Roger Stone Looks a Lot Like Howdy Doody -- Neither One of Them Is a Criminal

ROGER STONE LOOKS A LOT LIKE HOWDY DOODY, AND NEITHER ONE IS A CRIMINAL. What has the Unites States become?? Are we now a police state? Did we decide to replace Stalinism with Muellerism? • • • WHAT HAPPENED TO ROGER STONE SHOULD SHOCK EVERY AMERICAN TO THE CORE. Roger Stone told Sean Hannity : “They’re trying to criminalize legitimate political inquiry. They’re trying to criminalize free speech, which is really what this is about.” • Stone was taken into custody last Friday and indicted on charges of obstruction, making false statements and witness tampering. The indictment does not charge Stone with conspiring with WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website that published emails of Democrats during the 2016 campaign.? The indictment does not charge Stone with conspiring with the Russian officers who Mueller says hacked them. Instead, it accuses Stone of lying about his interactions related to WikiLeaks' release during investigations by Congress and Mueller’s team. The indictment states that during the summer of 2016, Stone spoke to senior Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks and information it might have had that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It also said that senior Trump campaign officials contacted Stone to inquire about future releases, and that Stone continued to communicate with members of the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. The 24-page indictment alleges that Stone worked to obstruct the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election by making false statements to the committee, denying he had records sought by the committee and persuading a witness to provide false testimony. • But, on Monday, Stone argued that the reason for the indictment against him was much simpler : “Look, I honestly believe that they’re going to try to charge the President and the Vice President with some hoked-up frame of Russian collusion. That way they can make Nancy Pelosi president. She can make Hillary Clinton vice president and then step aside. It’s a nightmare but I think that’s what they have in mind." • Roger Stone continues to insist : "There is no Russian collusion. I had no collaboration with WikiLeaks. I’m not charged with conspiracy. Believe me, if they could’ve made that case they would’ve. But they want to silence me because I will stand up for Donald Trump. That’s what this is really about.” Stone added : “This is not only an effort to silence me because I support Donald Trump...and I’ve been a critic of the Mueller investigation...and I think Donald Trump is making America great again. He’s my friend of 40 years. I have great affection for him and his family. I’m not going to testify against him because I possess no negative information. There is no Russian collusion. This is a witch hunt.” • Roger Stone describes himself : "I’m targeted here because they want to silence me. I’m 66-years-old. I support the Second Amendment but don’t own a firearm...I can’t swim even though they had two amphibious units planted behind my house...I’m not going to testify against him because I have no negative information on Trump..." • Roger Stone described the police state raid last Friday when 29 FBI agents had arrived in 17 vehicles, with lights flashing, to arrest him. He also claimed Monday that the FBI had used more force to arrest him than it had used “to take down Bin Laden or El Chapo.” • Stone added : “It’s a raw abuse of power in the fact that a CNN reporter was allowed to film my arrest.” CNN, whose new motto is "Facts First," has denied that it was tipped off about the arrest and credited its scoop to clever observation of court proceedings -- although we know for a Fact First that the people at CNN aren't even smart enough to figure out who the legitimate US President is. Brooke Baldwin, anchor of CNN’s Newsroom, mocked Stone’s claims, saying, ”The FBI knocked on his door.” CNN also described Stone’s arrest as an “early morning FBI raid : "A number of law enforcement vehicles with silent sirens flashing pulled in front of Stone’s home on a darkened Ft. Lauderdale street just after 6 a.m. Friday morning. About a dozen officers with heavy weapons and tactical vests fanned out across Stone’s lawn. Law enforcement shined a flashlight into Stone’s front door before one officer rapped against it, shouting, 'FBI. Open the door.' Seconds later, the agent shouted, 'FBI. Warrant.' A second-floor light turned on and moments later, Stone appeared in the front entryway. He confirmed who he was to law enforcement." • Not everyone at CNN agreed with this narrative. CNN legal analyst Paul Callan wrote on the network’s website, in an article titled, “Roger Stone must have made Mueller really angry,” that special counsel Robert Mueller had used “an FBI arrest team worthy of