New Explosive Roger Stone Video Dooms Donald Trump’s Main Legal Defense

donuts@kbin.social to politics @lemmy.world – 474 points –
newrepublic.com

The video was filmed before the election results had even been announced.

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Reminder that Roger Stone is not the only coup plot insider who confessed Trump's Start the Steal conspiracy plans to a group of Trump insiders before the election.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1112138665/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

…audio from Trump advisor, Steve Bannon, surfaced from October 31st, 2020, just a few days before the Presidential election.

Let’s listen. [Begin Videotape]

STEVE BANNON: And what Trump’s going to do is declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory, but that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner. The Democrats — more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage — that’s our strategy.

He’s gonna declare himself a winner. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm. Also — also if Trump is — if Trump is losing by 10 or 11:00 at night, it’s going to be even crazier. Because he’s gonna sit right there and say they stole it. If Biden’s wining, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.

A member of team Trump (Peter Navarro maybe?) was describing the plan on Ari Melber's MSNBC show. Ari stopped him and said, "you know that's a coup, right? What you're describing is a coup." - The guy had no idea.

Education is important.

I actually prefer traitors to be dumb as rocks, makes it easier to point and laugh at them.

We just need a good place to all point and laugh at them, perhaps some kind of raised platform, with ropes to hoist them higher for the crowd to see.

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Wasn't he also behind the "Brooks Brothers Riot" that stopped the counting in Florida and threw the 2000 election to Bush?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

Yes. He has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back and he’s one of the biggest pieces of shit in a generation. He has no redeeming qualities. There are a few documentaries about him, I think Netflix had a good one a couple years ago.

“Get Me Roger Stone” it was Netflix and it’s quite good.

Yes! I knew it was something like that but I kept thinking of “Where’s my Roy Cohn” or whatever Trump said. Thanks!

So if that didn't happen likely Gore would have won?

Would you believe me if I told you that at least 3 of the current supreme court members were lawyers arguing on behalf of Bush in that case?

Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Alito?

Also, while wikipediaing Alito, I learned that Alito worked under Trump's sister as an AUSA and she spoke at Alito's confirmation hearing. Also, Bill Clinton appointed Trump's sister to the appellate court.

Correct. As we found out AFTER Bush was installed, no matter how you counted the votes in Florida, if the vote had been completed, Gore would have won.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/29/uselections2000.usa

Wrong. If you only counted the votes for Bush, Gore would lose.

Tell me you didn't read the linked article without telling me you didn't read the linked article.

"In each case, if the newly examined votes had been allowed to count in the November election, Mr Gore would have won Florida's 21 electoral college votes by a narrow majority and he, not Mr Bush, would be the president. Instead, Mr Bush officially carried Florida by 537 votes after recounts were stopped."

Whoosh. Read it again.

I've been reading it since January 2001.

If the recounts had been allowed to complete, no matter how you counted the votes, Gore would have won.

Bush only became President because they stopped counting valid ballots.

Gore did win.

Always knew that why hated Bush so much and still do. Gore was my first presidential election. Just turn 20.

The republicans have not won the presidency legitimately since HW Bush. I don't count GW's second term because the first one was illegitimate.

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Fun fact: in the past 30 years of presidential elections Republicans have had more riots than they have popular vote victories!

Fun fact: the electrical college determines the presidency in our representative democracy.

Yes, and it appears that had vote counting been allowed unimpeded in Florida, as opposed to undemocratically stopping it for partisan gain, Gore would have won the electoral college and popular vote in 2000.

There's really nothing fun about defining land as more important than people.

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This title is clickbait garbage, but at least it doesn't use the word "slam".

If the Trump legal defense is that he believed he won the election and was investigating fraud, and this proves that they were planning to call fraud before the election happened, then that does disprove his legal defense.

Do you mean by "clickbait garbage" that the language is too inflammatory for you regardless of the article content?

Except weren't they were claiming that mail-in ballots were potentially fraudulent for months before the election? This video doesn't disprove anything if they claimed that ballots that had already been cast were illegal.

Not that I'm aware of, but if so, that would just bolster the case of now additional, ironclad video evidence of intentional foreplanned election interference and manipulation.

If their main defense is that the cries of election fraud were a result of a legitimate investigation but this video shows deliberate planning to cry fraud before the election even happened, that seems like a significant point against his legal defense, although the title is inflammatory and weird. Dooms?

