All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 7, 2023 - The StoneZONE - Roger Stone
01:00:23
Is Special Counsel Jack Smith's Appointment Even Legal? w/ Attorney Paul Kamenar on The StoneZONE
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The Stone Zone with legendary Republican strategist and political icon and pundit Roger Stone.
Stone has served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and a longtime friend and advisor of President Donald Trump.
As an outspoken libertarian, Stone has appeared on thousands of broadcasts, spoken at countless venues, and lectured before the prestigious Oxford Political Union and the Cambridge Union Society.
Due to his four-plus decades in the political and cultural arena, Stone has become a pop culture icon.
And now, here's your host, Roger Stone!
Welcome, I'm Roger Stone.
It's Monday and you are back in the Stone Zone.
Late Friday, Special Counsel Jack Smith's office filed a request for a protective order In the DC case of President Donald Trump.
Now essentially a protective order is a limitation on what President Trump can say publicly.
I personally have experienced this.
It's an effort to gag you so that you can't defend yourself in the public arena.
So while MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the rest of the jackals In the fake news media are attacking Trump relentlessly.
This would limit his ability to defend himself.
This is complicated by the fact that Donald Trump is a certified legal candidate for president.
Denying him his free speech rights is bad enough, but doing it while he is not only running for president, but he's the leading candidate for president.
is particularly complex and thorny.
Joining me now to talk about this and other issues is Paul Kamenar.
Paul is an attorney, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, and full disclosure, he represented me in the Soviet-style show trial that I was subjected to in the District of Columbia.
Now Paul Kamenar joins us on The Stone Zone.
Hey, Roger.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I think other than me, you are the first Hungarian-American to ever appear on the Stone Zone.
Congratulations.
It's a pleasure and an honor.
I'm really glad to have you here.
I want to start with a terrific article Uh, that you wrote for Town Hall, uh, making the case, uh, that Jack Smith's appointment as special counsel may not in fact even be legal.
Now, I know this legal argument, uh, was brought previously, uh, in DC, challenging the legitimacy and the authority of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, uh, and the courts there denied it.
Uh, as a non-lawyer, that's what we call Wrongly decided.
But now that they have decided to bring this indictment against Donald Trump in Florida, your argument is that these issues could come back to the fore.
So first tell us why you believe legally, and a number of other legal scholars agree with you, that Smith's appointment may be improper in itself and how this might play out.
Sure, be glad to.
As you recall, Roger, we represented a former aide of yours, Andrew Miller, who was subpoenaed by Robert Mueller at the time to appear before the grand jury.
And what we basically said is, who are you?
Who appointed you?
And so we filed a motion to quash that subpoena, With the court and we argued under constitutional law that his appointment violated the Appointments Clause.
The Appointments Clause basically says that all officers of the United States has to be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
That it does have a further clause that says, however, inferior officers Established, quote, by law, may be appointed by the head of the department, or the president alone, or the courts of law.
So what we argued is that, wait a minute, here Robert Mueller, and this of course all applies to to Jack Smith as well, but we argue that Robert Mueller, his office of special counsel, was not established by law.
Just a little history for your viewers.
You recall that during Kent Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton, there was a statute called the Independent Counsel Act that Congress established by law, the Office of Independent Counsel.
And when that expired in 1999, because quite frankly, both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats said, hey, look, This, you know, independent counsel is kind of a wild card.
They can come after anybody.
They're unlimited.
So we're going to let this law die.
And so it expired.
Well, the very next day, Janet Reno said, I don't care if the law is expired.
I'm going to establish by fiat a special counsel that will basically have the same powers as the independent counsel.
And so since then, There's been some special counsels appointed for various investigations over the years, but nobody really challenged that.
Hey, wait a minute.
Where does the Attorney General get the authority with the stroke of a pen set up this very powerful office?
And so what we did was challenge that authority because there was no law establishing a special counsel.
