Roger Stone, former advisor to the last Republican presidential campaign and friend of Donald TrumpHe was sentenced Thursday to 3 years and four months in prison for obstructing a congressional investigation into the proven Russian interference in the 2016 elections, a case in which prosecutors declared that the main motivation was to protect the Republican president.
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The decision of the judge is known in the middle of a controversy Trump unleashed by criticizing on Twitter the penalty of seven to nine years in jail that had been recommended by the prosecutors of the Department of Justice and was reviewed by the attorney general, William Barr, shortly after the presidential tweets. That decision of Barr triggered, in turn, the resignation of the four prosecutors in the case.
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Stone was accused of lying to the House of Representatives intelligence committee, trying to block the testimony of other potential witnesses who would expose their falsehoods and hide evidence from investigators.
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The charges to the 67-year-old ex-advisor are derived from the investigation led by the special prosecutor since May 2017 Robert MuellerWho, despite not being able to prove that there was coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign to affect the results of the elections, indicated that there was a broad interest of the now president’s team to obtain dirty information about the former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and thus affect the opinion of the electorate in favor of the Republican, who finally won the elections in November 2016.
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Long investigation
Mueller’s office had been investigating Stone for months, trying to find out if he played any role in the alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The now guilty of the charges held when the portal WikiLeaks published during the 2016 election campaign emails hacked to the National Democratic Committee. Even before the presidential elections, he acknowledged that he was in contact with Julian Assange, head of the portal, which he directly called “my hero.”
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By the way, on Wednesday of this week Assange, the lawyer of the founder of WikiLeaks, said President Trump offered to forgive him for spying charges in exchange for saying that Russia had nothing to do with leaking emails. The White House then denied such a claim.
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Assange, who is imprisoned in London, could be extradited to the US for such crimes. Your full court hearing will begin next week.
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US prosecutors have accused the 48-year-old Australian hacker of espionage for filtering and publishing hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on WikiLeaks. If convicted, face up to 175 years in jail.
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Assange argues that he was acting as a journalist, entitled to the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the rights of free expression and action.
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Political storm
After William Barr’s intervention in the sentence to Stone, the president’s congratulations came to the attorney general. “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking over a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not even have been filed,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
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This behavior of the president and the attorney general He turned on the alarms about the independence of the Justice Department from any pressure from the White House, although deny that it has been discussed. But the chronology of events awakens suspicion.
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It was not usual before Trump arrived at the White House for a president to interfere with his opinions in justice decisions. But Trump has done so openly even to ask that investigations be opened to his political rivals. The president has also denied the prison sentence given to his former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, for various crimes, including conspiracies, scams and others.
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