'The Truth Looked Bad for Donald Trump': What We're Learning from the Roger Stone Trial
Just as the nation zeroes in on the House impeachment inquiry brought on by Trump’s solicitation of foreign interference in the 2020 election, one of the last shoes is dropping over foreign interference in the election of 2016.
Roger Stone — an informal Trump adviser and infamous longtime GOP henchman — is now on trial in federal court on criminal charges that he lied under oath to House investigators, as well as engaged in witness tampering, regarding the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Wikileaks and its dissemination of damaging emails from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that were hacked by Russia.
Stone, the alleged go-between connecting WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, was indicted in January as part of the investigation by Robert Mueller. The details of his involvement in the Trump/Russia scandal were heavily redacted in the Mueller Report.
On day one of the trial, prosecutors dropped a bombshell, presenting call records showing that Trump and Stone spoke on the phone regularly as the WikiLeaks email-dump saga evolved, including on the day the DNC announced it had been hacked. Federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky stopped short of arguing Trump directed Stone’s activity, but the government alleged Stone’s criminal cover-up was perpetrated on behalf of the now-President. “Evidence will show Roger Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee because the truth looked bad,” Zelinsky told jurors. “The truth looked bad for the Trump campaign and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/roger-stone-trial-trump-truth-909445/