And furthermore, even if there were a law, that that person has to be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, because that person is like U.S.
attorneys.
All U.S.
attorneys in this country are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate because they have very broad powers to throw people in jail.
And so we're saying, wait a minute, why does this guy get a pass, this guy, Robert Mueller?
He was not even a U.S.
attorney.
He wasn't even an assistant U.S.
attorney.
He was basically a private citizen.
And Rod Rosenstein, at that time, the deputy attorney general, just tapped him on the shoulder and said, hey, how would you like to have this awful power to go prosecute Trump and so forth?
So we argued that he didn't have that power.
Plus, there was no law that established the special counsel office.
And so that we argued in the district court, as you know, Chief Judge Beryl Howell issued a 92 page opinion saying this is a serious case, but she ruled against us eventually, citing a Supreme Court case that really didn't address this issue.
And then it went to the D.C.
Circuit, and the D.C.
Circuit here took about four months trying to decide how to decide this case.
I argued it in the Court of Appeals.
It was a packed courtroom, over-floor courtroom, and everybody thought that, wait a minute, maybe they're taking so long that perhaps there is some flaw with this Office of Special Counsel.
Unfortunately, they affirmed the District Court opinion, and it was a really slipshod opinion.
I mean, quite frankly, I could have written a better opinion against my position than they did, in a way.
And they said that, you know, it's affirmed, and therefore, case over.
Well, nothing's over until the Supreme Court says it's over, right?
Well, unfortunately, we could not go to the Supreme Court at that time because we could not get a stay of that order, meaning that Andrew Miller, the subpoenaed witness, would have to go to jail during all the Supreme Court proceedings before we could argue it.
Quite frankly and fairly, he was not ready to do that.
He had a family.
So we went to the grand jury, and one other argument we made at the very end was another one to show the abuse of prosecution.
And that is, at that point, Roger, you were already indicted.
And there's a case law that says once somebody's indicted, you can't go back to the grand jury and start subpoenaing witnesses for your case.
You're supposed to have your ducks all lined up in a row.
So we argued that in court, and Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge, thought it was a good argument.
She called the prosecutor, Aaron Zielinski, who you well know, up to the bench.
And I was not allowed to hear what they were saying.
It was a private conversation.
She comes back and says, or he comes back and she says, well, I don't think there's an abuse of the grand jury proceedings.
And the next day, Andrew Miller had gone to court.
So that was the end of it until Jack Smith had the idea to indict Donald Trump in Florida for the Mar-a-Lago document.
Well, thanks, Jack Smith, because The D.C.
opinion, the D.C.
Circuit opinion, has no precedential value before Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida or the Eleventh Circuit, which in my view, and many others, is a more conservative circuit than the D.C.
Circuit.
And so, in their preliminary papers, Trump attorneys did signal that of the various legal arguments they're going to make, They're going to make this motion that Jack Smith is unconstitutional.
Now, there's one problem with that in the sense that if he loses in the district court, it cannot be appealed to the 11th Circuit for this technical reason.
The courts have said if you're a criminal defendant and you lose certain kinds of procedural motions, You can't appeal it until you get convicted.
And then we'll take a look at it.
And then if we think that Jack Smith's unlawful, we'll cancel your conviction.
The only reason we were able to go to the Court of Appeals in Andrew Miller's case is that he was not a defendant.
He was a witness, and he was held in contempt of court for not going to the grand jury.
So that, under the procedures, allowed us to go to the Court of Appeals.
But quite frankly, I think Eileen Cannon may rule in his favor, in which case the government would have to go to the 11th Circuit.
Now, where are we today?
Well, now Trump's indicted at the January 6th case in the D.C.
Circuit.
So we're back there, and I'm in touch with Trump's attorneys to see if that argument could still be made in the District Court in D.C.
Even though the District Court is bound by the D.C.
Circuit opinion, we think there may be some arguments that the D.C.
Circuit did not address that we could renew and maybe have that looked at again.