a Navy SEAL operation....In a dramatic predawn raid, FBI agents placed Roger Stone, the Republican king of darkness, under arrest at his Florida home on charges related to the Robert Mueller investigation. The televised raid looked like one designed to apprehend a terrorist rather than the pajama-clad 66-year-old Trump campaign advisor renowned for his 'dirty tricks' approach to presidential campaigns and the large Richard Nixon tattoo adorning his back. The aggressive raid suggests that it might be time to trade in the Nixon tattoo for a bulls-eye, especially given the ferocity of the arrest tactics employed by Mueller’s FBI agents. The approach to this arrest makes clear that Roger Stone and possibly his attorneys have done something provocative enough to make the usually low profile and careful special prosecutor extraordinarily angry. Stone was not afforded the customary voluntary surrender option usually seen in white collar criminal cases. Most likely, the raid was intended to send a clear message to other witnesses and potential defendants..." • • • IS AMERICA NOW A POLICE STATE? That is not a throwaway line we might hear from the ProgDem regulars of late night mainstream media TV. • "Silencing" people who oppose the regime's agenda is what a police state is all about. Ask the freedom fighters in Syria. Ask the national assembly leaders in Venezuela. Ask the Cuban democrats languishing in prison hellholes in Cuba. Ask the Canadian citizen sentenced to death in China. And, now, because of a terrifyingly swift SWAT team sweep by the FBI, ask Roger Stone. • National Review's Andrew McCarthy analyzed the SWAT raid arrest by the FBI : "Roger Stone is the shiny object. The obstruction charges in his long-anticipated indictment, made public on Friday, are not the matter of consequence for the United States. Nor is the critical thing the indictment’s implicit confirmation that there was no criminal “collusion” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. What matters is this: The indictment is just the latest blatant demonstration that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have known for many months that there was no such conspiracy. And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime, they have allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover over the presidency -- over the Trump administration’s efforts to govern -- heedless of the damage to the country." • McCarthy reminds us -- reminds America -- reminds the Swamp and Deep State -- that : "The rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation -- namely, the notion that the Trump campaign had 'coordinated' in the Kremlin’s cyber-espionage operation to meddle in the 2016 campaign -- has been nothing more than a suspicion harbored by political, law-enforcement, and intelligence officials who loathed Donald Trump. That there may be a thousand good reasons to dislike Donald Trump is irrelevant, for we are talking about investigations, not politics. Investigative suspicions must be rooted in fact, not contempt." • YET, McCarthy, states : "Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false. In truth, there was no evidence of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage -- nothing but the Clinton- campaign generated, unverified Steele Dossier. The months-in-the-making Stone indictment is just the latest proof of that. Yet investigators were not just content to let the country believe there was a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy; they affirmatively encouraged the public to believe it was true. Even as they indicted people for providing misleading information and then failing to correct the record, they never themselves corrected the misimpression they had gratuitously created in public statements -- the statement issued by FBI director James Comey, with Justice Department approval, just two months after Trump took office; and the statement issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein two months later, when he reiterated Comey’s testimony in appointing Special Counsel Mueller." • Andrew McCarthy says that he accepts US intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia is the culprit in tte hacking of Democratic National Committtee computers. But, he adds : "An intelligence finding is just an assessment of probability; it is not courtroom proof. And Mueller’s indictments of Russian intelligence officers, individuals, and corporate entities are effectively no more than press releases trying to put to rest any questions about Russia’s culpability. As the prosecutors well know, an indictment is just an allegation; it is evidence of nothing. Given that Vladimir Putin is never going to extradite his operatives to face US criminal charges, Mueller’s team well knows that their allegations are freebies -- they are never going to be tested in court." • McCarthy brings the