Trump’s Crimes Never End, Republicans Never Do the Right Thing
The lemmings voted for trump despite all of the Russian fingerprints, they gave him a pass after the Access Hollywood tapes, they ignored the first impeachment and then the second impeachment, they cut him slack after he urged followers to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and they swallowed trump’s incredible, utterly debunked claims of voter fraud.
And evidenced by trump’s improved popularity in polls, Republican voters are doing it again after trump’s conviction on nearly three dozen felony charges stemming from covering up a payment to a sex worker.
After the jury issued its decision, trump and many GOP lawmakers and media hogs lambasted the judicial process as being politically weaponized by the Democrats. In an old refrain, trump has claimed that President Joe Biden orchestrated and ginned up the hush money trial for political reasons. There has been no evidence to back trump’s claims but there is substantial testimony that trump has tried to influence trials involving his allies. They include his former major moral and political supporter, Roger Stone and QAnon nut, Christian nationalist and disgraced trump aide, Michael Flynn.
Stone was found guilty in 2020 of multiple counts of lying to congress about his efforts to contact Wikileaks, the website that released damaging emails about trump’s 2016 Democratic election rival Hillary Clinton. On Friday, October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began dumping into the public domain thousands of emails which the Russian government had hacked from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s personal email account.
Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison on Feb. 20, 2020, after being convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Career prosecutors had originally recommended a sentence of 87 to 108 months. The sentence evidently was reduced because of pressure from trump.
Trump had tweeted that the original sentencing recommendation was “horrible and very unfair” and that, “the real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them.” Trump closed the tweet with, “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”
All four career prosecutors handling the case against Stone withdrew from the legal proceedings after the Justice Department signaled it planned to undercut their sentencing recommendation for Stone. At the time, Rep. William Pascrell, D-N.J., accused trump of the same things that trump claims have happened in his hush money trial.
“We are seeing a full-frontal assault on the rule of law in America,” Pascrell said. “Direct political interference in our justice system is a hallmark of a banana republic. Despite whatever trump, (former Attorney General) William Barr, and their helpers think, the United States is a nation of laws and not an authoritarian’s paradise.”
After Stone’s arrest, trump said his friend had been “very brave” in refusing to cooperate with prosecutors. The Special Counsel’s report said trump’s compliments to Stone “support the inference that the President intended to communicate a message that witnesses could be rewarded for refusing to provide testimony adverse to the President[.]”
Stone was indicted in January 2019 and repeatedly violated court orders, culminating in publishing a picture of presiding judge Amy Berman Jackson with a crosshair next to her head and attacking her as corrupt. Stone later testified that the crosshairs were not a bull’s eye but were an innocuous, “occult Celtic symbol.”
Jackson rejected the implication that Stone had been prosecuted “for standing up for the president.”
“He was prosecuted for covering up for the President,” Jackson said.
Trump later pardoned Stone, claiming his friend had been the victim of a “Soviet-style show trial on politically motivated charges.”
Stone has been urging trump to also pardon Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange and National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. Trump has said that if he is reelected, he would consider issuing pardons to Assange, Snowden and Ross Ulbricht, convicted creator of the darknet, international drug marketplace, Silk Road.
Aaron Zelinksy, an assistant U.S. attorney (AUSA) in Maryland who previously served on former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team, told members of congress on June 23, 2020, that top level Justice Department officials pressured government lawyers in Stone’s criminal trial to treat him “differently and more leniently,” “based on political considerations” and “because of his relationship with the President.”
“What I heard — repeatedly — was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President,” Zelinsky said. “For the Department to seek a sentence below the (federal) guidelines in a case where the defendant went to trial and remained unrepentant is in my experience unheard of.”
Zelinsky testified before the House Judiciary Committee about what he claimed was the improper politicization of the Justice Department. He said the Stone case was the only instance in his career where he saw political influence play a role in prosecutorial decision-making. He said that prosecutors typically prioritize justice without regard to party or politics, but said the Stone case was an exception.
According to Zelinsky, the upper reaches of the DOJ exerted significant pressure on line prosecutors to obscure the originally, recommended sentencing guidelines calculation for stone and to downplay the events that transpired during his trial. He said that he had heard repeatedly that Stone was being treated differently because of his relationship with trump.
Zelinksy, a veteran of six years with the Justice Department, said that in the many cases of his prosecutorial career, that he had “never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making.”
Never, except for one time, in the case of U.S. v. Roger Stone.
Zelinsky said he witnessed the “unusual and unprecedented way” that Stone’s sentencing was handled by the Justice Department and that the department was “exerting significant pressure” on front-line lawyers “to obscure the correct sentencing guidelines” for Stone and to “water down and in some cases outright distort” the events that transpired in his trial and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction.
