Roger Stone, a longtime friend of Donald Trump and a self-styled dirty trickster of American politics, showed little emotion as he stood, squeezed between his defense team, at the front of the courtroom to await his sentence on Thursday.
“Unsurprisingly, I have a lot to say,” the federal district court judge Amy Berman Jackson began.
She was aware, of course, of the extraordinary public interest surrounding this case: the letters and calls to the chamber, the op-eds in every major newspaper, the hours of punditry on cable news, and, perhaps most remarkable of all, the stream of tweets from the president of the United States.
“The only people who think this is easy [are] the people who don’t have to make the decision,” she lamented from the bench.
Stone’s presence in the courtroom on Thursday had nothing to do with his political views or personal association. He would not be sentenced, Jackson said, “for who his friends are or who his enemies are”.
The case, she said, “arose because Roger Stone characteristically inserted himself smack in the middle of one of the most incendiary issues of the day”. At issue, she explained, is only what he has been convicted of: attempting to sabotage a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“He was not prosecuted for standing up for the president,” she said. “He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
She laced into the defense offered by Stone’s attorneys in response to his conviction on charges that he lied to congressional investigators and attempted to block the testimony of a witness, which she said amounted to: “‘So what?’”
“Of all the circumstances in this case, that may be the most pernicious,” Jackson said, in comments that quickly resonated far beyond the E Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington. “The truth still exists, the truth still matters.”
Stone stood unflinching, hands clasped in front of him, as she continued to excoriate him.
“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,” she said emphatically.
The judge forcefully rejected claims by Stone and his supporters that law enforcement was carrying out a political vendetta against the president by prosecuting his longtime friend.
“There was nothing unfair, phoney, or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution,” she said.
She accepted that Stone had cultivated a reputation as an “agent provocateur” who is belligerent and hyperbolic – noting humorously that these are descriptions of him from “people who wrote [to the court] on his behalf”.
“The problem is that nothing about this case was a joke. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t a stunt,” she said, adding: “The defendant lied about a matter of great national and international significance. This is not campaign hi-jinks. This is not just Roger being Roger.”
The prosecution team had originally recommended a sentence of seven to nine years, which Trump decried earlier this month as “horrible and unfair”. Almost immediately, William Barr, the attorney general, intervened and overruled the prosecutors, recommending a far more lenient sentence. Jackson called the what the justice department did “unprecedented”.
In what appeared to be a reference to the president’s running Twitter commentary on the case, Jackson said: “The court cannot be influenced by those comments. They were entirely inappropriate.”
Nevertheless, she believed the initial recommendation was unduly punitive. Probation, however, would not fit the gravity of the crimes committed, she said.
In the end, she arrived at her decision: Stone would be sentenced to 40 months in prison. But Stone would not be imprisoned until the judge rules on a motion brought by his defense team requesting a new trial.
After the sentencing, a representative for Stone criticized Jackson for sentencing him before reaching a decision on the defense team’s motion claiming juror bias.
“It falls on President Trump to use the power of a pardon as the final means of checks and balances to right this horrible wrong,” the spokeswoman, Kristin Davis, wrote in a statement.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony in Las Vegas on Thursday, Trump said he was following Stone’s trial “ very closely”.
“I want to see it play out to its fullest because Roger has a very good chance of exoneration, in my opinion,” he said.