Russian hacking down to the Roger Stone arrest : "As the prosecutors have further developed their allegations, we’ve learned that Russia obtained the emails through its hackers and somehow got them to WikiLeaks, which then got them into mainstream publications. Mueller’s indictments of Russian entities strongly suggest that Russia acted alone in its hacking and troll-farm operations: The Kremlin neither needed nor sought help from Trump; its operations actually predated Trump’s candidacy; and sometimes it operated against Trump. Moreover, Mueller has never uttered a single sentence in all his charging instruments alleging Trump’s complicity in Russia’s espionage -- the indicted Russians have no connection to the Trump campaign, and the indicted people in Trump’s orbit have no connection to Russia’s hacking. So now we have the Stone indictment. It alleges no involvement -- by Stone or the Trump campaign -- in Russia’s hacking. The indictment’s focus, instead, is the WikiLeaks end of the enterprise -- i.e., not the 'cyberespionage' of a foreign power that gave rise to the investigation, but the dissemination of the stolen emails after the hacking. And what do we learn? That the Trump campaign did not know what WikiLeaks had. That is, in addition to being uninvolved in Russia’s espionage, the Trump campaign was uninvolved in Julian Assange’s acquisition of what Russia stole. The Stone indictment reads like an episode of The Three Stooges. Stone and two associates -- conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerry Corsi, and left-wing-comedian-turned-radio-host Randy Credico, respectively denominated 'Person 1' and 'Person 2' -- are on a quest to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton and when Assange is going to publicize it. But that does not suit Stone, who has cultivated an image of political dirty trickster and plugged-in soothsayer. In public, then, Stone pretends to know more than he knows and to have an insider’s view of Assange’s operation; behind the scenes, he scrounges around for clues about what Assange is up to, hoping some insider will tell him." • Andrew McCarthy labels the Roger Stone quest for information about the Russian hacked emails for what it is -- "a clown show. A despicable one, at that." • Assange, says McCarthy, "is an inveterate anti-American who has done incalculable damage to US intelligence operations." AND, McCarthy ties Mueller inott he Russian affair -- "How interesting that Robert Mueller led the FBI during those debacles and has special incentive to dig into the WikiLeaks-Kremlin connection. And how interesting that Assange was a heroic figure to the Left, and the bane of the national-security Right, before his apparent distaste for Hillary flipped the script (at least for blind Trump and Clinton partisans). In any event, we have Stone and Corsi racking their brains about how to ferret out what Assange has got, and to understand the timeline in which he might release it -- hoping against hope that it will kill off the Clinton bid. And we have Credico, Stone’s radio-host pal, dealing directly with Assange (mainly by interviewing him), then passing information along to Stone while imploring Stone to keep his (Credico’s) name out of it. Meanwhile, Stone tells his friends in the Trump campaign that he has heard WikiLeaks may have information that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. After the hacked DNC emails are published in July 2016, a 'senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton campaign.' 'Was directed'? Naturally, you’re thinking, 'was directed by whom?' By Trump? Could be...Stone says it was not, but who knows? The POINT, however, is not who did the directing but WHY it was thought necessary to reach out to Stone. The Trump campaign had to ask Stone because it was in the dark." • McCarthy concludes, as any objective analyst must, that the Trump campaign was "not involved in the hacking, so it did not know what the Russians gave Assange. And it had no involvement with WikiLeaks’ operations, so it turned to Stone, who had held himself out as a knowledgeable source." • But Stone, too, was unsure. McCarthy notes that Mueller alleges : “STONE thereafter told the Trump campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by [WikiLeaks]” (emphasis added). The prosecutor has to say “potential” because Stone did not have solid knowledge of Assange’s intentions -- he tried to find out from others (including Credico, who had contact with Assange), but they did not know for sure exactly what Assange had and whether or when he would publish it." • IT IS NOT A CRIME, as McCarthy points out : "to know that bad people have damaging information about your political opponent, nor to try to nudge them to publish it at the time most opportune for your political favorite. Here, the Trump campaign did not even know what WikiLeaks had. Its best