As a result of the pressure, the Justice Department went over the heads of Zelinsky and others on the case and made a “virtually unprecedented decision” to override the original sentencing recommendation and to file a new sentencing memorandum that included statements and assertions “at odds with the record and contrary to Department of Justice policy.”
Zelinsky said that Timothy Shea, the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, was “receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice” to moderate Stone’s sentence because he was “afraid of the President.” Zelinsky said that he and other AUSAs raised concerns about the favorable treatment toward Stone but their objections went unheeded.
Zelinsky said that a memo from leadership in the U.S. Attorney’s office sought to lower the sentencing range.
“We responded that cutting a defendant a break because of his relationship to the President undermined the fundamental principles of the Department of Justice, and that we felt that was an important principle to defend,” Zelinsky said.
The memo from the department leadership also said that Stone deserved a lower sentence because of “health” reasons, but no evidence of poor health was submitted.
After hearing from both sides Judge Jackson concluded that the “government’s initial memorandum was well researched and supported.” She found no evidence of Stone’s poor health and that Stone had engaged in “threatening and intimidating conduct towards the Court, and later, participants in the National Security and Office of Special Counsel investigations that could and did impede the administration of Justice.”
After learning that the department was going to issue a new sentencing memo, Zelinsky said he made the “difficult decision” to resign from the case and to step down from his temporary appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. Zelinsky was reassigned to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland.
According to public records, in the summer of 2016, Stone was considered by the trump campaign to be the campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks. Throughout the summer and fall, Stone was in regular contact with the highest levels of the trump campaign, which was relying on him for information about Wikileaks’s activities to damage the Clinton campaign. Beginning in spring 2016, Stone told senior trump campaign officials that he had inside knowledge regarding WikiLeaks’s plans, and that he had communicated with Assange.
Stone made the claims about Wikileaks throughout the summer to deputy trump campaign chairman Rick Gates, campaign chairman Paul Manafort and campaign CEO Steve Bannon.
Bannon and three others not related to the Stone investigation were arrested in August 2020 on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign. On his last day in office, Jan. 20, 2021, trump pardoned Bannon but he still faced state charges.
Bannon was held in contempt of Congress in October 2021 after he refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the congressional committee investigating the 2021 Capitol attack. He was sentenced in October 2022 to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine but the sentence was held pending an appeal, which he lost this past May. Federal officials have yet to decide where Bannon will be incarcerated.
Gates was a longtime business associate of Manafort. Both pleaded guilty related to their consultation work with pro-Russian political figures in Ukraine. On December 17, 2019, Gates was sentenced to 45 days’ jail and three years of probation.
Manafort was convicted in August 2018 on eight charges of tax and bank fraud. He later pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering, while agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors. On March 7, 2019, Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison and a week later, he was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison.
The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in August 2020 that Manafort’s ties to individuals connected to Russian intelligence while he was trump’s campaign manager “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” by creating opportunities for “Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”
Trump pardoned Manafort on December 23, 2020. Manafort had been helping in trump’s 2024 election campaign but stepped away after it was reported that he had worked with foreign officials and businesses.
The Stone interference was not the first time trump had tried to influence a legal proceeding. In 2020, trump publicly said the Justice Department should drop its case against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was a strong trump supporter.
In 2020, the Justice Department moved to drop its two-plus-year-old prosecution of Flynn who had been awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to lying to investigators about his calls in late 2016 with Russia’s ambassador, and he later reaffirmed to a judge that he had knowingly lied.
The decision to abandon the prosecution coincided with the abrupt withdrawal from the case of the lead Justice Department lawyer, Brandon L. Van Grack, who had been a part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team, which brought the case against Flynn.
Prior to the Justice Department decision to drop the prosecution, trump had tweeted, “What happened to General Michael Flynn, a war hero, should never be allowed to happen to a citizen of the United States again!” Trump later tweeted that “General Flynn was treated like nobody should — and I’m not talking about generals; I’m saying like nobody in this country should be treated.”
He added the next day in an interview, “It’s a disgrace what happened to General Flynn. It’s a — it was a setup from Day One.”
On November 25, 2020, trump pardoned Flynn and on December 8, the judge on the case dismissed the criminal case against Flynn, stating that had Flynn not been pardoned, he probably would have denied the Justice Department motion to drop the case.
On July 4, 2020, Flynn pledged an oath to the QAnon conspiracy theory. After trump lost the 2020 election, Flynn suggested the president should suspend the Constitution, silence the press, and hold a new election under military authority. Flynn has since become a prominent leader in the Christian nationalist movement, organizing and recruiting for what he characterizes as a spiritual and political war.