Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison on Thursday after he was convicted of more than a half dozen charges stemming from the Bob Mueller investigation.
Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison, two years of probation, and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine after he was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.
“The truth still exists. The truth still matters,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson said. “Roger Stone’s insistence that it doesn’t—his belligerence, his pride in his own lies—are a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the very foundation of our democracy.”
Jackson also hit out at Trump after the Justice Department intervened to reduce its recommended sentence for Stone following Trump’s tweets that decried the recommendation as politically motivated.
“He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the president,” she said. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
“This is not campaign hijinks,” Jackson added. “This is not Roger just being Roger.”
Trump hints at pardon:
"I'm following this very closely, and I want to see it play out to its fullest, because Roger has a very good chance of exoneration, in my opinion," Trump said during an event in Las Vegas on Thursday.
"It's my strong opinion that the forewoman for the jury is totally tainted," Trump claimed, calling her an “anti-Trump person, totally.”
"I don't know if this is a fact, but she had a horrible social media account," he said. "She's, I guess from what I hear, a very strong woman, a very dominant person, so she can get people to do whatever she wants. How can you have a jury pool tainted so badly? It's not fair.”
Trump under fire:
"Now he's attacking citizens called for jury service," former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told NBC News. "Most people have political beliefs. They don't disqualify you from sitting in a case like this."
He said that "there was no reasonable juror who could have concluded anything but Roger Stone was guilty."
“I’m appalled, honestly,” Stone juror Seth Cousins told CNN. “I think it’s appalling for the president to be attacking American citizens for fulfilling their duties to our republic. And further I think the actions of the president and of the attorney general cast doubt on the bedrock of the equal administration of justice that is just so important to our country."
