ROGER STONE IS CONVICTED
Mr. Stone, a longtime informal adviser to President T-RUMP, obstructed
one of Congress’s Russia investigations and lied to lawmakers…
WASHINGTON — For decades, Roger J. Stone Jr. played politics as a kind of performance art, starring himself as a professional lord of mischief, as a friend once called him. He tossed bombs and spun tales from the political periphery with no real reckoning, burnishing a reputation as a dirty trickster.
On Friday morning, a reckoning arrived, the consequence of his efforts to sabotage a congressional investigation that threatened his longtime friend President Trump.
Mr. Stone, 67, was convicted in federal court of seven felonies for obstructing the congressional inquiry, lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness whose account would have exposed his lies. Jurors deliberated for a little over seven hours before convicting him on all counts. Together, the charges carry a maximum prison term of 50 years.
In a last-minute bid for salvation, prosecutors said, Mr. Stone appealed to Mr. Trump for a pardon on Thursday, using a right-wing conspiracy theorist who runs the website Infowars as his proxy. Mr. Trump attacked the guilty verdict against Mr. Stone in a tweet on Friday but made no mention of a pardon.
To some friends, Mr. Stone’s fatal flaw was that he did not know when the time for gamesmanship was over. “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he liked to say. But that mantra seemed to ring hollow as Mr. Stone, forced to stand in silence, heard a courtroom deputy read the word “guilty” seven times.
The impeachment inquiry underway nearby on Capitol Hill overshadowed news of the verdict, but it was nonetheless another setback for the president. Mr. Stone is the sixth former Trump aide to be convicted in cases stemming from the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
And the trial revived the saga of Russia’s efforts to bolster Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the White House just as House impeachment investigators are scrutinizing how Mr. Trump pressured another government, Ukraine, to help with his 2020 re-election chances.
Prosecutors said Mr. Stone tried to thwart the work of the House Intelligence Committee because the truth would have “looked terrible” for both Mr. Trump and his campaign. They built their case over the past week with testimony from a friend of Mr. Stone and two former Trump campaign officials: Rick Gates, the deputy campaign chairman, and Stephen K. Bannon, who led the campaign through its final three months and served as a White House strategist early in the administration.
Hundreds of exhibits that exposed Mr. Stone’s disdain for congressional and criminal investigators buttressed the testimony.
The evidence showed that in the months before the 2016 election, Mr. Stone strove to obtain emails that Russia had stolen from Democratic computers and funneled to WikiLeaks, which released them at strategic moments timed to damage Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent. “Every chance he got,” prosecutors said, Mr. Stone briefed the Trump campaign about whatever he had picked up about WikiLeaks’ plans.
But he told the House committee in September 2017 that he never described to anyone involved in the Trump campaign his conversations with an intermediary to WikiLeaks.
The trial called into question Mr. Trump’s own answers to queries from Mr. Mueller. The president, who refused to be interviewed and agreed to respond to questions only in writing, said he could not recall the specifics of any of 21 conversations he had with Mr. Stone in the six months before the election.
In one of the trial’s most revealing moments, Mr. Gates recounted a July 31, 2016, phone call between Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump, just days after WikiLeaks had released a trove of emails embarrassing the Clinton campaign. As soon as he hung up with Mr. Stone, Mr. Gates testified, Mr. Trump declared that “more information” was coming, an apparent reference to future releases from WikiLeaks that would rattle his political rival.
Within minutes of the verdict, Mr. Trump protested on Twitter that it was unfair. “So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” Mr. Trump wrote, though his own administration’s Justice Department prosecuted Mr. Stone.
He then listed the names of nearly a dozen favorite targets of his ire, including Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Mueller, the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and Representative Adam B. Schiff, who heads the House Intelligence Committee. “Didn’t they lie?” he tweeted, and then added: “A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?”
Mr. Stone joins a notable list of former Trump aides who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes in cases stemming from Mr. Mueller’s work. It includes Mr. Gates; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime fixer; George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide; and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman and Mr. Stone’s onetime partner in a political consulting firm.