GOP operative Roger Stone was sentenced to more than three years in prison on Thursday after days of drama ensnaring career prosecutors, the attorney general and the president over how severe Stone’s punishment should be for making false statements to investigators during the Trump-Russia probe.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, while taking a firm stance toward Stone in the courtroom, also said the up to nine years originally sought by federal prosecutors was excessive. Her sentence of 40 months in prison was considerably less than that — yet far more than the probation sought by his defense and certainly tough enough to keep speculation alive about a possible pardon from President Trump.

In court, Jackson repeatedly made clear she holds Stone responsible for his circumstances, as his lawyers sought leniency.

“Mr. Stone lied,” Jackson said. She also said Stone injected himself “smack” into a political controversy and was not “persecuted.”

The fact that Jackson said the original 9 years was excessive will either be ignored by the left or taken as evidence that she was tainted by Trump’s and Barr’s comments. But it’s the simple truth: it was excessively excessive, and even the left must know that although they’ll never admit it.

However, that’s not what the problem is right now. The problem is twofold. First, the jury foreman and probably several other jurors in his case were extremely biased against him. Second, until other far more important liars such as Brennan, McCabe, Comey, and others are prosecuted for their far more important lies, Stone’s conviction and sentence is just another example of our two-tiered justice system.

I had originally thought Stone was in custody, but that was my error. He’s free on bond.

Next step is that the judge will decide “whether to grant the defense’s motion for a new trial over claims of juror bias.” Let me guess: no, she won’t.

Trump has tweeted the following:

“They say Roger Stone lied to Congress.” @CNN OH, I see, but so did Comey (and he also leaked classified information, for which almost everyone, other than Crooked Hillary Clinton, goes to jail for a long time), and so did Andy McCabe, who also lied to the FBI! FAIRNESS?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2020

Trump can always pardon Stone if he wishes. But he almost certainly won’t do so while Stone is free, and until the appeals go through the system. That should take Trump up to the election and beyond, and if the appeals don’t work I imagine he will pardon him.

The post Roger Stone is sentenced appeared first on The New Neo.

“When the District of Columbia is the venue for any prosecution with political overtones, Justice Department charging decisions must factor in the jury pool, which is solidly anti-Trump,” observed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy…

Justice still awaits government officials who illegally leaked classified information to the media to defame Michael Flynn and Carter Page three years ago. The signers of unlawful FISA applications, including Comey and McCabe, have thus far escaped the “fair administration” of the law while their victim, Page, must live with the consequences of their malfeasance.

No, the only people who have paid a price are associates of Donald Trump. The justice system situated in our nation’s capital is toxic, destructive, and demonstrably unfair.

Barr should move any trial out of Washington—West Virginia or North Carolina, perhaps?—and at least give the accused a fighting chance. Contrary to what Barr’s detractors insist, that’s the only way to legitimately execute impartial justice and restore the rule of law.

It’s been a long long time since I knew much of anything about the rules governing the choice of court venues. And what I once did know is probably quite outdated. So I can’t say exactly what the obstacles would be to such a move. If the decision would be in the hands of the DC US District Court itself, that’s an obvious problem. I don’t know how much leeway Barr or anyone else has. A brief search for clarity on the subject has failed to yield any relevant information so far, but I invite anyone who knows something about it to post in the comments.

I did find this extremely prescient article from a year ago, about how biased Stone’s jury was likely to be. Please read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

U.S. District Court in Washington chooses jury pools strictly from deep-blue D.C. boundaries, a place the president calls “the swamp.”

The Constitution’s Sixth Amendment mandates an “impartial jury.” His 12 jurors would not necessarily be a jury of Mr. Stone’s peers…

Washington has no elected Republican, the last GOP city council member leaving in 2009. Republicans make up just 6 percent of registered voters.

Hillary Clinton garnered 91 percent of the vote in 2016; Mr. Trump 4 percent…

“I think it’s hopeless for Roger Stone to find an impartial jury in Washington, but I’ve lost all faith in the U.S. justice system,” Michael Caputo, a longtime Stone friend and a former Trump campaign adviser, told The Washington Times…

Sidney Powell [who later became Flynn’s appeals lawyer, in June of 2019), an appeals court attorney who has criticized Mr. Mueller’s tactics, told The Times, “It will be impossible for Stone to find an impartial jury in Washington. He should be given a change of venue to some place in the heartland of the country. Washington has become a cesspool of political corruption.”

And this is how Paul Manafort’s request to move his trial fared:

Kevin Downing, who represents former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, asked that his trial in Alexandria be moved to Roanoke, Virginia…

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III turned down the motion.

[ADDENDUM: See this for how jury selection objections went during Stone’s trial:

Jury selection got off to a slow start, with the judge denying most of the requests by defense lawyers to exclude potential jurors they fear could be biased against Stone.

At the outset of Tuesday’s proceedings, Jackson said she would not agree to strike prospective jurors just because they work for the federal government or because they have opinions about Trump.

That warning did not stop Stone’s lawyers from trying to strike the very first one, a woman who once served as a communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget under Democratic President Barack Obama and whose husband is a Justice Department national security attorney.

‘She said credibly she doesn’t have an opinion on this case,’ Jackson said as she denied the motion.

The judge also blocked subsequent efforts by Stone’s defense to strike prospective jurors who worked for the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of whom acknowledged she had voted against Trump.

‘Donald Trump is the chief executive for whom these individuals work,’ Jackson said.

