Told the you Fifth Amendment wouldn’t save Roger Stone

| 4:00 pm EST December 17, 2021
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From the start of the January 6th Committee subpoena process, we’ve pointed out that witnesses cannot get themselves off the hook by simply pleading the fifth across the board. You can only plead the fifth if you fear that answering a specific question would put you at risk of prosecution. You can’t credibly argue that every single question you were asked evoked that fear in you.

Sure enough, now that Roger Stone has shown up this morning and pleaded the fifth in response to every question he was asked, MSNBC is reporting on-air this afternoon that January 6th Committee members are looking into referring Stone for criminal contempt.

Given that Stone announced ahead of time that he was going to plead the fifth across the board, the committee likely included innocuous questions that it knew couldn’t possibly put him in a position where he’d be testifying against himself.

For that matter, Roger Stone probably didn’t help his legal case when he announced to the cameras that he pleaded the fifth because he was looking to avoid getting rung up on perjury charges. That’s not even a legal basis for invoking the Fifth Amendment.

In any case, this is the latest reminder that Donald Trump’s people cannot use the Fifth Amendment as a magic wand to simply get away with it all. In fact there are no magic wands available to them. But people like Roger Stone are going to keep trying to find one anyway.