Let’s face it. Since the desperate tinpot despot is so willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of American lives, why would he be squeamish with killing the rule of law?
Last night he again pounded his paws on the scales of justice – this time by freeing convicted criminal Roger Stone, one of his favorite henchmen, a key figure in the Trump-Russia election scandal of 2016. Stone was supposed to be jailed next week, and for the next 40 months – a jury had convicted him, a federal judge had sentenced him – by that’s not how things work in this regime. Trump, hewing to the mob credo he learned from Roy Cohn, decided to reward Stone for his silence.
If yuh stand up for duh Don, duh Don takes care-a yuh.
Or, as international corruption expert Brian Klaas noted last night, “In authoritarian regimes, the rule of law is wielded like a weapon – to punish the president’s opponents and protect the president’s allies. Trump has rapidly politicized rule of law, moving the United States away from democracy and toward despotism.”
If you’re not up to speed on Stone (it’s tough to track everyone in Trump’s criminal rogue’s gallery), here’s a quick refresher:
In 2016 he was Trump’s liaison to WikiLeaks, which harvested and released the Hillary documents that Russia’s military intelligence hackers had stolen. Stone subsequently lied under oath to Congress, claiming that his hands were clean. He was then prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia. At his criminal trial, a key witness – Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates – testified that he’d heard Trump and Stone discuss WikiLeaks’ plans to release Hillary material hacked by the Russians. But Stone refused to testify against Trump. He was convicted on seven counts – perjury, witness intimidation, lying under oath to the judge, and posting the judge’s picture online with a target icon next to her head. The judge sentenced him to 40 months in the slammer.
Which, in Trump’s Orwellian world, means that Stone is a model citizen. Hence the imperial decision to commute Stone’s sentence and permit him to live free with the rest of us.
The official rationale was delivered last night by Trump propaganda minister Kayleigh McEnany: “Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency.” In truth (for what that word is still worth), the Stone investigation was launched by career prosecutors in Trump’s Justice Department, and Attorney General Bill Barr (Trump’s de factor criminal defense lawyer) told ABC News the other day: “I think the prosecution was righteous and I think the sentence the judge ultimately gave was fair.”
This latest perversion of justice comes as no surprise, of course. Since the dawn of his dystopian reign Trump has labored to cover up the irrefutable fact that Vladimir Putin’s operatives worked hard to put him in office – and that while he may not have “colluded” in the strict legal sense, he was complicit in reaping the rewards bestowed by Russia’s alliance with WikiLeaks. Indeed, one newly released (previously redacted) passage of the Mueller Report connects some crucial dots:
Witnesses have stated…that candidate Trump discussed WikiLeaks with Stone, that Trump knew that (former campaign chair) Paul Manafort and Gates had asked Stone to find out what other damaging information about Clinton (that) WikiLeaks possessed, and that Stone’s claimed connection to WikiLeaks was common knowledge within the Campaign.
By the way, Trump told Mueller, in written answers to written questions, that he could not “recall” whether he and Stone had ever discussed the hacked Russian materials on Hillary. Make of that what you will.
Or maybe we should put the Stone farce in perspective and see it as just another sideshow. the rule of law is of paramount importance, and it may take years to repair the damage Trump was wrought. But if we view this episode through the prism of the 2020 election, it’s small potatoes.
The voters who are most determined to oust Trump already know that he’s a corrupt traitor to his country. But swing voters in crucial swing states are far more focused on Trump’s bread-and-butter fundamentals: Is he doing a good or bad job on the pandemic, health care, race relations, and the economy? His horrific poll numbers suggest that the verdict is already in.
Roger Stone needed to go to jail, for the sake of the rule of law. We long ago grew sick and tired of Trump’s perv assaults on Lady Justice. But with mass death and mass unemployment stalking the land, it’s clear that the electoral stakes for this country – and for our very lives – are far higher than the fate of one disgraced Trump flunky.