Some prospective jurors were excluded because they indicated the could not put aside their dislike of Trump.

‘I think he’s very corrupt,’ one prospective juror said of Trump.

In other words, as long as a prospective juror said he or she could put aside his/her existing hatred of Trump and all his associates, it was okay with Jackson.

I don’t know whether there was also a request for change of venue. But my hunch is that there may have been – and that, if so, it was denied by Jackson.]

The post On the bias of DC courts and what to do about it appeared first on The New Neo.

Once upon a time, this sort of [juror] bias [as evidenced by Tomeka Hart] would have been something liberals would have recognized as disqualifying. But now, since it hurt Trump and Stone, I predict that the judge, Obama appointee Amy Berman Jackson (who presided over the Manafort trial as well as the Stone trial) will not see it that way.

So today we have this exceedingly unsurprising news, via The Hill:

A federal judge on Tuesday refused to delay Roger Stone’s sentencing amid the fallout over the Trump administration’s decision to intervene in the case against the president’s longtime ally.

The sentencing will move forward on Thursday at its originally scheduled time, the judge said, despite a new effort from Stone’s defense team to get a new trial.

Note the way the entire thing is framed. Those are the first two paragraphs of the story, and the focus is on Trump’s comments (which Barr said did not influence him) rather than anything about Hart. It’s obvious why it’s written that way.

The article doesn’t go into just why Stone’s attorneys are asking for a new trial until paragraph number seven, which goes like this:

It’s unclear what grounds Stone’s legal team is citing in its request for a new trial, but one of the lawyers acknowledged to The Hill last week that it was investigating the social media activity of a member of the jury.

Note how neutrally Hart’s rampant bias is described: “social media activity.” One would think they might just be objecting to her having a Facebook page and posting photos of her vacations.

Then we get to paragraph eight:

Right-wing Stone supporters seized on posts from Tomeka Hart, who served as foreperson for the trial jury, as evidence of bias against the administration after she came forward last week in defense of the prosecution.

I think the authors of that sentence/paragraph from the Hill piece should get an award from the American Association of Subtle Propaganda Writers. It’s really a thing of beauty, designed to get readers to discount such objections (see yesterday’s post of mine for example of what Hart actually wrote).

So, it was “right-wing Stone supporters” who criticized Hart? Like good old Democratic voter Jonathan Turley, who wrote:

[Tomeka Hart] referred to the President with a hashtag of “klanpresident” and spoke out against “Trump and the white supremacist racists.” She posted about how she and others protested outside a Trump hotel and shouted, “Shame, shame, shame!” When profanities were projected on the Trump hotel, she exclaimed on Jan. 13, 2018, “Gotta love it.” On March 24, 2019, she shared a Facebook post — no longer public — while calling attention to “the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in 45’s inner-circle.”

More worrisome are her direct references to Stone, including a retweeted post, in January 2019, from Bakari Sellers, again raising racist associations and stating that “Roger Stone has y’all talking about reviewing use of force guidelines.” She also described Trump supporters such as Stone as racists and Putin cronies…

It certainly seems Hart had no place on the Stone jury. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that the “minimal standards of due process” demand “a panel of impartial, indifferent jurors.” Hart’s record suggests little that is impartial or indifferent. She was perfectly within her right to engage in such commentary and protests — but she had no right to sit in judgment of an associate of the president after her public declarations. Her participation raises serious arguments for setting aside the verdict, from the possibility of ineffective counsel to the denial of due process.

Turley is far from being a “right-wing Stone supporter.” What he is, however, is a person who loves the rule of law and tries to defend and support it impartially. And he is not alone; many of the people who are pointing out Hart’s bias are not what you’d call “Stone supporters,” although the authors of that Hill piece would have you think so, the better to discount the criticism of Hart.

Then of course, we have one of the favorite MSM verbs: “seized” (variant: “pounced”), as in “right-wing Stone supporters seized on posts from Tomeka Hart.” It indicates some sort of desperate, aggressive attention to something relatively innocuous.

And the Hill authors conclude this short-but-fully-packed sentence this way: “as evidence of bias against the administration after she came forward last week in defense of the prosecution.”

That is literally true; it is indeed when Hart’s social media posts were spotlighted. But the implication is that these “right-wing supporters” of Stone’s suddenly seized on Hart’s previously ignored posts only because she had the nerve to support the stalwart Stone prosecutors. But actually, until she outed herself at that point, no one had any idea what her identity was and therefore no one was able to scrutinize and criticize her social media posts for bias until her defense of the prosecution revealed her identity.

That is conveniently left out of the article entirely. And it goes on to talk about Trump again, and his criticism of the prosecution team.

There is also mention of this:

Jackson said that she has not decided whether to have a hearing on the defense motion, but said that it would be best to move forward with Thursday’s hearing and delay the sentence from going into effect until the motion is decided.

What’s the big old rush to sentence Stone? Has she really not decided on the motion? I would be astounded, utterly astounded, if she were to grant it. I think she just wants to get this over with and hopes the attention is away from her when she refuses to grant the motion. Otherwise, why not delay the sentencing a little while, if there’s any hope of granting a new trial?

I am going to assume that if things go as I predict, this case will be appealed and may wind up in the hands of SCOTUS. Meanwhile, Roger Stone will be in prison for less than the sort of thing that earned Andrew McCabe a nice gig with CNN.

The post Judge Amy Brennan Jackson plans to go full steam ahead with sentencing Stone appeared first on The New Neo.