Is the left prematurely celebrating Roger Stone’s indictment? At least one legal analyst thinks so.
Home raided before dawn
Stone, a former campaign adviser for now-President Donald Trump, was arrested in an FBI raid on his Florida home early Friday morning. The longtime Trump confidant is now facing five counts of lying to Congress, one count of witness tampering, and one count of obstructing a government investigation — namely, Robert Mueller’s probe.
These charges stem from Stone’s alleged involvement in the 2016 leak of damaging Hillary Clinton campaign emails that were hacked by Russian agents and “then provided to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks,” the Associated Press reported. WikiLeaks released the emails just weeks before the 2016 election.
According to the AP, Stone allegedly “sought to leverage the stolen material,” which included emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, “into a White House win.”
In Stone’s indictment, the Mueller-led prosecution alleges that Stone lied about his knowledge of the stolen emails when speaking with the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017, and later persuaded others to follow suit. Stone has categorically denied the allegations.
“I’m in for the fight of my life but I will not quit. I will not fold. I will not bend. I will not bear false witness against the president,” Stone said on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight on Friday. “I intend to fight because this indictment is fabricated. This indictment is thin as can be.”
It was reported on Friday that Stone hasn’t ruled out striking a deal with Mueller and his team.
Not so fast
The news of the arrest of a top Trump ally by the special counsel had liberals from CNN to MSNBC jumping for joy over what they perceived as clear evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign team and Russian hackers. But Blitzer says that while Stone’s indictment does link Trump to the hacked emails, there’s still one big hole in the left’s argument.
“If the Trump campaign was supposedly involved in hacking the Clinton campaign emails, why did they need Roger Stone to feed them information about them?” Blitzer asked in a Law & Crime op-ed on Friday.
“If special counsel Robert Mueller ends up having evidence of a particular collusion-related crime, such as actual involvement with the hacking of the Clinton campaign emails and not just knowledge of the release of the emails, then everything mentioned above could be used to support potential charges” against Trump or his campaign, Blitzer added. “Otherwise, it’s just a case without a crime.”
Indeed, the AP even pointed out that “prosecutors did not accuse Trump of wrongdoing or charge Stone with conspiring with WikiLeaks or with the Russian intelligence officers Mueller says hacked the emails.” The special counsel “also did not allege that Trump aides knew in advance of the hacking.”
Mueller and his team has so far indicted six Trump campaign staffers and 34 individuals overall, including several non-U.S. citizens. For his part, the president has called Mueller’s probe a “witch hunt” and tweeted on Saturday in response to Stone’s indictment that several top Obama-era Democrats should face similar charges.
If Roger Stone was indicted for lying to Congress, what about the lying done by Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Lisa Page & lover, Baker and soooo many others? What about Hillary to FBI and her 33,000 deleted Emails? What about Lisa & Peter’s deleted texts & Wiener’s laptop? Much more!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2019
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