Judge sentences Trump adviser Roger Stone to 40 months in prison

WASHINGTON — After excoriating Roger Stone for his lies and “belligerence,” a federal judge on Thursday ordered President Trump’s longtime political adviser to serve three years and four months in prison — a stiff sentence for most white-collar defendants but far less than the seven to nine years originally recommended by federal prosecutors.

As Stone stood grimly before her, scowling at times with his hands tucked inside his pants, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson berated him for deliberately and repeatedly obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, a subject of “national and international significance.”

And she dismissed as groundless the claims of Stone and his supporters that he was being persecuted because of his forceful advocacy on behalf of Trump.

Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president,” she said. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”

Roger Stone leaves Federal Court after a sentencing hearing February 20, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Roger Stone leaves federal court in Washington after his sentencing hearing on Thursday. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Jackson’s comments capped a tumultuous week of controversy over Stone’s sentencing that has roiled the Justice Department. Four federal prosecutors withdrew from the case, and Attorney General William Barr appeared to threaten to resign over Trump’s repeated tweets about matters before the department involving his political friends and perceived enemies.

The impact of that controversy on the Justice Department was readily apparent during the hearing when John Crabb Jr., the new assistant U.S. attorney placed in charge of the case, backtracked and advocated for enhanced sentencing guidelines for Stone that, only days earlier, the department had withdrawn.

Stone was convicted in November of seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering related to his attempts to interact with WikiLeaks about documents — hacked by Russian military intelligence agents — that the group released in the closing weeks of the 2016 election as part of an apparent effort to undercut Hillary Clinton and boost Trump’s candidacy.

When called to testify before the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, Stone falsely claimed he had learned about WikiLeaks’ document dump from a “back channel” that he identified as comedian and radio talk show host Randy Credico. He also testified he had no emails or texts with Credico about WikiLeaks, when, in fact, as Jackson noted, he had 1,500 such communications, including several in which he coaxed the comedian to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to testify before Congress and later threatened him with menacing words that Jackson read to the court, complete with an expletive: “Prepare to die, c***sucker.”

The threats to Credico were at the heart of the dispute over how long Stone, a self-styled dirty trickster and political provocateur, should serve in prison. His indictment grew out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and the prosecutors who brought it last week filed a memo recommending seven to nine years in prison — an unusually harsh sentence that they based in large part on an enhancement under the sentencing guidelines for threats to a witness involving possible physical violence.

In a virtually unprecedented series of events, that memo was quickly withdrawn by Barr’s office only hours after it had been filed. After the original prosecutors who filed it withdrew from the case (and one of them resigned from the department altogether), Crabb was ordered to file a new sentencing memo that, while recommending Stone’s incarceration, did not endorse the proposed enhancement and offered no opinion as to how long he should be behind bars.

But on Thursday, after more than 2,000 former federal prosecutors called on Barr to resign, Crabb reversed the department’s position yet again and told Jackson the enhanced levels for witness tampering involving threats of violence should apply after all.

Supporters of Roger Stone with a banner that reads "#PardonRogerStone" wait outside federal court in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020.  (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Supporters of Roger Stone wait outside federal court in Washington on Thursday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

“I want to apologize to the court,” Crabb told Jackson about the whipsawing series of positions taken by the department in the case. He emphasized the original prosecution memo was written “in good faith” and that the court “should impose a substantial period of incarceration,” although he still declined to make a specific recommendation as to how long.

The reversal seemed to take Jackson by surprise; she sought to drill down and question Crabb about how and why the strange series of events had taken place. Crabb said the original memo was withdrawn because there had been a “miscommunication” between Barr and his newly appointed U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Tim Shea.

But when Jackson pressed for more detail — and questioned Crabb on whether he wrote the second memo or was ordered to put his name on it when it was actually written by somebody else — he declined to answer. “I’m not at liberty to discuss our internal deliberations,” he told her.

The dispute about the witness-tampering charge was complicated by Credico, who during his trial testimony said he never actually believed that Stone would carry through on one of his threats: to take away Credico’s service dog, Bianca. The comedian then wrote a letter to Jackson urging her not to send Stone to prison at all, insisting he never felt threatened by him, concluding that Stone’s menacing words were just “Roger being Roger” and that he was “all bark and no bite.”

But Jackson at first seemed to dismiss that argument, saying that under the law, what Credico perceived was less significant than what Stone actually wrote in his texts and emails. “It’s nice that Credico has forgiven Stone. But that says more about Credico than it does Stone,” she said.

And she pointed out that Stone engaged in similar conduct during the course of his trial, using social media to make apparent threats, including one showing an image of Jackson herself in the crosshairs of a target.

Roger Stone accompanied by his wife Nydia Stone, left, arrives for his sentencing at federal court in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Roger Stone, accompanied by his wife, Nydia, arrives for his sentencing on Thursday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

“This is intolerable to the administration of justice,” Jackson said. “This court cannot sit idly by and say that’s just Roger being Roger.”

But she seemed to reserve her toughest words for an argument made by Stone’s lawyers and in their summation to the jury — that none of Stone’s lies to the House Intelligence Committee mattered because neither that panel nor Mueller’s probe itself established that Stone was ever really in communication with WikiLeaks or any Russian agents.

Their argument seems to be “so what?” Jackson said, her voice dripping with contempt. “So what?” She then answered her question: “The truth” still matters.

Congress and Mueller’s team were trying to discover how Stone seemed to be conveying inside information to the Trump campaign about emails hacked by Russians and released by WikiLeaks. “The defendant is free to say, so what? Who cares?” Jackson said. “Congress cared, the U.S. Department of Justice cared ... and the American people cared.”

Stone may never have actually been a co-conspirator with WikiLeaks and Russian hackers. But his efforts to find out what WikiLeaks had — and then feed that information to top officials of the Trump campaign and Trump himself — were not something the president wanted to be publicly told. “He understood full well it would reflect poorly on the president,” said Jackson.

But for all her tough words, Jackson made clear that the controversy over the Justice Department’s handling of the case would not affect her decision about what sentence to apply. After pointing out that she had gotten many favorable letters about charitable acts by Stone — on behalf of veterans, animals and NFL players suffering from brain injuries — she delivered her sentence of 40 months in federal prison.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News: