I worry that maybe we've gotten so tied up with process that no one is responding to the core of the argument against Stone's sentencing recommendation--that his misconduct was somehow unimportant. A reminder from the trial that it was important.
The Mueller investigation famously did not establish the existence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. But that's not because it found there was nothing to the idea. Rather, serious leads ran up against some seriously recalcitrant witnesses. Stone was one.
I wrote a thread when the report came out about all these factual leads the investigation despaired of chasing down.
In the report, Stone's stuff is some of the most heavily redacted material. When it came out, the trial was still in the future, so it's all marked 'harm to ongoing matter.' That stuff is still redacted, so to this day we don't know everything Mueller found about Stone's channel.
We know enough, though, to say that Stone's channel was serious. Stone was tasked by the campaign (at trial, we learned it was Manafort/Gates) to make contact with Wikileaks and bring back briefings about the stolen emails Wikileaks was receiving from the Russian conspirators.
At trial, Rick Gates also said that Trump had a phone call directly with Stone about upcoming Wikileaks releases. (This is in tension with Trump's written answers to Mueller where he says he doesn't recall discussing the matter with Stone.) cnbc.com/2019/11/12/tru…
When he was called before Congress, rather than tell the truth about his activities connecting the Trump campaign with Wikileaks (which, again, was the Russian conspirators' cut-out for releasing the stolen emails), Stone made up a bunch of preposterous lies.
When he realized he was at risk of being exposed for telling those lies, Stone cajoled and threatened the people who could expose him over a period of two years so that they would lie too.
Although we still don't know all the details, Stone was somehow interfacing with a foreign power's attack on a US presidential election on behalf of the campaign that was boosted by that attack, he lied to Congress, and he threatened other witnesses. It's really serious.