source was Stone, but, like the campaign, he was pressing sources who might have the information about WikiLeaks that he lacked. No surprise, then, that Mueller does not even allege that Stone was in a criminal conspiracy with WikiLeaks, let alone that Trump conspired with WikiLeaks -- much less with Putin. Instead, Stone is charged with seven counts of obstructing congressional investigations -- by giving misleading testimony, withholding and lying about the existence of records responsive to a congressional request, lying about his communications with Credico, and attempting to influence Credico to lie or refuse to testify. These are serious charges, and while Stone may have cards to play on the allegations that he made misrepresentations (more on that another time), the special counsel appears to have daunting evidence that Stone tampered with Credico’s testimony -- a charge that involves Stone’s cheesy exhortations that Credico ape the stonewalling of both Stone hero Richard Nixon and 'Frank Pentangeli' (the Michael V. Gazzo character who famously develops witness-stand amnesia in Godfather II)." • The salient fact, states Andrew McCarthy, is that "the evidence-based narrative from which Mueller derives these obstruction charges underscores that the President and his campaign were not complicit in Russia’s hacking of Democratic accounts. That’s not new news. It is completely consistent with indictments Mueller has been filing for a year. Why does that matter? Well, if I may beat a dead horse, in February 2017, Comey, then the FBI’s director, gave this astonishing public testimony at a House Intelligence Committee hearing : 'I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.'....It was wrong to acknowledge the existence of the classified Russia investigation, and it was egregiously wrong not only to name the Trump campaign as a subject but to do so in a manner that suggested criminal prosecution was foreseeable. Any thinking person would have taken Director Comey’s disclosure, in disregard of several law-enforcement and intelligence protocols, to signal that the new President could be conspiring with Russia in an espionage scheme, for which he -- or at least officials in his campaign -- might very well face criminal charges. It has to have been obvious to investigators for months that this suggestion was misleading. Yet there has been no correction of the record. For month after month, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the special counsel have been content to allow the presidency to be enveloped in a cloud of suspicion that necessarily infects the administration’s capacity to govern, to conduct foreign relations, and to deal with Congress." • Andrew McCarthy calls it for what it was and is : "We are talking about common sense and common decency: The Justice Department and the FBI went out of their way to portray Donald Trump as a suspect in what would have been the most abhorrent crime in the nation’s history. It has been more than two years. Is it too much to ask that the Justice Department withdraw its public suggestion that the president of the United States might be a clandestine agent of Russia?" [The entire McCarthy article is available at < https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/roger-stone-indictment-underscores-no-trump-russia-conspiracy/ >.] • • • ALAN DERSHOWITZ WEIGHS IN ON THE ROGER STONE ARREST. In Gateway Institute, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Dershowitz says : "The reasons given thus far for Roger Stone's pre-dawn arrest by armed FBI agents are utterly unconvincing. He was not a flight risk, as evidenced by the low bail and easy conditions of release set by the judge without objection from the government. Stone knew he was going to be indicted and if he wanted to flee, he had plenty of time to do so. The same is true of destroying evidence, wiping his electronics or doing anything else that would warrant an arrest rather than a notice to his lawyer to appear in court at a specified time. A search was conducted of various residences pursuant to a search warrant. No arrest was necessary to conduct these searches. So, if there was no legitimate reason for the arrest and handcuffing of this presumed innocent defendant, what was the illegitimate reason? To paraphrase the indictment against Stone, the illegitimate purpose of the arrest was to intimidate the potential witness -- namely Stone -- into not invoking his constitutional right to remain silent, rather than to testify as a government witness. The arrest was nothing more than a show of toughness -- a foretaste of what Stone could expect if he did not cooperate with Mueller. Police do this all the time : 'Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.' The tough arrest with handcuffs and shackles was a demonstration of the hard way. Prosecutors have enormous power and discretion