The saga of Roger Stone is far from over, but that hasn’t stopped several of the parties involved from providing fireworks this week.
A longtime pal of President Donald Trump, Stone has been an agent provocateur for decades in Washington. Beginning way back with the well-documented loyalty to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal in the early ’70s. Stone even has a tricky Dick tattoo on his back in honor of the fiasco.
Now, as Stone awaits the final adjudication of his case for lying to Congress in the “RussiaGate” investigation the judge in the case is ripping his legal team a new one for trying to replace her.
Judge Army Berman Jackson, who presided over the case of former Trump adviser Roger Stone, denied Stone’s request that she be removed from deciding whether he can have a new trial, writing Sunday that his motion seemed to be “nothing more than an attempt to use the court’s docket to disseminate a statement for public consumption that has the words ‘judge’ and ‘biased’ in it.”
Stone was sentenced to over three years in prison last Thursday following his conviction in November on charges of lying to Congress and intimidating a witness in connection with the Trump-Russia probe.
Stone’s defense team filed a motion Friday arguing that Jackson’s statement that the jury in the case had “served with integrity” should disqualify her from presiding as Stone pursued his bid for a new trial.
Stone’s close proximity to the President has made for heavy speculation that a pardon could be coming. Even the President himself has hinted to such a maneuver via social media activity.