CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, July 20, 2020

Roger Stone: Justice denied

In the case of Roger Stone, Justice was not done. Stone’s sentence should not have been commuted. Instead, Roger Stone’s request for a new trial should have been granted.

Tomeka Hart, the woman who ended up serving as the foreperson of the Roger Stone jury should never have been allowed to serve on the jury. Stone’s lawyer should have challenged Hart "for cause," and, if that failed, used one of his "peremptory challenges" to prevent Hart from serving on the jury. Ergo: Stone was not adequately represented.

During the voir dire (speak truth) examination of the potential jurors, the Obama-appointed, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, should have discovered that Tomeka Hart was a Democrat, anti-Trump activist who had already made up her mind that Roger Stone was guilty as charged. Fault Judge Jackson for not dismissing Hart.

During the trial, Tomeka Hart continued to tell her social-media followers that Stone should be convicted. After sentence was passed, Hart celebrated to her followers how she, the jury foreperson, convinced her fellow jurors to convict Stone.

Despite all the evidence that Hart tampered with the jury’s deliberations, Judge Jackson refused to grant Stone a new trial. Rather than see his aging, long-time friend possibly perish in prison from the Chinese virus, President Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.

The great irony is that Stone was convicted, in part, of jury tampering when the jury foreperson is the one tampered with the Stone jury and then bragged about it.

But when it comes to letting the convicted off the hook, President Clinton holds all the records. On Clinton’s last day in office, he issued 140 pardons or commutations. The most outrageous being Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich who owed $48 million in back taxes and faced 51 counts of tax evasion.

While fugitive Marc Rich was living the high life in Switzerland, his supposedly estranged wife was donating $450,000 to the Clinton library and over $10,000 to Hillary Clinton’s senate campaign. Meanwhile, Marc Rich was helping Iran obtain over 4 million barrels embargoed oil.

Clinton’s pardon of Rich caused such a furor that Mary Joe White, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, launched an investigation. But, when James Comey replaced White, the investigation was scrapped. Does anyone see a connection here?

Clinton’s rogue’s gallery of pardons and commutations included two Weather Underground terrorists; Susan McDougal, who refused to testify against the Clintons in the Whitewater scandal; former Democrat Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, convicted in the House post office check-kiting scandal: Patty Hearst, who joined the Symbionese Liberation Army and took part in a number of bank robberies. Also among Clinton’s 140 last-minute pardons was Clinton’s brother, Roger, a convicted drug-dealer.

Unlike many of the many play-for-pay Clinton pardons and commutations, the Stone case raised serious questions of: prosecutorial misconduct (sending a SWAT team to arrest Stone for alleged non-violent crimes and tipping off a CNN film crew to be on hand), judicial laxity during the voir dire examination of prospective jurors, inadequate legal representation, jury tampering by the Democrat-activist juror foreperson and the judge slapping a gag order on Roger Stone so Stone could not counter the social media attacks by Tomeka Hart. We report. You decide.

(c) 2020. William Hamilton.

William Hamilton is a laureate of the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Nebraska Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame. He was just named a 2020 Grand County Citizen of the Year. Ten-percent of the royalties from Dr. Hamilton’s Formula for Failure in Vietnam: The Folly of Limited Warfare go to the Blue Angels Foundation. To order, call toll free: (800) 253-2187 Or, go to Amazon.com.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com