Roger Stone, a longtime Donald Trump confidant and self-described “dirty trickster” of Republican politics, was found guilty Friday of a laundry list of crimes stemming from his chase for Russian-hacked Democratic emails and contacts with the president’s 2016 campaign.
A Washington, D.C., jury took just 1 { days of deliberation to return a guilty verdict on all seven counts, convicting Stone of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing a House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.
Stone, 67, is the sixth Trump ally or official to be convicted of charges brought as part of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Kremlin’s 2016 election attack and possible coordination with the president’s campaign. He could face upward of 20 years behind bars when he’s sentenced Feb. 6.
Trump, already reacting to the rapidly moving House impeachment inquiry, quickly took to Twitter after Stone’s guilty verdict landed.
“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” the president tweeted before listing off a number of his perceived political enemies, including Hillary Clinton, Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey.
“Didn’t they lie?” Trump continued. “A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?”
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson allowed Stone to remain a free man until his sentencing.
An attorney for Stone did not immediately return a request for comment.
Stone, who worked for Richard Nixon and infamously has a tattoo of the disgraced ex-president’s face on his back, lied in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 because the “truth” would have looked “bad” for Trump, according to prosecutors.
The truth, as laid out by prosecutors, was that Stone went to extraordinary lengths to find out what information Russia had that could prove damaging to Hillary Clinton and beneficial to Trump.
Using at least two intermediaries, Stone kept in regular contact with WikiLeaks, the radical transparency organization that released caches of emails stolen by Russian hackers from servers belonging to the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign, according to prosecutors.
While Stone didn’t have an official role in Trump’s campaign, witnesses at his trial including former deputy Trump campaign chairman Rick Gates testified he kept the soon-to-be president and his advisers in the loop about WikiLeaks’ developments.
Phone records, text messages and emails obtained by prosecutors showed Stone informed top campaign officials as early as April 2016 that WikiLeaks had damaging information about Clinton and the Democrats.
In July of that year, WikiLeaks dumped its first trove of DNC emails, posing a major embarrassment to Clinton.
According to Gates, Stone spoke to Trump directly over the phone after the DNC dump and told him that he should expect “more information” to come out.