whether and how to use it. All too often they use it the way Mueller has been using it during this investigation: to pressure witnesses to testify against Trump. As Judge T.S. Ellis, III, who presided over the Manafort trial, observed: 'You don't really care about Mr. Manafort's bank fraud -- what you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.' " Professor Dershowitz points out : "If Hillary Clinton had been elected president and if a special prosecutor had arrested one of her associates in the rough and demeaning manner by which Stone was arrested, civil libertarians would be up in arms. They would correctly argue that to marshal dozens of armed FBI agents to arrest an elderly man accused of non-violent crimes is an abuse of authority and a waste of FBI resources. They would complain that it constitutes intimidation and violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But because the arrest is of a Trump associate and the purpose is to get evidence against President Trump, we have not heard from fair-weather civil libertarians who use civil liberties and constitutional rights as tactics to serve their partisan political agendas....Their silence speaks volumes about their partisanship and lack of neutral standards of civil liberties." • Alan Dershowitz demands that the American public be told the truth about why Roger Stone was arrested : "We have not received the truth. Congress should hold a hearing and call as witnesses those who ordered the arrest and demand they explain and justify it. It is unlikely that a plausible and credible explanation will be offered, but Mueller and his FBI agents should at least have an opportunity to set the record straight. Maybe there is a good reason for why the arrest was necessary, but if so, we have not heard it and it is unlikely that the reason involves national security or other secrets. These hearings should lead to legislation setting enforceable standards for when the kind of arrest to which Stone was subjected should be permissible. The power to arrest, using armed FBI agents, handcuffs and shackles must not become a tactic to be used by law enforcement for impermissible reasons. Nor should it become routine. Congress must act to prevent these abuses from recurring." • • • TO REPEAT, IS AMERICA NOW A POLICE STATE? "Silencing" people who oppose the regime's agenda is what a police state is all about. Ask the freedom fighters in Syria. Ask the national assembly leaders in Venezuela. Ask the Cuban democrats languishing in prison hellholes in Cuba. Ask the Canadian citizen sentenced to death in China. And, now, because of a terrifyingly swift SWAT team sweep by the FBI, ask Roger Stone. • Sean Hannity said it on Fox News Opinions on Wednesday : "With all the people we know who lied to Congress -- former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, ex-CIA Director John Brennan, the folks who lied to the FISA court and years of scandals like Fast and Furious, IRS targeting conservatives and Hillary Clinton's missing emails, it's good to know the feds finally got their man. Roger Stone, who is being charged not with Russia collusion, but the process crime of lying to Congress, was targeted for the same reason US District Judge T.S. Ellis said they went after Paul Manafort and the same reason they tried to bankrupt General Michael Flynn. They want to put the screws to Stone, who is 66, to make him sing or compose against Trump. That’s the only reason. Otherwise, why would you arrest him? If it was really for lying to Congress, he'd be near the back of a long line....Stone got the same treatment as Manafort and Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen. All the other people who lied to Congress or to FISA judges got a pass. Roger Stone committed no violent crime. He’s not a drug dealer or a drug kingpin. He’s not a Mafioso or a gangster. He’s not El Chapo. He may have lied to Congress. All the feds had to do was call his lawyer and say, 'Be at police headquarters for processing at 9 a.m. or we’re putting a warrant out for your arrest,' and he would have shown up. Hillary Clinton and her cronies ignored subpoenas for emails, wiped her hard drive with BleachBit and smashed phones to pieces to avoid turning them over. Do you think you would get away with that? You might, if you could help the Deep State with its witch hunt for President Trump. There’s a danger here. We are a democratic republic. The Constitution that we cherish so much is the foundation of all law and order in this country. If you don’t apply the laws equally, only going after one group of people because of their political views, and you protect people with other political views, you’ve lost our Constitution. We've lost our country. Without equal application of our laws and equal justice under the law, there's one thing left to say to our great nation: Goodbye." • • • DEAR READERS, corruption