{"id":177243,"date":"2019-11-15T19:14:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-16T00:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/11\/15\/took-long-enough\/"},"modified":"2019-11-15T19:14:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-16T00:14:00","slug":"took-long-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/11\/15\/took-long-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Took Long Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>After a half century of rat-f%$#ery and malice, Roger Stone has finally been convicted of lying to Congress<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Given the volume and intensity of his lies over the years, there is a certain symmetry to this: <\/p>\n

For decades, Roger J. Stone Jr. played politics as a kind of performance art, starring himself as a professional lord of mischief, as a friend once called him. He tossed bombs and spun tales from the political periphery with no real reckoning, burnishing a reputation as a dirty trickster.<\/p>\n

On Friday morning, a reckoning arrived, the consequence of his efforts to sabotage a congressional investigation that threatened his longtime friend President Trump. <\/p>\n

Mr. Stone, 67, was convicted in federal court of seven felonies for obstructing the congressional inquiry, lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness whose account would have exposed his lies. Jurors deliberated for a little over seven hours before convicting him on all counts. Together, the charges carry a maximum prison term of 50 years.<\/p>\n

In a last-minute bid for salvation, prosecutors said, Mr. Stone appealed to Mr. Trump for a pardon on Thursday, using a right-wing conspiracy theorist who runs the website Infowars as his proxy. Mr. Trump attacked the guilty verdict against Mr. Stone in a tweet<\/a> on Friday but made no mention of a pardon.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Mr. Stone joins a notable list of former Trump aides who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes in cases stemming from Mr. Mueller\u2019s work. It includes Mr. Gates; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; Michael D. Cohen, the president\u2019s longtime fixer; George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide; and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump\u2019s former campaign chairman and Mr. Stone\u2019s onetime partner in a political consulting firm.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a guy who literally has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, and now he is going to suffer the fate of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a half century of rat-f%$#ery and malice, Roger Stone has finally been convicted of lying to Congress. Given the volume and intensity of his lies over the years, there is a certain symmetry to this: For decades, Roger J. Stone Jr. played politics as a kind of performance art, starring himself as a professional …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,407,374,486],"class_list":["post-177243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-justice","tag-politics","tag-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}