By CD Media Staff | February 20, 2020
Friend of President Donald Trump and longtime conservative political operative Roger Stone has been handed a sentence of 40 months by federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson for lying to Congress and witness tampering.
As CD Media reported [1] this week, the entire case has been handled with a high degree of police state theatricality, what with predawn raids (and of course a CNN reporter who was magically there to record the perp walk).
The initial prosecutorial recommendation was six to nine years, a sentence that Trump, and subsequently Attorney General Bill Barr rejected as too strong. Trump reiterated his disdain for the lack of balance between charges against Stone versus similar cases on the left two hours prior to the verdict.
The sentence will not be effectuated immediately. Stone’s lawyers have filed a motion for a retrial, which Jackson will weigh. Their complaint: jury foreperson Tomeka Hart was in fact highly biased and never should have sat on the jury, much less led it.
Hart works for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she has recently donated to two campaigns of democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election, and lied about knowing who Stone is (she retweeted about him in negative terms), and demonstrated a strong anti-Trump bias in social media accounts, calling his followers “racist.” Finally, Hart ran for a House seat as a Democrat in 2012.
Ironically, Hart is already a contributor to the more lenient sentence, as it was her desire for publicity in a Facebook post that led to her outing as a biased juror. [20] When four federal prosecutors resigned after Barr directed a more appropriate sentencing, Hart vented her frustrations, thereby exposing her bias publicly.
‘I have kept my silence for months. Initially, it was for my safety. Then, I decided to remain silent out of fear of politicizing the matter,’ Hart said in her Facebook post on Wednesday.
‘But I can’t keep quiet any longer. I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis – the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial,’ Hart wrote, referring to the prosecutors who resigned in protest.
‘It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice. For that, I wanted to speak up for them and ask you to join me in thanking them for their service,’ she said.
CNN ran a piece on the Facebook post [21], and voilà, grounds for a retrial fell like a gift from above onto Stone’s lap. Hart may well end up being responsible for Stone walking free if he is granted a retrial.
- Video: World Health Organization Briefing On Coronavirus (COVID-19) [22]
- Manufacturing Earth-Shattering Kaboom! To The Upside In Philly [23]
This piece originally appeared on CreativeDestructionMedia.com [24] and is used by permission.