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Show Trial Ends: Roger Stone Sentenced to 40 months in Prison, Judge Decries ‘Threat to Democracy’

21-2-2020 < SGT Report 16 659 words
 

from 21st Century Wire:



Today, the President’s long-time friend and former campaign consultant, Roger Stone, was sentenced to 40 months in a federal prison for multiple charges relating to his Congressional testimony and Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.


US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued Stone’s sentence after his lawyers had first requested that he receive no prison time.


After the sentence was handed down, Stone refrained from making a personal statement to the court.



The prosecution originally asked for a 7 to 9 years sentence, so today’s ruling appears to vindicate Bill Barr’s Dept of Justice who weighed-in in January to reduce the sentence. When that story broke, Trump was also tweeting like mad in the background which triggered a partisan storm drawing accusations of the President imposing his will on the judiciary, although the timeline of events suggests that the DOJ intervened on its own volition.


Normally, one might refrain from criticizing a judge too harshly, but this was no ordinary closing remarks performance, as Judge Jackson seemed to go on forever, attempting to address all of her critics, and seemed compelled to want to justify the premise of the legal proceedings.


After reviewing her statements, to say (and I don’t say this lightly) that she had a personal axe to grind is an understatement, and her extended diatribe appears to point to an obvious political agenda.


Judge Jackson wasn’t shy about showing her bias either, remaining in lockstep with the original RussiaGate narrative – even though it’s been proven to be hoax after a 3 year-long Mueller Investigation produced no evidence of alleged ‘Trump-Russia Collusion.’ She clearly attempted to do this here:


“He was not prosecuted for standing up for the president,” said Judge Jackson during her closing remarks. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”


Only the President did nothing which required covering for.




As that wasn’t enough, the judge went on during her hours-long sentencing hearing to claim that what Roger Stone did was somehow “a threat to our democracy”.


We’re still trying to work out exactly what she is talking about there, or how the 67 year-old Stone became so powerful as to bring down democracy in the United States. I mean, he has certain skills, but take down the United States of America? Here Jackson is dog whistling to the RussiaGate consensus – when in fact there was no collusion between Stone, Trump, WikiLeaks and Russia – nor did Stone have any ‘back channel’ to WikiLeaks. Any rational, objective professional might look at that and conclude that there was no underlying conspiracy which this entire Russia Investigation effort was supposed to uncover.


The truth is, Stone’s entire case was erected to help maintain the RussiaGate narrative, to help towards delegitimizing Trump’s historic 2016 upset victory. Validating the hoax also helps to fortify a hawkish US foreign policy against Russia, and all the political, geopolitical and military industrial spoils that go with it.


In response to public comments made by Trump about the trial being a farce, Judge Jackson felt compelled to defend her political show trial, exclaiming that, “There was nothing unfair, phony or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution.”


If only it ended there. She kept going, insisting that the Stone case was ‘serious’ and not a joke, which Trump had publicly intimated. “The problem is nothing about this case was a joke,” said Jackson just prior to sentencing Stone. “It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t a stunt and it wasn’t a prank,” said Jackson.


Read More @ 21stCenturyWire.com





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