It’s not every day that news comes out of the special counsel’s office — Robert Mueller and his team play their cards notoriously close to the vest, and any clues for the President or his team of vipers in Congress and on his legal squad can present an opening to attack the legitimacy of the investigation.
That’s why Friday’s statement from prosecutors on Mueller’s team came as such a surprise when they announced a key detail of the Roger Stone case that could lend a little insight into their strategy and perhaps even what they might be expecting from Stone’s defense team.
In a filing Friday afternoon in the DC District Court, the special counsel indicated that they expect the trial for Stone — the lifelong political strategist who cut his teeth with Richard Nixon and was most recently at the heart of communications between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks as Julian Assange’s outfit was assisting the Russian government in influencing the 2016 election — to last approximately 5 to 8 days, including cross-examination of the government’s witnesses by Stone’s defense.
It does not, of course, include any time for witnesses that the defense has not yet announced they intend to call, but the nature of Stone’s case makes it exceedingly unlikely that there will be unforeseen witnesses to call anyway.
The time span indicates a broad array of evidence that will likely be presented by Mueller’s team, including support for allegations in his indictment of lying to Congressional investigators and witness tampering as it pertains to former radio host Randy Credico, another witness to WikiLeaks’ involvement in the entire affair.
Stone was recently hit with a gag order by District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson after he posted an image on social media featuring her picture accompanied by a set of crosshairs from a gun sight. Stone promptly violated that gag order during the Michael Cohen testimony on Wednesday, by sending a text message to reporters at BuzzFeed News, although no new charges for that violation have yet been announced.
Featured image via screen capture
