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Prosecutor says Roger Stone lied ‘because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump’ – The Washington Post, The Washington Post

Prosecutor says Roger Stone lied ‘because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump’ – The Washington Post, The Washington Post


President Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone lied to Congress “because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump,” a federal prosecutor said Wednesday at the opening of Stone’s trial on charges that he lied to Congress .

Stone’s trial represents the last case filed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, and prosecutors wasted little time connecting Stone’s alleged crimes to the interests of the Trump campaign.

Minutes into their opening statement, prosecutors linked the charges against Stone directly to Trump, citing phone records that showed the two talking at key moments.

“The evidence in this case will show Roger Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee because the truth looked bad for the Trump campaign, and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump,” prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky told the jury of nine wo men and three men at the federal courthouse in Washington.

Zelinsky said that on the evening of June 14, 2016 – the day the Democratic National Committee announced that its computer system had been hacked – Stone called then-candidate Trump. In late July, after the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks had begun releasing hacked DNC material, Stone again called Trump, and the two spoke for 10 minutes.

Prosecutors do not know what the two discussed but “about an hour after that call that Roger Stone had with then-candidate Trump, Roger Stone sent another email,” Zelinksy said, asking a friend in London to try to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The prosecutor urged jurors to focus on Stone’s conduct, not the broader controversies still swirling around the 2016 campaign.

“This case is not about who hacked the Democratic National Committee servers. This case is not about whether Roger Stone had any communications with Russians. And this case is not about politics, ”said Zelinksy, who was a prosecutor on the Mueller team. “This case is about Roger Stone’s false testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in an attempt to obstruct the investigation and to tamper with evidence.”

Stone, 67, has pleaded not guilty to felony charges oflying to Congress, obstruction and witness tamperingin connection with efforts to gather information about Democratic Party emails that prosecutors say Russia stole during the 2016 campaign and released through WikiLeaks.

Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and political consultant, was charged in January in a seven-count indictment. Prosecutors contend that he lied on several points: when he told the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017 that he did not have texts or emails about his 2016 discussions surrounding WikiLeaks; when he said that he had only one associate who tried to act as a go-between with Assange; and when he claimed that he never spoke to anyone in the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks’s plans.

Zelinksy said Stone told those lies because if Congress had found out about his many emails and texts about the quest to learn what WikiLeaks had on Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, “it would have unraveled all of the other lies Roger Stone told.”

The prosecutor also pointed to an email Stone sent then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Aug. 3, 2016, seeking to speak to him.

When Manafort asked why, Stone emailed back, “To save Trump’s a–. Call me please. ”Manafort was convicted last year of unrelated financial crimes and is in prison.

In that critical summer 2016 time period after WikiLeaks began releasing hacked data, Stone emailed Trump campaign strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Zelinsky told the jury.

“Trump can still win, but time is running out, ”Stone wrote to Bannon. “’I know how to win, but it ain’t pretty,’” Zelinsky read, showing jurors the email on their computer screens and suggesting that Stone was alluding to WikiLeaks.

The trial before Judge Amy Berman Jackson is expected to last about two weeks.

A trove of Stone’s communications with Trump insiders, including exchanges with Bannon, Manafort, and Manafort deputy Rick Gates, will figure prominently in

Zelinsky said the case’s most important evidence will not be the witnesses, but Stone’s own words.

“Amazingly, most of the evidence in this case is in the written record – it’s emails and text messages showing what really happened. If those records had come out, the truth would have been exposed, ”the prosecutor said.

The trial will detail the eagerness of some in Trump’s orbit to find damaging information to derail Clinton’s presidential run .

“At a critical moment in this nation’s history,” as Congress sought to “to find out the truth of what happened,” Zelinsky said, Stone “was doing his best to stop them . ”

Stone, a self described“ agent provocateur ”of American conservative politics, has said that any misstatements he made were unintentional and that he is a victim of politically motivated attacks against the president. Stone first met Trump in the 1980 s and had encouraged him to run for the White House since the 1990 s.

The defense team, led by Bruce S. Rogow, disputes the legitimacy of Mueller’s investigation. But in pretrial hearings, it failed in attempts to challengethe special counsel’s central findingthat Moscow had a primary role in “sweeping and systemic” cyber -interference in the 2016 campaign, including hacking and releasing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman,

Rogow has not said whether Stone would testify in his own defense, but left open that possibility.

Prosecutors have said their first witness will be Michelle Taylor, the former lead FBI agent in the case.

Jackson, a 2011 Obama appointee, has rejectedStone’s claims that he was selectively prosecuted, saying that he had only himself to blame for coming under investigation for his alleged lies after taking public credit for the WikiLeaks release and suggesting that he had inside information about more to come.

Ultimately, Mueller did not charge anyone associated with Trump’s campaign of working with Russia or WikiLeaks to release stolen information, and Mueller’s report did not accuse anyone of having advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans.

The witness-tampering charge against Stone stems from his alleged attempt to persuade a witness who also was to testify before the congressional panel to say falsely either that he was an intermediary for contacts with WikiLeaks or could not recall anything he had said to Stone.

Stone was put under a court gag order that bars him from commenting about the case or prosecutors after he repeatedly posted on social media attacks regarding his indictment, the conduct of federal agents and intelligence agencies, actions the judge said before trial might impair the ability to seat an impartial jury. Stone’sInstagram account also had shown a photographof Jackson’s face next to what appeared to be the crosshairs of a gun scope.

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