Trump confidant Roger Stone pleads not guilty

[prometeus]

If there was ever anyone charged so far that Trump would pardon, Stone would top the list. They've been friends for years.

Well, scumbags of a feather jerk together...

It is a good thing when politics are purged of crap like Stone, regardless of party. Low lives like him have been infecting our politics for too long.

 

[sangha]

I'm saying that the indictment is only part of the story. I'm saying that the indictment can be 100% accurate as to the included details but could also be missing 100% of any exculpatory evidence.

OK, but I do not see how any unmentioned evidence can exonerate someone who testified he had no text messages after he spent the morning receiving 30 of them.

 

[iguanaman]

Every year I get a letter or two from the IRS saying that one of my clients lied on their tax return and failed to report $100k or more in stock sales. Quite often the IRS is right. I'll call my client and ask "Did you sell a bunch of stock and forget to tell me"? Sometimes they'll cop to the offense and say that they did but that they didn't know it needed to be reported. If I was a good prosecutor I'd haul them off to the IRS myself at that point, stand them in front of the RO and say "MY CLIENT IS GUILTY! Mete out whatever penalty the law allows!"

Of course I'm not a good prosecutor. I'm not a prosecutor at all. My job is to defend my client. That means I look for information that might get them out of the obvious hot water they are in. So, about 95% of the time I find information that tells me how much they bought the stock for. That's important information because tax can only be assessed on the gain from the sale of the stock. Sometimes there isn't any gain at all and, while the IRS is 100% right about them not reporting the sale, there still isn't any "crime" because there's no gain and they didn't really cause any damage by "lying" or "forgetting".

So you think Stone was indicted by the IRS? I don't know what their conviction rate is but I do know what the DOJ's is and it is 99% of defendants either plead guilty or are found guilty by a jury. Stone's only hope of not spending the rest of his life in jail is a pardon and then he would be forced to testify to Congress without a 5th amendment excuse.