"If you are a friend of Trump, getting a fair trial in the District of Columbia is a challenge, if not an impossibility"

In Fox News, Gregg Jarrett writes in part,

If you are a friend of Trump, getting a fair trial in the District of Columbia is a challenge, if not an impossibility, especially in a politically charged case. In the last presidential election, 90.5 percent of the ballots in the nation’s capital were cast in favor of Hillary Clinton. A scant 4.1 percent of votes were cast for Trump.

Suspicions of a wrongful conviction against Stone became more acute when new evidence emerged after his trial that justice may have been undone by a jury foreperson who harbored a disqualifying bias.

Tomeka Hart, the foreperson, is a Democratic activist who voiced extreme anti-Trump opinions that were largely concealed during jury selection. Before she was ever picked for the trial, Hart posted numerous social media comments highly critical of Trump and actively engaged in protests against him.

Even worse, in a string of posts Hart commented negatively about the Stone case itself, praised the Mueller investigation and suggested that the president and his supporters (such as Stone) were racists.

Hart referred to Trump with the hashtag “klanpresident.” She should never, under any circumstances, have been sitting in judgment of Stone. Hart must have known this, inasmuch as she is a lawyer.

As I pointed out in a previous column, Hart’s record is indicative of a manifest prejudice against Stone by virtue of his close association with Trump. Because Hart was the foreperson who had the ability to guide and even induce other jurors to convict Stone, it is likely that he was deprived of his constitutional right to an impartial jury and a fair trial,

Predictably, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, denied a motion for a new trial for Stone.

The judge blamed Stone’s attorneys for not uncovering evidence of bias before the trial commenced. Under the law, that is not an excuse for refusing to overturn a tainted conviction by granting a new trial.

When our imperfect system of justice fails the president is constitutionally empowered to issue either a pardon or a commutation. Indeed, he may do so for either a good reason or no reason at all.

President Trump did not pardon Stone, which would have absolved him of his convicted crimes. Rather, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence of 40 months in prison.

Stone’s convictions will stand, unless a higher court reverses them on appeal. The political and media backlash will be severe, to be sure. But that has never deterred Trump before and should not in the future.

The contorted case of Roger Stone is a sad coda to the work of Robert Mueller. As Trump tweeted last month, Stone was “a victim of a corrupt and illegal Witch Hunt, one which will go down as the greatest political crime in history. He can sleep well at night!”

Stone has suffered enough, He deserves to sleep in his own bed.

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