Roger Stone may have punched his ticket to prison after all
So you’re a career criminal. The departing President of the United States just issued you a blanket pardon intended to protect you from your years-long crime spree, thus saving you from dying in prison. Do you decide to disappear from the stage after that, or at least keep your nose clean?
If you’re Roger Stone, the answer is a resounding no. After he was issued a blanket pardon in late December, he turned around and played a role in the January 6th Capitol domestic terrorist attack. The question up to now has been whether his role was deep enough to land him in legal hot water. Now it appears the answer is “yes.”
Stone has admitted that he was in Washington DC for the insurrection, but he’s insisted that he never left his hotel room. This meant prosecutors were going to have to prove that he was criminally responsible for the attack from afar. But now ABC News says there’s video of Stone outside of the hotel, meeting with the “Oath Keepers” terrorist group whose leaders have already been indicted in the attack.
This is a big deal for a few reasons. First, it means prosectors can physically put Roger Stone with the terrorists on the morning of the attack. Second, he lied about this meeting, which suggests he was trying to cover up the intent of the meeting. Third, with some of the Capitol attackers likely to end up cutting cooperating plea deals, there’s a good chance one or more of them will give up precisely what Stone was telling them to do that morning.
Roger Stone’s blanket pardon was already legally flimsy, with some legal experts expecting him to be criminally charged for his past crimes in spite of the pardon. But the one thing that’s definite under the law is that blanket pardons don’t apply to future crimes. Now prosecutors may not even have to litigate Stone’s pardon in order to put him in prison.
