Roger Stone's arrest may renew threat of impeachment for Trump

The Guardian 2019-01-25 18:58:03

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Roger Stone speaks with media after meeting with Donald Trump at Trump Tower on 6 December 2016 in New York, New York. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/AFP/Getty Images

It was time once again on Friday morning for Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, to go on television and say that the arrest of a Donald Trump campaign associate had nothing to do with the president.

This time the arrestee was Roger Stone, a longtime Trump political adviser, taken into custody in a 6am raid by FBI agents on his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Stone was charged with lying to Congress, obstructing an investigation and witness tampering. In the past, Stone has denied all wrongdoing.

Roger Stone arrested on seven charges including obstruction – live updates

As usual, the White House moved swiftly to dismiss the arrest. “This has nothing to do with the president and certainly nothing to do with the White House,” Sanders said on CNN. “This is something that has to do solely with that individual.”

But influential members of Congress and legal analysts described a sharply different view of what the arrest meant.

Perhaps most troubling for Trump, who was uncharacteristically silent on Twitter on Friday morning, was a tweet by the Democratic representative Jerry Nadler, the freshly minted chairman of the House judiciary committee – where articles of impeachment against Trump would originate if Democrats decided to bring them.

(((Rep. Nadler))) (@RepJerryNadler)

Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn... What did the President know and when did he know it?

January 25, 2019

Nadler’s tweet named other Trump associates to plead guilty or be convicted of crimes since the election. The line of questioning was famously posed by a Republican senator during the Watergate hearings of 1973-74, which culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon – on whose campaign Stone first cut his teeth as a political streetfighter and whose face Stone has tattooed on his back.

Nadler has described a hesitancy to open impeachment hearings, and the Democrats seem unlikely to make such a move during the partial government shutdown, the longest in US history, which appears to be damaging Trump more deeply with each passing day.

But renewed talk of impeachment represents only one threat that Trump and his campaign and associates could face with the arrest of Stone, which could also put the president in significant legal jeopardy, analysts said.

In the indictment of Stone, special counsel Robert Mueller describes a line of communication between a senior Trump campaign official, who appears from previously published emails to be the former White House strategist Steve Bannon; Stone; and the WikiLeaks organization, which during the 2016 election battle published emails stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and elsewhere.

Mueller has not charged Stone or any member of the Trump campaign with a conspiracy to defraud the United States by tampering in the election, as the special counsel did in the case of Russians accused of email hacking. But the alleged line of communication between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks could represent criminal activity along those lines, legal analysts said.

Or the alleged communication between the campaign and other parties could violate laws forbidding coordination between campaigns and outside political groups. “Focus on underlying conduct revealed in [the Stone indictment],” tweeted Ryan Goodman, the co-editor-in-chief of the Just Security blog. “The coordination between Trump Campaign and WikiLeaks via Stone gives rise to potential criminal campaign law violations.”

“Today’s indictment makes clear that Roger Stone had something to hide,” tweeted former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “He desperately tried to hide his efforts to coordinate with WikiLeaks from Congress and the public. Why does Donald Trump care so much about ensuring that Stone doesn’t flip? What does *he* have to hide?”

The Stone indictment appears to strengthen the case that the Trump campaign coordinated some of its own messaging with real-time actions by WikiLeaks, which the current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has called a “non-state, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors, like Russia”.

In the indictment, Mueller asserts that Stone was told in advance of a WikiLeaks dump related to Clinton’s health, and the “Trump Campaign – and Russia – then kicked into gear on Clinton’s health”, Goodman pointed out.

Other lines in the indictment could represent a legal vulnerability for as-yet unnamed members of the Trump campaign. “A senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information WikiLeaks had,” the indictment says, without identifying who was giving the directions.

The case against Stone – or against Trump or his associates – could change in unexpected ways depending on the material that federal agents seized in the raid on Stone’s Florida home and a simultaneous raid on a Manhattan address tied to Stone on Friday. Material seized in the second raid included hard drives, the New York Times reported; any communications between Stone and WikiLeaks intermediaries or other actors could be significant.

Mueller has signaled that he would follow justice department guidelines barring the indictment of a sitting president, which means that any legal vulnerability Trump might face would not appear to include looming criminal charges.

But the descending spiral of public disapproval that Trump faces from the shutdown could make him more vulnerable to a move by Democrats to take the first steps toward impeachment.

In any case, the arrest of Stone has made it all the harder for the White House to credibly argue that none of the wrongdoing alleged – and in many cases proven in court – by Mueller is connected with Trump himself.

“It is completely normal for lots of smart, accomplished professionals to lie like crazy, tell other people to lie like crazy, and commit multiple felonies in the process, all in order to hide the fact that … nothing nefarious actually happened,” tweeted University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck.

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