The judge previously turned down a similar motion by the
longtime Trump adviser.
Roger Stone, the longtime confidant of Donald Trump whose
criminal conviction angered the president and led to the turmoil
engulfing the Justice Department, is making another bid for a new
trial.
The move by Stone’s defense team was disclosed by U.S. District
Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in an order Friday, but the motion
itself remains secret.
“It’s under seal, so I can’t discuss it,” Stone attorney Grant
Smith said Friday.
Last November, a jury convicted Stone on all seven charges he
faced: five counts of lying to Congress, one of obstructing a
congressional investigation and one of witness tampering.
Stone’s lawyers previously made an unsuccessful bid for a new
trial. A couple of months ago, they asked for a do-over on the
grounds that Jackson refused to strike a juror who acknowledged her
husband had shown her a Wall Street Journal article about the trial
after she was called for the case, but before she was formally
picked for the jury.
“The Court is persuaded that the transgression in this case–if
one indeed occurred–was unintentional and that it had little, if
any, effect,” Jackson wrote when rejecting the first motion last
week.
The four federal prosecutors from Stone’s trial abruptly
withdrew from the case this week after Trump complained about the
seven-to-nine-year sentencing recommendation they submitted and
Attorney General Bill Barr ordered that proposal withdrawn in favor
of a more lenient sentence. Barr said Thursday he made that
decision before Trump weighed in publicly.
While it’s unclear what the new motion for a new trial complains
about, Stone’s allies have called attention in the past day or two
to the presence on the jury of a woman who criticized Trump and
Stone in social media posts.
Tomeka Hart, a former Democratic candidate for Congress in
Tennessee, took to her Facebook page Wednesday night to offer a
vocal defense of the prosecution’s trial team.
“It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of
the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence,
integrity, and respect for our system of justice,” Hart wrote. “I
can’t keep quiet any longer.”
Hart’s conservative critics have argued that some of her answers
in court about her social media activity and media consumption were
not true.
While Hart’s name wasn’t mentioned in court, lawyers for both
sides had it well before the trial, she was publicly questioned by
both sides during jury selection, and she disclosed that she had
served on the Memphis school board and previously ran for
Congress.
“I worked on my own campaign,” said Hart, who insisted she could
be fair despite her political outlook.
Stone’s attorneys did not ask the judge to remove her, nor did
they use one of their peremptory strikes to oust her, so Jackson
permitted her to serve.
The details mentioned in court made it easy for journalists to
identify Hart. She did not respond to several messages from
POLITICO just after the jury verdicts were returned and on
Friday.
Culled from POLITICO