Is Roger Stone about to spill the beans on Donald Trump?

| 12:01 pm EST February 24, 2020
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The doomsday pundits swore up and down that Donald Trump would magically pardon Roger Stone the minute he was sentenced to prison. Palmer Report explained why that was highly unlikely to happen, as Trump would be creating a huge political and legal mess for himself by attempting to pardon a co-conspirator. Sure enough, when Stone was sentenced, Trump didn’t pardon him and instead encouraged him to seek out a new trial.

It wasn’t difficult to see what Trump was trying to do. If he’s going to pardon Stone, he’d much rather wait until after the election before doing it. That way, Trump will either have been reelected and he doesn’t have to worry about accountability, or he’ll be on his way out the door and he won’t have to worry about appearances.

Trump is urging Stone to seek a new trial because the longer Stone can drag out the legal process, the longer before Stone’s prison sentence will begin. If enough legal hijinks drag on for long enough, Stone could just maybe make it all the way to November without having had to report to prison yet. It’s why Stone is seeking a new trial. He would almost certainly end up being convicted again, but the process would take quite a long time.

Roger Stone’s only realistic chance of getting a new trial was if he could somehow convince Judge Amy Berman Jackson to recuse herself from the decision on whether to grant her a new trial. In such case, if Stone got lucky and his trial just happened to be reassigned to a crackpot judge, he just might get a new trial. Donald Trump has tried to help Stone’s effort by tweeting menacing things about the judge, the trial, the sentence, and the jurors.

But Judge Jackson announced on Sunday that she won’t recuse herself. This means she’ll make the decision whether Roger Stone deserves a new trial – and there’s about a 99.9% chance she’ll decide he doesn’t deserve one. There are other legal stall tactics that Stone can and will try next, but getting a new trial was his best bet. Now it’s out the window. If Stone can’t stall til November, will he try to blackmail Trump into pardoning him right now? It’s clear that even Trump understands that doing so before the election could come at great cost to him. But if Trump doesn’t pardon him, Stone could end up soon spilling the beans.