Feds: Stone undermined inquiry
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican political operative Roger Stone undermined the effectiveness of the congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election by repeatedly and deliberately lying under oath to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign avoid embarrassment, prosecutors told jurors in closing arguments at his trial Wednesday.
Defense attorneys countered that Stone had done nothing deliberately illegal and claimed the government’s case was built on conjecture, leaps of logic and unreliable witnesses.
Stone, 67, was indicted in January as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral tampering. A veteran Republican political operative and longtime Trump confidant, Stone is accused of lying to lawmakers about his attempts to communicate with the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, tampering with a witness and obstructing a House Intelligence Committee investigation into whether Trump’s Republican presidential campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election.
The case is expected to go to the jury today after about a week of testimony.
If convicted, Stone could face up to 20 years in prison.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis said Stone lied to protect the Trump campaign from embarrassment. Several witnesses have highlighted how campaign officials were eager to take advantage of the more than 19,000 emails that had been hacked by Russia from the Democratic National Committee and were being released in batches by WikiLeaks in the months before the election.
Steve Bannon, who served as the campaign’s chief executive, testified that Stone had boasted about his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, alerting the campaign to pending new batches of damaging emails. Campaign officials saw Stone as the “access point” to WikiLeaks, he said.
As a result, the campaign looked to Stone to make contact with WikiLeaks and learn more about the content and timing of the upcoming email releases.
“Roger Stone knew that if this information came out, it would look really bad before his longtime friend Donald Trump, so he lied to the committee,” Kravis said. “He not only tried but succeeded in impeding the committee’s investigation.”
Defense attorney Bruce Rogow dismissed the attempts to contact Assange as standard operating procedure for any political campaign.