Bon Voyage, Roger Stone!
Roger Stone was found guilty by a jury today on all seven felonies he’d been charged with in relation to Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. Stone will soon be sentenced to several years in prison, which will likely end up exceeding his natural lifespan. Trump will then likely decide not to take the legal risk of trying to pardon his old friend Stone, just as Trump has failed to stick his neck out for everyone else who’s been convicted for carrying out his crimes.
In other words, Roger Stone’s life is effectively over. He’ll rot in solitary confinement until he dies of old age. This is a seriously ugly outcome for any human being’s life, even though in Stone’s case it’s fully deserved. It’s not something to gloat over, even though Stone once called me “fake news” and a “piece of human excrement” because I played a small journalistic role in helping to expose Stone’s crimes. The whole thing is just a shame.
Roger Stone is a career criminal, going back to his role in Watergate. He’s a pure villain, as evidenced by his conviction today for having threatened to murder a witness and kidnap his dog. He threatened a number of female political pundits in vicious and explicitly sexist fashion. He vaguely threatened to murder the judge ahead of his trial. Stone is finally getting the lifelong prison sentence he deserves. At long last, he won’t be able to harm anyone else going forward.
And yet things never should have gotten this far. Career criminals like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort are only being taken down because they criminally conspired against the United States to rig a presidential election and install a traitor like Donald Trump into the Oval Office. Even when Trump himself inevitably goes to prison, it still won’t be a “victory” so much as it’ll be a relief. Stone’s conviction today means we’re one step closer to taking Trump down, which means we’re one step closer to getting back to being America.
