Federal prosecutors are recommending Roger Stone receive a prison sentence of seven to nine years for witness tampering and lying to Congress.
The 26-page sentencing memorandum, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday, asks that Stone, a former associate of President Trump, serve 87 to 108 months in prison. The 67-year-old Republican operative was found guilty on seven charges last November following a two-week trial based on his actions during and after the 2016 presidential election.
A jury found the self-styled “dirty trickster” guilty of five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee, in addition to two more charges of obstructing a congressional investigation and intimidating a witness. The trial centered on Stone’s claims about his alleged communications with WikiLeaks.
Stone was one of several individuals indicted in spinoff trials as a result of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
“Roger Stone obstructed Congress’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, lied under oath, and tampered with a witness,” prosecutors wrote in the Monday memo. “And, when his crimes were revealed by the indictment in this case, he displayed contempt for this court and the rule of law. For that, he should be punished in accord with the advisory guidelines.”
The jury found Stone repeatedly misrepresented and concealed his 2016 attempt at collaborating with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, to obtain dirt on then-candidate Hillary Clinton when speaking with Trump-Russia investigators from the House Intelligence Committee.
“Stone regularly communicated with senior Trump campaign officials, including deputy campaign chairman Richard Gates and campaign CEO Steve Bannon, about WikiLeaks’s plans to release more information that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign,” the DOJ. “Both Gates and Bannon believed that Stone was providing them with nonpublic information about WikiLeaks’s plans. Indeed, Bannon viewed Stone as the Trump campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks.”
The charges against Stone included one count that he “corruptly influenced, obstructed, and impeded” the congressional investigation and another that he attempted to “corruptly persuade” radio show host Randy Credico’s congressional testimony. Stone also faced five counts of making “materially false, fictions, and fraudulent statements” to Congress.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the Obama appointee who presided over Stone’s trial, will hand down his sentence on Feb. 20.
Prosecutors argued Stone tried to contact Assange about information damaging to Democrats by using conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and Credico as conduits and misled the House Intelligence Committee’s 2017 investigation into Russian election interference by concealing monthslong WikiLeaks discussions with Corsi. Stone spoke with the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks throughout 2016.
Stone, an on-again, off-again political ally and confidant of Trump for more than three decades who, by the summer of 2016, was an informal adviser with Trump’s campaign, attempted to reach out to Assange, suspected of having tens of thousands of stolen Democratic emails. He also communicated with the hacker Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious persona created by Russian intelligence that dealt with some of the stolen records.
During the trial, Stone’s lawyer attempted to distance the flamboyant Republican operative’s outreach efforts to WikiLeaks from the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the opening statement of the case on Wednesday. Defense lawyer Bruce Rogow also dismissed Stone’s pronouncements about his connections to Assange as exaggerations.
“This was a Russian investigation, and the fact that it was a Russian investigation colored all his answers,” Stone’s attorney argued in court. “Its publicly stated scope was about what Russia was doing, not about what WikiLeaks was doing.”
“Russia. Russia. This whole thing was about Russia,” Rogow said.
The House investigation into Russian election interference was focused on what Russian cyberactivity and other active measures were directed against the United States and if those actions included links between Russia and people associated with political campaigns. It was widely known before Stone’s allegedly misleading September 2017 congressional testimony that the U.S. government believed WikiLeaks was inextricably linked to the issue of Russian interference.
During the trial, the jury heard testimony from Gates, the former business partner of campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Gates strongly suggested that Stone told Trump about supposed upcoming WikiLeaks releases. Bannon testified the Trump campaign saw Stone as the “access point” to WikiLeaks. Credico testified he was not Stone’s “intermediary” to WikiLeaks, despite Stone’s claims, and former FBI agent Michelle Taylor laid out a timeline of Stone’s communications with Corsi, Credico, Trump associates, and Trump.
