Prosecutors seek 7 to 9 years in prison for Roger Stone

Source: Politico | February 10, 2020 | Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney

Feds say the longtime Trump adviser’s lies and obstruction struck “at the very heart of our democracy”

Federal prosecutors are urging that longtime Donald Trump adviser and Republican political provocateur Roger Stone be sent to prison for about seven to nine years for his conviction on charges of lying and witness tampering during investigations of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Following a weeklong trial last November, a Washington jury took found Stone guilty on all seven felony counts he faced: five of making false statements to Congress, one of obstruction of Congress, and one of witness tampering with both the House Intelligence Committee inquiry and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

In a sentencing filing Monday, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington argued that Stone’s conduct was exceptionally sinister because of the importance of those investigations and the danger of overseas influence on U.S. elections.

“Foreign election interference is the ‘most deadly adversar[y] of republican government,’” prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington wrote, quoting Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 68. “Investigations into election interference concern our national security, the integrity of our democratic processes, and the enforcement of our nation’s criminal laws. These are issues of paramount concern to every citizen of the United States. Obstructing such critical investigations thus strikes at the very heart of our American democracy.”

The argument was strikingly similar — in some cases borrowing from the exact passages from the same Constitution-era text — as that lodged by the House’s prosecutors during Trump’s impeachment trial. “Alexander Hamilton cautioned that the ‘most deadly adversaries of republican government may come ‘chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils,'” the House members argued in their trial brief.

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