os insidious. It creeps in, bit by bit, as democracies age or become lazy -- or are targeted for takeover by groups who do not like democracy or We the People. That is the situation now in the United States. A group -- we might better call them a cabal -- composed of Progressive Democrats who want Hillary or another ProgDem to be President at any cost to the Republic, and now being infiltrated and taken over themselves by radicalized anti-American Democrat politicians who see the US as the best candidate to replace Venezuela or the Soviet Union -- are targeting America for overthrow and destruction. American Thinker's Patricia McCarthy asked on Tuesday : " Will no one stand up to the corruption in the FBI, DOJ, and CIA?" • The answer seems to be "No" with one gigantic exception -- President Donald Trump. Patricia McCarthy lzys Robert Mueller bare : "For nearly ten years now, Americans who have been paying attention have known that our government has become corrupt, that its premier institutions were weaponized by the Obama administration to the point that we have become something of a police state or banana republic. This is not to say there was no corruption previous to Obama. As Sidney Powell addresses in her book License to Lie, the current special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his amoral, ruthless right-hand man, Andrew Weismann, had already been practicing their prosecutions of personal destruction for decades. In the 1980s when head of the FBI in Boston, Mueller allowed four men to remain in prison whom he knew were innocent. He did it to protect a confidential informant. Two of them died in prison. The lawsuits filed cost taxpayers $100M. There was the total destruction of Enron, and then came the obliteration of Enron's accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. Those prosecutions were run much as Mueller and Weismann are running their current job assignment. Mueller successfully ruined both companies, costing thousands of people their jobs and sending nonviolent people to prison, sometimes to solitary confinement like what he did with Paul Manafort. Fortunately, but too little, too late, nearly all of the guilty verdicts they managed to elicit from juries were overturned by the Supreme Court in both cases." • But, Mueller goes on, sowing corruption and partisan Fake justice to the enemies of the Deep State and its elite political overseers. Patrica McCarthy asks : "Why were these two men not disbarred? How this malicious and vindictive man continued to rise to be a US attorney in Massachusetts and California before becoming head of the FBI is a still unexplained mystery....Obama definitely used the FBI, DOJ, and CIA for his own ends without regard for the Constitution, rights to privacy, and basic decency. People like Mueller have been around for years and years, poisoning the agencies they are charged with running lawfully. Mueller is just one of the worst, but he has plenty of company : Patrick Fitzgerald, Eric Schneiderman, Eliot Spitzer, and Eric Holder come to mind. Each of them perpetrated crimes against the DOJ and the American people as surely as Comey and McCabe have against the FBI, by using the power of the government for their own despicable ends." • At the end of the day, Patricia McCarthy is right -- "Mueller was not hired to investigate Trump; he was hired to cover up crimes, his own and those of his fellow travelers, their elaborate plot to derail the Trump campaign and then to orchestrate his impeachment by any means necessary. His appointment was successfully manipulated by Comey and Rosenstein for their own purposes. Now Mueller has authorized the over-the-top SWAT-team, guns-drawn raid of Roger Stone's home, an exercise that would be comical if it were not so deadly serious.... As Tucker Carlson pointed out, Mueller sent more men to get Stone than Obama sent to get Osama bin Laden!" • I am beginning to suspect that the Pelosi stonewall over a measly $5.7 billion for a security wall on the southern border is in part a covering tactic -- she is covering Mueller's endgame ruthlessness as he lunges for President Trump; she is covering the Deep State's final thrust for the jugular of the Constitution and its rights and protections; she is covering her own unstated radical plan to take America away from its citizens and give it to socialist-marxist elites. • AND, so I ask again -- and every American ought to be asking the same question and demanding answers -- Is America now a police state? "Silencing" people who oppose the regime's agenda is what a police state is all about. Ask the freedom fighters in Syria. Ask the national assembly leaders in Venezuela. Ask the Cuban democrats languishing in prison hellholes in Cuba. Ask the Canadian citizen sentenced to death in China. And, now, because of a terrifyingly swift SWAT team sweep by the FBI, ask Roger Stone.