WASHINGTON -- Roger Stone, a longtime friend and ally of President Donald Trump, was convicted Friday of witness tampering and lying to Congress about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton's 2016 election bid.
The panel of nine women and three men deliberated for less than two days before finding Stone, 67, guilty on all seven counts resulting from his September 2017 testimony during a House Intelligence Committee investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Kremlin's efforts to damage Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent. Stone's trial lasted about a week.
Stone's indictment was the last lodged by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. He is the sixth Trump aide or adviser to be convicted of charges filed by Mueller, after former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
Stone has denied wrongdoing and consistently criticized the case against him as politically motivated. He did not take the stand during the trial, and his lawyers did not call any witnesses in his defense.
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Stone, in a gray-blue suit, stood at the defense table and showed no reaction as the verdict was read aloud, count by count. He sighed and frowned as he left the courtroom, offering a half smile to reporters who had covered the proceedings. His wife hugged crying supporters.
Michael Caputo, a Stone friend, was kicked out of the courtroom for refusing to stand for the jury after the verdict. When Caputo was ordered to stand, he turned his back to the panel.
As he walked out of the courthouse, Stone was asked if he had any comment on the verdict. He replied, "None whatsoever," before he hopped into a waiting SUV with his wife.
Stone faces a legal maximum penalty of 50 years in prison -- 20 years for the witness-tampering charge and five years for each of the other counts. However, a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.
Trump tweeted minutes after the verdict, calling the conviction "a double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country," arguing that Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, U.S Rep. Adam Schiff and others, "including even Mueller himself," have not been convicted. "Didn't they lie?"
Mueller had reported that members of the Trump campaign were interested in the computer files hacked by Russia and made public by the website WikiLeaks. Steve Bannon, who served as the campaign's chief executive, testified during the trial that Stone had boasted about his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, alerting them to pending new batches of damaging emails.
Campaign officials saw Stone as the "access point" to WikiLeaks, he said.
Prosecutors argued that Stone, who had been out on bond before and during his trial, should be jailed while he waits to be sentenced on Feb. 6, though U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately turned down that request. Stone was placed under a gag order in the case -- and in an unusual move, the judge said her gag order would remain in place, even though the trial is over.
[GALLERY: Trump ally Roger Stone guilty on all counts » arkansasonline.com/1116trial/]
WITNESS THREATENED
Prosecutors used Stone's own text messages and emails -- some of which appeared to contradict his congressional testimony -- to lay out their case that he lied to Congress and threatened a witness.
That witness was New York radio host and comedian Randy Credico, who scored an interview with Assange in 2016, when he was avoiding prosecution by sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Credico testified that Stone pushed for him to broker a contact with Assange, but that he refused. Stone, however, told the House Intelligence Committee that Credico was his intermediary to Assange, and that Stone's own attempts to reach out to WikiLeaks were unsuccessful.
After Credico was contacted by Congress about Stone, Credico reached out to Stone, who told him he should "stonewall it" and "plead the Fifth," Credico testified. Credico also testified during Stone's trial that Stone repeatedly told him to "do a 'Frank Pentangeli,'" a reference to a character in The Godfather: Part II who lies before Congress.
Prosecutors said Stone also had threatened Credico's therapy dog, Bianca, saying he was "going to take that dog away from you."
Jurors saw texts in which Stone told Credico, "You are a rat. A stoolie. Prepare to die."
Though prosecutors sought to prove only that Stone had lied to Congress and threatened a witness, they asserted that his motive was protecting Trump from embarrassment -- and thus made the president and his campaign a key component in their case.
Stone's defense team, however, urged jurors to treat his case as a referendum not on him but on Mueller's entire Russia investigation. His attorneys conceded that Stone's own emails, texts and other documentation showed that he claimed inside information on WikiLeaks' releases and wanted to get even more hacked emails to the Trump campaign.
But in its closing, the defense urged jurors to reframe the question from whether Stone lied to whether his lies mattered, and whether he secured anything of value.
"So much of this case deals with that question that you need to ask ... so what?" defense attorney Bruce Rogow asked, adding, "There was nothing illegal about the campaign being interested in information that WikiLeaks was going to be sending out."
The attacks prompted a passionate response from prosecutors.
"If that's the state of affairs that we're in, I'm pretty shocked. Truth matters. Truth still matters," Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Marando told jurors. "I know we live in a world nowadays with Twitter, tweets, social media where you can find any view, any truth you want ... [but in] our institutions of self-governance, to a congressional committee, in our courts of law, truth still matters."
Stone's political foes and those whose messages were hacked and released celebrated the conviction.
"Just about to take off on a long transatlantic flight in a middle coast seat. I think I will just sit back, relax, and enjoy it," former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta wrote, affixing a link to an article about Stone's conviction. Podesta's emails were hacked by the Russian government, and Stone had predicted -- before the emails were released -- that it would soon be the Clinton campaign official's "time in the barrel."
Donna Brazile, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, which also had its emails hacked, tweeted that she was "pleased with the guilty verdict of Trump ally and political adviser #RogerStone."
"Everyone who aided, exploited and used hacked, stolen DNC emails and other data from #WikiLeaks, should learn from this saga," she wrote.
Information for this article was contributed by Rachel Weiner, Spencer S. Hsu and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post; and by Michael Balsamo and Ashraf Khalil of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/16/2019