Roger Stone appealed his conviction and sentencing months after a jury found him guilty of lying to the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia investigation.
Stone, a self-described “dirty trickster” and a longtime confidant of President Trump, made the move weeks after the presiding judge in his November trial refused his request for a new trial amid allegations of anti-Trump juror bias and days after the Justice Department unsealed its 33 search warrants against Stone, showing his 2017 communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“I, Roger Stone, hereby appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from the above-stated judgment and order, the sentence imposed, and all underlying orders,” Stone said Thursday in a D.C. federal court filing through his New York-based lawyer, Seth Ginsberg.
Stone was arrested in January 2019 and was later found guilty in November on five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee during its investigation into Russian interference about his alleged outreach to WikiLeaks in 2016, one count that he “corruptly obstructed” the congressional investigation, and another for attempting to intimidate a possible congressional witness, radio host Randy Credico.
Trump has decried Stone’s sentencing as a “miscarriage of justice” in the past but has thus far refused to grant clemency for him, though Stone says he is still loyal to the president. Stone told the Washington Examiner earlier this month that there has been no communication between him or his lawyers and the White House on the matter.
“Right now, all I can do is pray for justice and mercy, and I’m doing that,” Stone said, adding that he is leaving the subject of a pardon “in God’s hands.”
Stone was sentenced to 40 months for obstruction of justice and 12 months for the other five counts to be served concurrently. Stone also received a $20,000 fine and 24 months of supervised release when he gets out. A ruling on a date for when Stone is to report to prison is expected within the coming days. Stone, who remains on bail, has called his three-year-plus prison sentence a “death sentence.”
The case is a spinoff from Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, which “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Prosecutors told the court in February they recommended Stone receive up to nine years behind bars. But after Trump tweeted he “cannot allow this miscarriage of justice,” the Justice Department suggested a less severe sentence. The four line prosecutors on the case withdrew as the department walked back the “unduly high” sentence recommendation.
Attorney General William Barr denied the president’s tweet influenced the Justice Department’s actions, but Barr did complain that such tweets make “it impossible for me to do my job.”
“The prosecution was and is righteous,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crabb said during Stone’s sentencing hearing.
Earlier in April, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee who handled multiple cases stemming from Mueller’s investigation and presided over Stone’s November trial, denied Stone’s motion for a new trial following allegations the juror foreperson misled the court to conceal a bias toward him.
“The defendant has not shown that the juror lied; nor has he shown that the supposedly disqualifying evidence could not have been found through the exercise of due diligence at the time the jury was selected,” Jackson said.
The controversy surrounding juror Tomeka Hart, a former Democratic congressional candidate, kicked into high gear in February when it was revealed she shared anti-Trump posts on social media, which resulted in Stone’s lawyers filing a motion for a retrial before his sentencing.
The search warrants show Stone and Assange conversed with each other online after the election in the spring and summer of 2017. Stone told an account dubbed “Target Account 1” in April 2017 that “I am [Julian Assange’s] only hope for a pardon.” Assange wrote back using “Target Account 2,” thanking Stone for an “ace article in InfoWars” and telling him that “U.S. intel engages in slight of hand.”
Stone wrote back in June 2017, saying, “if the US government moves on you I will bring down the entire house of cards” and “with the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for.”
In his reply, Assange said, “between CIA and DOJ they’re doing quite a lot” and “the DoJ side that’s coming most strongly from those obsessed with taking down Trump trying to squeeze us into a deal.” Stone wrote back: “I am doing everything possible to address the issues at the highest level of Government.”
Stone responded to the revelations on Tuesday night.
“Although there are private communications contained in the warrants, they prove no crimes,” Stone said in a lengthy statement on his website. “I have no trepidation about their release as they confirm there was no illegal activity and certainly no Russian collusion by me during the 2016 Election. There is, to this day, no evidence that I had or knew about the source or content of the Wikileaks disclosures prior to their public release.”
