email to Person 2, “You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds.” STONE also said he would “take that dog away from you,” referring to Person 2’s dog. On or about the same day, STONE wrote to Person 2, “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].”
Roger Stone didn't want the world, and Team Trump, to find out that he was bullshitting about communicating with Asssange. He didn't want his grifting to be discovered. He lied, he lied about the existence of evidence, he tried to get someone else to lie for him , and when that didn't work he threatened him.
Thus he was charged with
Now, one can argue that other people also lied and were not charged, or people lie all the time in Congress, and that this was part of a larger "Witch Hunt", and that is probably all true.
But still Stone did lie all over the place, and for no good reason.
He was certainly NOT protecting the Presdient, quite the opposite. If he had not started in on his original lies, to Team Trump, then a whole leg of the "Trump Collusion" narrative would have
never even come into existence.
Mueller investigated Trump's "coordination" with Assange because Roger Stone was out there saying he was doing it, even though we now know he was not!
It seems like no one else even bothered to look at the charges and read the reporting on the trial.
It's not that complicated. Stone lied,obstructed justice, and witness tampered. He did all this out of vanity, to continue to pretend he knew things he didn't know, to support his persona of being the connected fixer, when he was just a guy reading Twitter feeds. His vanity was destructive. It hurt Trump, and it hurt our understanding of what was going on. It gave lots of (dummy) ammunition to Trump Narrative Constructors, like CNN and NBC.
He deserves to be found guilty, if "guilty" mean anything anymore.