RIP Roger Stone's balls. Judge Amy Berman Jackson has once again kicked them so far up inside the old perv that he's currently unable to swallow. It breaks your heart to see it, said absolutely no one ever.
This morning Judge Jackson issued an Opinion on various motions filed by Stone's lawyers. They'd asked her to dismiss the charges against him because (a) Robert Mueller is illegal, (b) the DOJ is powerless to prosecute someone for lying to a congressional committee unless that committee asks for it prettyplease , and (c) the separation of powers clause means you're not allowed to investigate friends of the president. (Yeah, seriously.)
Judge Berman already danced this "Mueller is ILLEGAL" dance before with Paul Manafort. Stone's idiot protegé Andrew Miller danced this dance all the way up to the DC Circuit, where Their Honors stuck out their gavels andtripped his dumb, loyal ass into a pile on the floor. Ain't nobody got time for this shit today, and NFW is Her Honor granting an injunction to stay prosecution so they can litigate it again.
As for Stone's claim "without citing any legal authority" that the DOJ is not allowed to prosecute him for lying to the House Intelligence Committee without a congressional referral, Judge Jackson tersely observes,"[t]he defendant misapprehends the fundamental allocation of authority established in the Constitution and ignores clear precedent that recognizes the Executive's unfettered responsibility for law enforcement." In other words, Congress has to make a referral for criminal contempt, but perjury is all the way up in the Justice Department's wheelhouse.
She made similar work of the nonsense about Adam Schiff "leaking" Stone's testimony to Mueller, pointing out that, (a) the transcript was conveyed pursuant to an official DOJ request, (b) in addition to shooting his mouth off for all of 2016 about Assange having dirt on Clinton, Stone himself gave a press conference where he read out his own prepared testimony, so it wasn't actually a secret, and (c) a "leaked" lie is STILL A LIE.
But the separation of powers "argument" seems to have really pissed off Judge Jackson.
There are several problems with this attack on the prosecution. First of all, Roger Stone is not the President of the United States. So it is not clear how any prohibition against investigating the chief executive would apply him.
AND THANK GOD FOR THAT.
Leaving aside the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that Richard Nixon couldn't quash subpoenas for third parties who might testify against him, and the fact that this was an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election -- not President Trump -- there remains the small detail that ROGER STONE IS NOT A PART OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH. Also, too, it's not illegal to investigate a sitting president, it's just DOJ policy not to charge him.
But wait, there's more batshittery! Because Roger Stone's lawyers are actually arguing that he can't be prosecuted for failing to turn over documents to HPSCI, because Congress never issued a subpoena, they only made a "request." This might have had something to do with the fact that Stone testified he had no such documents in his possession, but let's not quibble over details, right?
Oh, we're just now getting word that Stone was prosecuted because he "failed to turn over and lied about the existence of responsive records." NEVER MIND.
Judge Jackson similarly refused to authorize a fishing expedition into internal prosecutorial deliberations so that Stone might discover the smoking gun proving that the government is just trying to punish him for loving Trump. But she did let him see a couple paragraphs of the redacted Mueller Report, so MAZAL TOV, ROG. And she's continuing to let his ass stay out of jail and travel to the hinterlands to raise money from the rubes, so ... hey, it's another flawless victory for Roger Stone. Ya really stuck the landing, there, pal!
SLOW FUCKING CLAP.
[ US v. Stone, Memorandum Opinion ]
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Ew! Who's got the brain bleach?
It's a standard sign at beaches these days. Unfortunately, like most signes put up for peoples' safety, people don't read them.