Guest post by Roger Stone
January 25, 2024
It was exactly five years ago today, on January 25th, 2019, that 29 heavily-armed FBI agents in full SWAT gear and brandishing fully automatic M4 assault weapons surrounded my home to take me into custody for the entirely fabricated crime of lying under oath to Congress in my voluntary testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in their investigation into nonexistent “Russian collusion” with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
As I’m sure many will remember, CNN just happened to coincidentally have a camera crew positioned a mere 25-feet from the front door of my home. Although CNN would insist that their correspondent, producer, and camera crew made it there on the basis of shrewd investigative reporting and a hunch, documents sent to my lawyers by CNN that very morning would not only prove that CNN had been tipped off about my arrest, but also revealed who had gave them the advance notice of the raid on my home in violation of the law. Leaking the government’s plans to execute either an arrest or search warrant before the act is a felony.
I was arrested at 6:06 A.M., and at 6:20 A.M. CNN correspondent Sarah Murray texted my lawyer Grant Smith Esq. a copy of my still-sealed criminal indictment. In fact, the indictment would not be unsealed until 10:30 A.M. that morning by a magistrate in Washington D.C. While the document CNN sent my attorney had no timestamp or court markings on it, an examination of the metadata tags revealed the initials of the man who wrote it and who, therefore, also leaked it; Mueller henchman Andrew Weismann. Murray’s subsequent claim that the document she sent my lawyer had been obtained on the Special Counsel’s website is a blatant lie easily disproved with the use of the Wayback Machine. CNN would actually receive an award from the White House Correspondents’ Association for their dogged investigative reporting that allowed them to be present when my wife and I were perp walked out of our Fort Lauderdale home for CNN‘s cameras. Their claims are a lie.
Thus would begin a two-year odyssey in which the media cabal, in league with federal prosecutors, would smear me as a “Russian intelligence asset,” insisting falsely and without an iota of proof that the Democratic National Committee had been the target of an online hack by Russian intelligence agents and that I had acted as a go-between for WikiLeaks and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In fact, Robert Mueller’s prosecutors would never produce any evidence at my Soviet-style show trial to substantiate any of these claims. Fighting their charges would bring us to the brink of bankruptcy. Causing us to lose our home, our savings, most of our insurance, along with my livelihood since the gag order imposed on me by Amy Berman Jackson, the judge in my case – similar to the gag now imposed by a DC judge on President Donald Trump – prevented me from writing or speaking about any subject.
Nonetheless, the number of online trolls who continue to accuse me of being a “Russian traitor” is significant. This is the direct result of the fact that I was unable to defend myself on social media due to a constitutionally questionable gag order imposed upon me by Judge Jackson, and by the warped coverage of the Soviet-style show trial that I was subjected to simply because I refused to testify falsely against Donald Trump. In fact, I was framed for nonexistent crimes for the specific purpose of pressuring to testify falsely against President Donald Trump, in order to create an impeachable offense when Mueller and his thugs could find no actual evidence of Russian collusion or any other crime by President Trump or his campaign.
Federal prosecutors, of course, provided no evidence whatsoever of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign at my trial. In fact, in pretrial motions, the government moved that, in order to convict me, they did not have to prove that there was any Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, or that the Democratic National Committee had, in fact, been the target of an “online hack” with the purloined data going to WikiLeaks. Judge Jackson granted their motion.
Those who actually followed my legal lynching in a D.C. courtroom would also know that Judge Jackson denied my defense attorney a sealed Report from CrowdStrike, a private company retained by the DNC, that supposedly contained proof of this Russian hack. Only when the sworn testimony of CrowdStrike Head Shaun Henry (conveniently, a former deputy to Robert Mueller at the FBI) was declassified and released did we learn that CrowdStrike had no proof whatsoever that the Russians conducted an online hack of the DNC. It was in my trial that the DOJ admitted that, for some strange reason, the FBI never inspected the DNC computer servers to detect whether there was an online hack. Given their role in directing the silencing of pro-Trump voices on Twitter, we now see why.
