Recently Bill Barr’s DOJ got involved with the sentencing guidelines issued to a Judge in charge of Trump associate Roger Stone’s case. Roger Stone is being tried for lying and “witness tampering”. Some believe that compared to how former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe “got off”, for lying the sentencing guidelines for 7-9 years in jail for Roger Stone were harsh.
President Trump claims he had nothing to do with Attorney General Bill Barr stepping in to say those guidelines were too harsh. Subsequently, the Stone team requested a retrial based on all this. Today the judge says he’s not going to issue a retrial and plans to sentence Stone according to schedule. What that sentence will be though, does remain to be seen. Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson said at a teleconference hearing Tuesday that it would not be “prudent” to further delay the case.
She will delay the execution of the sentence until the retrial request is resolved though, leaving a glimmer of hope for the Stone team, if Berman Jackson decides to put down a harsh penalty. “I am going to keep the sentencing where it is,” she said, as she denied a request by Stone’s lawyers to delay the sentencing. Lawyers for the Justice Department said their preference was to proceed to the sentencing hearing as scheduled. This according to Talking Points Memo. Stay tuned for updates on the Stone case. Talking Points Memo also reported:
Tuesday’s hearing comes as the Stone case has emerged as a focal point for concerns of political interference at the Justice Department. Last week, the entire team of career prosecutors who had been leading the day-to-day of the case withdrew from it after their sentencing recommendation for Stone was clawed back and watered down by senior officials at the DOJ. The reversal in the recommendation came as Trump was publicly bashing the initial DOJ sentencing memo as too harsh, though the Department has denied that it was taking its cues from the President in scaling back its recommendation.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson scheduled Tuesday’s teleconference over the weekend, after Stone filed a request that she hold a new trial. The request was filed under seal, meaning that Stone’s reasons for requesting the trial aren’t officially known to the public. However the identity of a juror in his case caught the attention of conversative [sic] media outlets, and President Trump made several unsubstantiated claims on Twitter that the juror was biased.
Stone’s lawyers were aware of the identity of the juror, who previously ran for Congress as a Democrat, at the time the jury was selected.
Earlier this month, Jackson rejected a previous effort by Stone to secure a mistrial, during which Stone raised a separate set of concerns about the jury.
During the teleconference, the judge indicated that Stone’s defense team had filed an amended version of the retrial request that would be put on the docket Tuesday. She had previously ordered the lawyers to file by Tuesday a redacted version of the retrial request they submitted under seal last week.
