Swamp logic: Why Roger Stone is a big deal all of a sudden

Analysis by FPI / February 13, 2020

Investigators, prosecutors and assorted other deep staters for three years invested heavily in the Russia investigation only to have one of their own, Robert Mueller, shoot it down, analysts say.

So getting Roger Stone’s scalp is suddenly a top priority for the anti-Trump cabal in the D.C. swamp.

“It rises out of the Mueller investigation, which has been thoroughly compromised by the political nature of the investigators, most of whom are Democrats or Democrat donors,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight”, referring to Department of Justice prosecutors’ initial recommendation to imprison Stone for up to nine years.

Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday intervened and lowered the sentencing recommendations.

“There is a scandal at the Justice Department [but] it has nothing to do with Bill Barr,” Fitton said. “It has everything to do with these prosecutors who are acting like their own little team, independent of the rule of law, to target President Trump, to try to vindicate the Mueller scam and slap at Trump after his vindication by acquittal in the impeachment thing.”

“You also have them investigating Trump, knowing the underlying issue — Russia collusion — was a big scam and a big lie,” Fitton said.

Washington Times reporter Rowan Scarborough outlined what Stone was up against in a Feb. 3, 2019 analysis.

Stone was well aware, Scarborough noted, that he was “on course for a courtroom trial whose jurors would come from an electorate hostile to his longtime friend and boss, President Trump.

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 Stone’s peers.

Stone is a longtime conservative Republican, author and radio host and strong supporter of the president. Stone wrote “The Clintons’ War on Women” in 2015. The book blurb offers “How Bill and Hillary Clinton systematically abused women and others — sexually, physically, and psychologically — in their scramble for power and wealth.”

“Compare Mr. Stone’s resume to Washington’s overwhelmingly liberal demographics and its constant anti-Trump press,” Scarborough wrote.

At the time of Scarborough’s report last year, Trump’s job approval rating in Washington, D.C. was 12 percent, the lowest in the U.S., even 18 points lower than Massachusetts, his worst polling state, according to the firm SurveyMonkey.

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 won 91 percent of the vote in 2016 to Trump’s 4 percent.

Sidney Powell, an appeals court attorney who is currently defending Gen. Michael Flynn, told The Times in February 2019: “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.”

At a press conference on Jan. 31, 2019, after his first court appearance in Washington where he pleaded not guilty, Stone highlighted his civil rights record. A questioner asked about media stereotyping.

Stone responded: “People tend to put you in a box because I am a Republican. Let me make this point: I have been an advocate for drug law reform for 25 years. I’ve been an opponent and critic of the 1994 crime bill in which poor people and African-Americans are subject to much harsher mandatory sentences for the possession of rock cocaine than wealthy white people who are in the possession of powder cocaine. President Trump has just fixed that problem I worked for Richard Nixon. It is Richard Nixon who gave us affirmative action. I’m one of the few conservatives who’s written and spoken in favor of affirmative action. I think it was necessary.”

During an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show around the time of Scarborough’s February 2019 report, Stone brought up the possibility of a biased jury. He charged that the FBI conducted a show-of-force raid on his home where more than two dozen heavily armed agents, a dozen vehicles, and boats in a canal behind his home were used to influence a jury. A CNN video crew, the only one on scene, captured the pre-dawn arrest.

“That was the whole purpose of this raid was to poison a jury, to hold me up as public enemy No. 1,” Stone said.

Stone’s trial is being presided over by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee.

Free Press International