In fact, no misstatement that I made under oath was material or hid any underlying crime, never mind Russian collusion. The prosecutors provided no proof that I was a go-between for WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, as the fake news media had more than speculated about, or that I had any involvement in the timing of the devastating WikiLeaks disclosures that rocked Hillary Clinton back on her heels. The idea that I was “covering up for Donald Trump” as Judge Jackson said in her sentencing tirade against me is false. There was nothing to cover up.
Even the much-hyped claim that my innocuous Twitter DM (Direct Message) exchange with the persona of Guccifer 2.0, who then-CIA Director John Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey insisted was a Russian intelligence asset, is flawed. The 28-word exchange itself is innocuous, but more importantly, it took place three months after WikiLeaks had already published the DNC material which Guccifer 2.0 claimed he had hacked. Therefore, my involvement would have been chronologically impossible and the insistence that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian spy is contradicted by substantial evidence that he is a US intelligence-created operative.
Even if Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian hacker, my limited exchange with him provides no evidence that we coordinated or colluded in any way. I myself fully released our Twitter DM exchange, and I voluntarily turned it over to the House Intelligence Committee when I testified. It proves nothing. Nonetheless, when I was pardoned, Mueller attacked me in a Washington Post op-ed (probably ghostwritten by corrupt federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann) in which Mueller said I was “communicating with ‘Russian Intelligence asset(s)’”. It’s another fraud.
Federal prosecutors in my trial insisted that my case had to be in front of Judge Jackson because my case was “related to” the case Mueller brought against seventeen alleged Russian intelligence agents, a case that has never even gone to discovery, never mind trial. In fact, Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Kravis told Judge Jackson that federal prosecutors would present evidence against me, gleaned from search warrants in that case at trial, but never did. That’s because no such evidence exists.
Judge Jackson denied my lawyers’ attempt to introduce forensic evidence or expert testimony to challenge the claim that the DNC had been hacked by the Russians. When my lawyers challenged the government’s lack of evidence of a “Russian hack of the DNC” – the underlying premise of my indictment – Kravis filed a rare reply with the court, insisting that the government had proof beyond the CrowdStrike Report that the Russians hacked the DNC. They don’t.
If you don’t believe my version of events, you can simply look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s own long-suppressed final Report.
Only by court order, on November 3rd, 2020, based on a lawsuit brought by BuzzFeed, did the Department of Justice release the last remaining, redacted and long hidden portions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final Report, in which even he could not sugarcoat the fact that, despite his wide and unprecedented legal authority and an unlimited budget, he could find “no factual evidence” that I had engaged in Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration, or had played any role in the phishing or publication of John Podesta’s highly embarrassing e-mails.
Specifically, Mueller’s Report said:
On Page 178,
“The Office’s determination that it could not charge WikiLeaks or Stone as part of the Section 1030 conspiracy was also informed by the constitutional issues that such a prosecution would present. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001), the First Amendment protects a party’s publication of illegally intercepted communications on a matter of public concern, even when the publishing parties knew or had reason to know of the intercepts’ unlawful origin.”
Also Page 178,
“The Office determined that it could not pursue a Section 1030 conspiracy charge against Stone for some of the same legal reasons. The most fundamental hurdles, though, are factual ones.1279 As explained in Volume I, Section III.D.1, supra,( Mueller witness Jerry) Corsi’s accounts of his interactions with Stone on October 7, 2016 are not fully consistent or corroborated. Even if they were, neither (Mueller Witness Jerry) Corsi’s testimony nor other evidence currently available to the Office is sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Stone knew or believed that the computer intrusions were ongoing at the time he ostensibly encouraged or coordinated the publication of the Podesta emails.
