When the January 6th defendants sought to move their trial from the highly politicized D.C. circuit, prosecutors insisted that the Defendants would get a fair trial, and actually cited my trial as an example. The government pointed out that the judge ruled in my case that even though it was likely that a majority – if not all – the Jurors in D.C. would be anti-Trump, there was no reason to believe that the Jurors knew that I was a longtime associate of Trump and therefore, I was given a fair trial. This would assume that the jurors had not seen anything of the avalanche of pretrial publicity, and were living under a rock. It also ignored the clear political nature of the charges against me.
The truth is, I was subjected to a Soviet-style show trial in which my first, fourth, and fifth amendments were violated. The notion that my trial was fair is ludicrous on its face. The sham of a trial featured bias from Judge Amy Berman Jackson, federal prosecutors, and flagrant misconduct from both the Jury and Jury forewoman. These were among the reasons President Donald J. Trump ultimately issued my unconditional Presidential Pardon.
Prosecutors were allowed to pick the judge most favorable to their case by insisting that my case was related to their indictment of 17 alleged Russian Intelligence Officers who they claimed gave stolen data to Wiki-leaks at the DNC. In fact, the Prosecutors in my case promised the Judge that they would produce evidence against me at trial that was collected with search warrants from the Russian hacker’s case. They produced no such thing at trial – defrauding the court and violating my Due Process rights.
My constitutional rights were also violated by the Judge in a series of pre-trial rulings. The fact that the first 5 pages of my indictment clearly state that the Russians hacked the DNC and gave the stolen data to Wikileaks. However, the FBI was forced by my lawyers to admit, before the trial even began, that they never inspected the DNC computer servers. Amazingly, the Judge refused to allow me to use expert testimony or forensic evidence to prove that the DNC was not hacked, or that it was far more likely any stolen data was downloaded to a portable drive and taken out the back door.
The Judge also ruled that I could not raise misconduct by the Special Counsel’s Office, the FBI, The Department of Justice, or any individual member of Congress. Why would the government make such a motion unless there was misconduct? We already knew there was during Lt. Gen Flynn’s prosecution, which was conducted by the same office. This ruling was unconstitutional because the Supreme Court decision of Kyles v. Whitley held that the integrity of the investigation is always legitimate grounds for defense.
There is also the makeup of the Jury itself. It is statistically impossible to select a jury in which every Juror was a Democrat and numerous Jurors had served as political appointees in the Clinton or Obama Administrations. The Jurors in my case included individuals who had direct relationships with the FBI or in some cases, the Special Counsel’s Office. The Judge refused to dismiss any juror for political bias.
Most shocking was the conduct of the Jury forewoman. The Jury forewoman attacked me by name regarding the very case in which she was selected as a juror on Facebook and Twitter in 2019. The Jury Forewoman kept these accounts private during jury selection and the trial and only deleted them after the verdict in my case. The Judge insisted that this did not constitute any evidence of bias and refused a request by my Attorney to subpoena the deleted material despite the fact that we had screenshots proving the Jury forewoman’s offenses. In any other courtroom, outside the District of Columbia, the jury forewoman would have been prosecuted.
The Judge also imposed an unconstitutional gag on me insisting that any public comment or defense of myself had the potential to influence the pool of jurors. The judge offered no empirical evidence that my then dissipated social media presence would affect the jury pool and had no problem with the Washington Post and CNN, two dominant media voices in the District of Columbia, attacking me on a mere daily basis in the run-up to the trial. When I appealed this unconstitutional gag, which the Judge left in place after my conviction and prior to my sentencing, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sat on my motion for months while I sustained damage and ultimately ruled that I had to first ask Judge Jackson to remove the gag – an obvious waste of time. It didn’t matter, the Appeals court ran out the clock and my trial were imminent.
Overseeing the case against me for the Office of Special Counsel was Jeannie Rhee, who represented Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation in the email case and who gave the maximum contribution to Hillary’s campaigns in 2008 and 2016 as well as Obama in 2008. The reason Jeannie got this assignment is that she was a partner at Robert Mueller’s law firm, which had represented Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation in the “Illegal Server/missing Email” case. Judge Jackson, in her tongue lashing of about me at sentencing said my case was” really about the search for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.” If so, then both Rhee and Mueller had a conflict of interest and should never have been allowed to investigate the President or myself.
