Roger Stone jurors reach no verdict after first day of deliberations
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN and JOSH GERSTEIN
11/14/2019 05:18 PM EST
Jurors in the Roger Stone trial spent more than five hours Thursday ensconced in the Washington, D.C., federal courthouse without reaching a verdict.
The only indication of how the jury was leaning came via two notes passed to the U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, expressing confusion about what appeared to be just one of the charges against the longtime GOP strategist.
I’m not going to include details about the jurors’ questions in order to encourage readers to click through to the article. I’ll only say that it’s an interesting legal question. Props to the jurors who caught what Stone’s lawyers didn’t. Go read it.
Not having been there myself, (and a whole lot of other good reasons) i cautiously disagree with Judge Jackson’s opinion, that the letter did not count as testimony. It is an addendum to his testimony and, just like any other document, statement, whatever that is tacked on, it had better be considered that person’s testimony or it opens the doors to all kinds of bullshit. Judges need to leave juries to sort some things out but i don’t think this was one of those questions.
The jurors should treat the letter as something that was submitted under the same oath taken for testimony. It has to be considered at least complimentary to testimony. Stone claims that he’s got to speak to his source before providing the name. His lawyers follow up with a name.
Same person? Who cares? It’s only one person, and neither of them are explicitly named Jerome Corsi.
But i’m not certain that this is the question they’re hung up on, or what kind of twist they’ve put on it. Let’s look at the charges. Here are counts three through six. (One and two don’t pertain.)
underlines my emphasis
3 STONE testified falsely that his August 2016 references to being in contact with the head of Organization 1 were references to communications with a single "go-between," "mutual friend," and "intermediary," who STONE identified as Person 2.
4 STONE testified falsely that he did not ask the person he referred to as his "go-between," "mutual friend," and "intermediary," to communicate anything to the head of Organization 1 and did not ask the intermediary to do anything on STONE's behalf.
5 STONE testified falsely that he and the person he referred to as his "go-between," "mutual friend," and "intermediary," did not communicate via text message or email about Organization 1.
6 STONE testified falsely that he had never discussed his conversation with the person he referred to as his "go-between," "mutual friend," and "intermediary," with anyone involved in the Trump Campaign.
Indictment of Roger Stone
Count 3 ought to be an easy call.
The others may hinge on the fact that the government hasn’t shown that both Corsi and Credico fit the bill.
My first thought was that it didn’t matter who the person referred to actually was in each instance. But i wonder whether the jury might be thinking that the government needed to show that all of these charges were true for the same person. If that’s the situation i’d have to disagree.
To my mind, in each charge it doesn’t matter who he represented as his person etc, it matters that he did. The government was clearly aware that there were more than one intermediary.
Or, maybe it’s something else.