Stone’s actions would thus be consistent with (among other things) a belief that he was aiding in the dissemination of the fruits of an already completed hacking operation perpetrated by a third party, which would be a level of knowledge insufficient to establish conspiracy liability. See State v. Phillips, 82 S.E.2d 762, 766 (N.C. 1954) (“In the very nature of things, persons cannot retroactively conspire to commit a previously consummated crime.”) (quoted in Model Penal Code and Commentaries § 5.03, at 442 (1985).”
“Regardless, success would also depend upon evidence of WikiLeaks’ and Stone’s knowledge of ongoing or contemplated future computer intrusions—the proof that is currently lacking.” Are you shocked that neither The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal ever reported this shocking admission that I had, in fact, done nothing wrong? Are you surprised that MSNBC and The Atlantic omitted this from their reporting? I’m not.
Only BuzzFeed, The Gateway Pundit, and Zero Hedge reported this stunning DOJ press release put out at midnight on Election Day – the busiest media day of the year – to guarantee scant media coverage. Strangely, the Zero Hedge story is no longer online but the Wayback Machine locates it. Judge Jackson also withheld this exculpatory portion of Mueller’s Report from my defense attorneys at trial. In fact, when my defense lawyers requested Mueller’s full un-redacted Report in preparation for my legal defense, Judge Jackson ruled that she would review Mueller’s Report in chambers and decide if any specific section of the Report pertained to me. Curiously, she never gave my attorneys the exculpatory section cited above.
The other canard that must be addressed is the claim by the four prosecutors involved in my prosecution, that Trump Attorney General William Barr had pressured the prosecutors into recommending a more lenient sentence for me. While all four prosecutors resigned from my case in protest, only one of them, Aaron Zelinsky, testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee, claiming that his specific DOJ superiors had ordered him to “go easy on Stone because he was a friend of the President.” It is worth noting that the Washington Post reported that a subsequent investigation into this claim by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz included sworn denials of this assertion by Zelinsky. So, in other words, Zelinsky lied to Congress under oath—the very charge brought against me!
The other often recycled assertion that Russian collusion with the Trump campaign is proven in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Collusion. Although that Committee was indeed bipartisan, all of the Republicans on the panel were Trump opponents. The final Report is more of a compendium of false media claims cut and pasted into a baseless document. I can honestly say that every reference to me in their Report is false.
I am, of course, only alive on this fifth anniversary of my arrest because this entire ordeal motivated me to renew my faith in Jesus Christ and because President Donald J. Trump saw through my politically motivated prosecution. President Trump recognized that I had done nothing wrong and commuted my sentence forty-eight hours before I had been ordered to turn myself in at a dank federal correctional center in Georgia, later issuing a full and unconditional pardon shortly before Christmas of 2020. While the report of the commutation is easy to find on the internet, the fact that I was pardoned has been aggressively suppressed and virtually every major news outlet fails to mention it whenever reporting on me or my activities. How curious?
I wish I could say that the hysterical attacks of those in the Democrat Party and their allies in the fake news media have subsided, but sadly that is not the case. Only ten days ago, Mediaite, among the most biased and disingenuous of left-wing media outlets, posted an entirely AI-generated audio that they claimed they had gotten from an anonymous source, in which they said that, four years ago, I had been recorded threatening to kill two Democrat members of Congress. Simple forensic analysis of the audio Mediaite posted using two different technologies prove, beyond a doubt, that this manipulated audio was fabricated with the purpose of smearing me yet again.
The other result of the two-year effort to destroy me and my family are the 11 remaining civil lawsuits filed against me and my wife by Soros-backed front organizations, left-wing gadflies, nutjobs, and other assorted Trump-hating lunatics. Despite the fact that these lawsuits are baseless, meritless, and groundless, they must still be defended against. It is similar to the lawfare President Donald Trump is being subjected to. The purpose is to drain our personal finances and drag my name through the mud once again.
Patriots who want to HELP ME fight this scourge can Donate Here: StoneDefenseFund.com
The post ROGER STONE EXCLUSIVE: The FBI Stormed My Home and Arrested Me 5 Years Ago Today appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.