That's the part that I don't think is a strong argument though. They were crying fraud long before the election, e.g., saying that mail-in ballots were illegal, claiming people were stuffing drop-off, etc. None of it was valid, but their argument was well established before election day.

There's a difference between vague inflammatory remarks about how people can manipulate mail-in ballots during campaign speeches versus a political consultant to Trump detailing how exactly they plan to interfere and manipulate the results of a fair election if it doesn't go their way.

Any member of a board of directors may give a speech about how stock values might be compromised by valuable information and would likely not be criminally liable for speculation, but if one board member informs the rest about his intention to disclose private company information to the public in order to sway the markets, that is a criminal insider trading conspiracy that all board members could be held criminally liable for.

The media are getting a bit hung up on this. Trump's state of mind is entirely irrelevant. His actions are not.

They're not being prosecuted for stating that they believe fraud happened (or was happening). They're perfectly entitled to say that whether they truly believe it or not. What they're not entitled to do is bypass the courts, threaten officials, fraudulently access voting machines, fraudulently put forward fake electors, and so on. Stone is planning some of the illegal actions taken after the election here. This video is one of many pieces of evidence of an active conspiracy to subvert the election.

Ah ok. Thank you. I think I was getting stuck on the timing, which did not seem particularly relevant.

I think intent is important, and if you can prove that they knew it was not stolen it is gonna be devastating for their case because it shutdown the whole premise of the defense. It would be a critical failure of defense.

It really isn't relevant. They're not being prosecuted for saying untrue things, or things they believed to be false at the time. They're being prosecuted for conspiracy to overturn the election.

Intent is very important. The lying part makes it a conspiracy and very illegal, and you can open the indictment yourself to verify. There is a whole section about it on page 6 of the Columbia indictment.

Seriously. There weren't even any explosions in the video.

Reminder that Roger Stone coordinated timing with WikiLeaks to drop the emails that Russia had hacked and passed off to WikiLeaks. The low point of Trump's campaign - the release of the Access Hollywood tape - had WikiLeaks dripping emails within hours. Julian Assange's outfit had fallen from a champion of press freedom to a facilitator of the Russian dictatorship interfering in elections.

The clip was part of Guldbrandsen’s documentary, A Storm Foretold, released in March of this year.

So there's nothing actually new about this video. It's just that Donald forgot that someone filmed the slimy inner workings of his re-election campaign when it came time to mount a defense, and he doesn't have any good lawyers to help him avoid painting himself into a corner again. Hell, he probably lied to his lawyers, too.

My favorite visual detail: There's a sticker on an open laptop that says "What would Nixon do?"

Hell, he probably lied to his lawyers, too.

I don't think there's any "probably" about it lol. If Trump's talking he's lying. That's just how it works.

The video ... depicts the right-wing lobbyist dictating a fake elector plot in key battleground states. The video was taken on November 5, 2020, two days before the election was called, thus disproving Trump’s main defense that he and his allies genuinely believed they had won the race.

I'd like for him to rot in jail, but doesn't this need to prove that Stone plotted with Trump to be of any use?

That’s kind of the point of RICO. If this is a coordinated conspiracy then Trump can’t just say “hey listen my advisors told me this was legal” if those advisors are on tape giving out the details of their criminal conspiracy

"You try it like its a business." - Rudy 9/11 Giuliani

Thank you Indicted Racketeer Rudy Ghouliani. That is good advice for the DA.

As pointed out elsehwere, Stone does not have to be collaborating directly with Trump, but there are still a lot of unidentified co-conspirators, and "other persons known and unknown to the grand jury." There's room for Stone to be in one of those groups.

I find it very hard to imagine that there isn't evidence of this traitor directly plotting with Trump et al. We just haven't seen it yet.

It could just be hopium, but I doubt it; we certainly haven't seen the last of Jack Smith on Jan 6th indictments, after all.

I find it very hard to imagine that there isn't evidence of this traitor directly plotting with Trump et al. We just haven't seen it yet.

I have no doubts that at some point before the election their was a Coup Plot Kickoff Meeting with at least Bannon, Stone, Treason Trump, and Guiliani in the meeting. I don't know who else was in this meeting, but we know that Bannon and Stone attended the meeting because of their video confessions.

They all are fucked. That's why the sniveling little turd Colton, is attempting to get the DA impeached.

Why are Stone and Bannon not charged by someone yet?

They’re unindicted co-conspirators, I’m willing to bet. They’re shitting bricks and may eventually have to grapple with the possibility of flipping. It’s really fuckin’ fun to watch.