Despite the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons regulations on COVID-19, which held that individuals convicted of nonviolent crimes over the age of 65 be sent to serve their sentence in home confinement, Judge Jackson sentenced me to a 4-year prison term in a rural Georgia prison where the government insisted there were no known COVID-19 cases. In fact, the head of the Prison Guard Union stated that the government was hiding over 219 positive cases in that facility, and none of the CDC guidelines regarding masks or isolation were being followed in the correctional facility. Only days after the date I was to report to this hellhole, the US Bureau of Prisons website showed over 200 cases at the facility. At 68 years old, and with a lifetime history of asthma, mine was a death sentence.
Most outrageous about my trial was the deliberate suppression of exculpatory evidence by both the Prosecutors and the Judge. On Nov. 3, 2020, by Court Order, the DOJ in a rare midnight press release, published the last remaining, and long-hidden, sections of the Special Counsel’s final report which sought to obfuscate the fact that Mueller could find no “factual evidence of Russian Collusion, Wikileaks collaboration or involvement of the alleged heist of John Podesta’s embarrassing emails.” It also concluded that even if such evidence had been discovered, which it was not, such activities would not have been illegal. Had this been turned over to my defense attorneys as required by Giglio v. United States, 405 U. S. 150, decision, it would have undermined the government’s contorted and fabricated case against me. How does one lie to Congress about events that one is not involved in and knows nothing about?
Prosecutors ignored over 30 pages of exculpatory evidence of text messages by government witness Randy Credico, which indisputably proved that Credico was in fact, the source who told me that the Wikileaks material would be released in October. They also disregarded the first hand testimony of at least 3 Grand Jury witnesses who told the Grand Jury that Credico had confided in them directly that he was my source. Mueller’s thugs ignored a written threat by Credico to “put a hole in the head” of another witness who went to the Grand Jury if he contradicted Credico. Yet they charged me with one count of Witness Tampering for ‘threatening to steal Credico’s dog” – a charge even Credico said he never took seriously.
Steve Bannon, who was Mueller’s surprise lead witness, said under oath that he had discussed Wikileaks disclosures with me in virtually every phone conversation we had in 2016, directly contradicting his sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. After reviewing both transcripts Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School told the New York Post, “There does appear a glaring and irreconcilable conflict in what Bannon stated in testimony before Congress and the court. What is striking is that this was not a peripheral point but one of the main areas of inquiry.He has two diametrically opposite sworn statements in a high-profile controversy with dozens of attorneys in attendance.” Turley told The Post Prosecutors surely knew of these discrepancies and therefore they suborned perjury on the stand by Sloppy Steve. Bannon also said I was the Trump campaign’s “access point” with Wikileaks. This came as news to me because I had no role in the Trump campaign, and my one on-line attempt to email the Wikileaks flack on Twitter DMs resulted in a brush-off. Prosecutors also had an obligation to tell my defense attorneys that Bannon was under criminal investigation at the time of my trial as the text of his subsequent indictment showed. They failed to do so.
Prosecutors then proposed a 7-9 year prison sentence for me, in which they repeatedly “enhanced” the length of my sentence based on crimes I had been neither charged with nor convicted of. Mueller prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that he was subjected to political pressure by Senior Officials at the Justice Department to “go easy on Stone” in sentencing. According to the Washington Post, the three top career non-political Prosecutors at the Justice Department have all testified under oath to the DOJ Inspector General, denying that any such pressure was exerted on the Prosecutors in my case. In view of the fact that I was prosecuted for allegedly “lying to congress,” one wonders when Mr. Zelinsky will be prosecuted.
The conduct of the Prosecutors, Judge, and Jury in all of the Mueller-related cases demonstrates precisely that no supporter of Donald Trump and no Republican can get a fair trial in the District of Columbia. The January 6th defendants are no exception.
