Roger Stone filed a motion with a D.C. federal court for a new trial for the second time after being convicted by a jury last November amid allegations this week that the foreperson on his jury was biased against him.
The controversy surrounding the Stone juror, Tomeka Hart, a former Democratic congressional candidate and a program officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, kicked into high gear when it was revealed she shared anti-Trump posts on social media.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who has presided over the nearly yearlong criminal proceedings against Stone, including the two-week jury trial late last year, granted Stone’s request to file his request for a new trial under seal on Friday and ordered the prosecutors and defense team to fully explain their positions by Tuesday. Stone was scheduled to be sentenced next week.
“I can’t keep quiet any longer,” Hart said in a Facebook post first reported by CNN on Wednesday. “I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis — the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial who have all resigned from the case in response to the DOJ’s interference with their sentencing recommendation.”
The DOJ’s D.C. office told the court Monday it recommended Stone receive up to nine years behind bars, but President Trump tweeted late that night that he “cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” The DOJ reversed itself Tuesday, and the four line prosecutors on the case withdrew. The Justice Department said its decision was made before Attorney General William Barr was aware of Trump’s position, and Trump denied placing pressure on the agency.
Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., walked back the “unduly high” sentence recommendation for Stone, suggesting instead three to four years.
Hart said that “the prosecutors who have now resigned did a masterful job of laying out every element of every charge.”
Multiple outlets — including CBS News, Courthouse News, and others — noted in November that a jury member (now known to be Hart) disclosed her unsuccessful 2012 congressional bid during the selection process.
But Hart’s social media posts didn’t surface until this week.
Hart tweeted about Trump a dozen times, often harshly critical of the president and his supporters, with some comments regarding the targets of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Hart’s tweets include a few about Russian interference and allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.
“Ignoring the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in 45’s inner-circle, some Republicans are asserting that the Mueller investigation was a waste of time because he hasn’t found evidence of,” Hart wrote in a March 2019 tweet, linking to a Facebook post which seems to have been deleted.
It doesn’t appear Hart tweeted about Stone directly, though she did retweet a Jan. 30, 2019, tweet from CNN commentator Bakari Sellers criticizing Republicans unhappy about Stone’s arrest in early 2019.
“Mr. Stone and his defense team are diligently reviewing the newly reported information to determine any appropriate next steps,” Grant Smith, a spokesman for Stone, said Thursday.
The same day, Stone hired a new defense lawyer, Seth Ginsberg, to help with sentencing strategy. Ginsberg has previously worked for John A. “Junior” Gotti and alleged associates of the Gambino, Bonanno, and Lucchese crime families.
“Now it looks like the fore person in the jury, in the Roger Stone case, had significant bias,” Trump tweeted Thursday.
A copy of the Nov. 5 court transcript of the jury selection process for Hart was obtained by the Daily Caller. The under-oath examination of the potential jurors, known as voir dire, shows Stone’s lawyers did not make a motion to strike Hart from the pool when given the chance.
Hart admitted to the judge she previously sat on a federal grand jury for two years, had run for Congress, paid a fair amount of attention to politics on the news and social media, and was aware Stone was connected to Trump’s campaign, but said “absolutely not” when the judge asked if any of that would affect her ability to judge Stone fairly.
The judge asked what Hart had heard about Stone.
“Nothing that I can recall specifically,” Hart testified. “I do watch sometimes paying attention but sometimes in the background CNN. So I recall just hearing about him being part of the campaign and some belief or reporting around interaction with the Russia probe and interaction with him and people in the country, but I don’t have a whole lot of details. I don’t pay that close attention or watch C-SPAN.”
Hart said she would be able to only rely upon presented evidence in the case. Stone attorney Robert Buschel questioned Hart, but didn’t object to her.
Hart told Buschel she ran for Congress as a Democrat and was unsure if she still had political aspirations, but she didn’t have immediate plans to run for office.
“The fact that you run for an office, you’re affiliated with a political party. Roger Stone is affiliated with the Republican Party, Donald Trump. You understand what I’m saying and getting at?” Buschel asked.
“I do,” Hart replied.
“How do you feel about that?” Buschel asked, leading a DOJ prosecutor to object.
“Can you make that question a little bit more crisp?” the judge interjected. “Is there anything about his affiliation with the Trump campaign and the Republican Party in general that gives you any reason to pause or hesitate or think that you couldn’t fairly evaluate the evidence against him?”
Hart said “no,” and Buschel thanked her. After she stepped out, the judge asked if Buschel had a motion to remove her, and he said, “No.”
Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News said that “if the judge discovers afterwards that there was a built-in inherent bias against the defendant, that is an automatic trigger for a new trial.”
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who helped defend Trump during the Senate impeachment trial, tweeted that “all civil libertarians who care about non partisan justice should support a new trial for Roger Stone based on this new information about a biased juror.”
Not all legal experts agreed.
“Holding political views opposed to the criminal defendant is not an automatic barrier to serving on a jury,” national security attorney Bradley Moss told Law & Crime. “If the Stone legal team failed to do basic due diligence during voir dire and didn’t challenge Ms. Hart’s selection at that time, that is on them, not the government.”
“Neither the law nor the known facts support the claim. At least not yet,” conservative attorney and Trump critic David French wrote. “The key question isn’t whether a person is partisan but rather whether they’re capable of setting aside political bias to decide questions of fact fairly and impartially.”
Stone, a longtime confidant to President Trump, was found guilty in November on five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee in its investigation into Russian interference, in addition to one count that he “corruptly influenced, obstructed, and impeded” the congressional investigation and another for attempting to “corruptly persuade” a witness’s congressional testimony.
“The Stone case was prosecuted while I was attorney general — and I supported it,” Barr said on Thursday. “I think it was established, he was convicted of obstructing Congress and witness tampering. And I thought that was a righteous prosecution. And I was happy that he was convicted.”
Jackson rejected Stone’s previous claim that he was entitled to a new trial following his allegations of bias regarding another one of the jurors, saying Stone’s team had not shown “any reason to believe there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.”
Jackson, an Obama appointee, presided over a number of other spin-off cases from Mueller’s two-year investigation, including against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates, and former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig. Trump criticized her on Tuesday.
