on in tonight s show. as they finish up with these closed-door depositions, the first public impeachment hearings are on the calendar now. so here we go. and remarkably, simultaneous to all of that today in federal court in washington, d.c. they finished jury selection and started opening statements in the trial of the president s longtime friend and oldest political advisor, a man who s gone to great lengths to make him seem too ridiculous for serious news coverage, a man named roger stone. now, whether or not you re interested in mr. stone himself, and speaking from personal experience i can say that interest is hard to sustain on a personal level, no offense, i just don t care. but the reason mr. stone is being prosecuted and the way prosecutors are carrying out this case that started today in
and he asks manafort call him. you ll also hear roger stone emailed steve bannon. he told bannon that trump could still win, but time was running out. and he said he knew how to win this, but, quote, it ain t pretty. roger stone knew how to win this, and he was telling that to the trump campaign ceo, but his way in his own words, quote, ain t pretty. now at the same time in august you ll hear roger stone was bragging. he was bragging publicly and bragging loudly and bragging repeatedly he was in contact with wikileaks. that he had a go-between that was telling him information about what was coming that he had an intermediary. stone regularly updated people in the trump campaign at the senior levels about whatever information he thought he had about wikileaks. make no mistake roger stone could have easily told the truth to the intelligence committee. stone could have testified he had many e-mails and texts about wikileaks and julian assange. including the ones you see here today. he cou
this is aaron zelensky talking. you may recognize his name, he was one of the prosecutors who worked on the mueller investigation. here s zelensky. he says, quote, we are here today because one man obstructed congress investigation into russian interference in the 2016 election. in a critical investigation of national importance the defendant, roger stone, repeatedly lied under oath to a congressional committee and then tampered with a witness to cover up his tracks. now you ll hear in 2016 the democratic national committee, which is the organization that runs the democratic party of the united states, they announced their computer system had been hacked by the russian government. you ll hear not long after that a website called wikileaks began to release thousands of e-mails that were related to the dnc. after wikileaks began releasing these dnc e-mails you ll also hear that the defendant, roger stone, started bragging he was in contact with wikileaks and he knew what wikileaks plan
he was asked by the committee whether he d ever discussed what he learned from his intermediary with the trump campaign and roger stone told them he hadn t. you will hear that roger stone discussed what he was learning with the senior levels of the trump campaign. you might ask why didn t roger stone just tell the truth to the intelligence committee? the evidence in this case will show that stone lied to the intelligence committee because the truth looked bad. the truth looked bad for the trump campaign, and the truth looked bad excuse me, and the truth looked bad for donald trump. so this is a case about roger stone. but the prosecution made clear there in their opening statement that the reason stone lied in the prosecutor s telling, the reason he s on trial right now for these felony counts is because he couldn t tell the truth because, and i quote, the truth looked bad for donald trump. this is a case about the president. i mean, it s about roger stone
federal court is like, forget roger stone. i mean, yes, his criminal liability here is of interest, but forget roger stone. the case is about something way bigger than that, and we ve known that was a possibility when we first saw the charges against stone in the way they laid out the case against him in the indictment, but i did not expect it to be like this in court today. just listen to this. we got the transcript today. i had no faith we would get it in time for tonight s show, same day that it happened, right? but just before i came down to the studio and we got on the air tonight, we got the transcript of what happened today in court. so i have marked it up. this might be a little rocky because we haven t had it for very long. let me just lay it out here in terms of how the prosecutors are making this case because you can tell what it s about, and you do not have to care about roger stone to recognize this is big freaking hairy deal. all right, here s how the opening statement st