I'm not hopeful for that, but at least that will preserve That argument for any eventual appeal to the Court of Appeals at the Supreme Court should Donald Trump be convicted.
So that's basically the argument in a nutshell.
And I'd be glad to talk about the current case in terms of the legal arguments that his attorneys are prepared to make in that case.
A couple of key arguments.
First of all, I think it's important to note The Andrew Miller's testimony of the grand jury must not have been very interesting because Mr. Miller was not called as a witness in my case, nor was any testimony or evidence he provided used in my case.
So this was an argument for how tough Aaron Zelinsky is.
Boy, that was insane.
And then he had him fly to DC and wait during your trial in case he gets called, and he never did.
This was just basically Wasting everybody's time.
And finally, when your case was over, I told Andrew, you can now fly home back to St.
Louis.
And the next day, Zelinsky got upset that I allowed a witness to leave the DC area.
Well, you know, the case is over.
So again, this is an example of their prosecutorial overreach at that court.
It is interesting that Judge Amy Berman Jackson was spotted along with Judge Bozberg.
Remember him?
He's the guy who allowed the FISA court warrants on the basis of no probable cause whatsoever to be issued to spy on Donald Trump and members of his campaign.
And another judge, Randy Moss, were all seen in the back of the courtroom during the arraignment of Donald Trump.
Very famously, Amy Berman Jackson, who when we filed requesting
The entirety of Robert Mueller's redacted final report denied it to us, said that she would read it and determine what sections we were entitled to have, but she ignored exculpatory evidence that specifically says that Mr. Mueller had no factual basis to charge me with any conspiracy involving Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration, Or any other crime.
It wasn't until November 3rd, 2020, at the stroke of midnight, and then only by order of a federal judge, that the Justice Department was forced to disgorge that.
So I found it kind of interesting that she was there.
It's also interesting to me that she is the judge in the presidential documents case that ruled that Bill Clinton could do whatever he wanted with his documents.
Including keeping them in his sock drawer at home, which I find kind of an interesting historical footnote.
Here's a technical question.
If the judge in Florida ruled that the appointment of Jack Smith was in fact improper, that he had never been approved by the Congress, that there was no authority for his appointment, how would that affect the case in D.C.? ?
Yeah, that's a very good question.
It would certainly put a question mark over Jack Smith.
However, Judge Cannon's authority is only in that district, so it may be kind of an interesting specter to have Jack Smith disqualified in the Florida case, but still allowed to proceed in the D.C.
Circuit case for the January 6th.
But I think at that point, there will be enough you know, concern that, hey, we got to stop this until the Supreme Court resolves all this, because we can't have Jack Smith declared unlawful in one court, and here he's going ahead in the D.C. court.
So that's an interesting question, and I'm not sure how that will actually play out.
So tell us your impression of the actual charges that have been brought against Donald Trump in D.C.
I don't think very much of them.
I mean, first of all, everything in this 45-page indictment is nothing new.
It's basically regurgitating all the stuff that the January 6th Committee on the Hill dug up and got from witnesses and so forth.
Their basic arguments are that he is guilty of conspiracy with six unnamed co-conspirators, and I'll talk about that in a minute, to have the election overturned.
And also there's one final count, which is the most remarkable count, that they cite an 1870 Civil Rights Act law that Donald Trump conspired to defraud the voters of the vote in the 2020 that they cite an 1870 Civil Rights Act law that Donald And that statute was passed as part of the Ku Klux Klan Act to prevent, at that time,
Ku Klux Klan members from going out and stopping the freed slaves from voting in the elections and to intimidate them Ku Klux Klan members from going out and stopping the freed slaves from voting in the elections and to intimidate them to go on the So Jack Smith is taking that law and shoehorning it in to these facts.
And I don't see that working.
But here's the big defense that they're going to be making.
And his attorney, John Laurel, has been making this over the weekend on the various Sunday talk shows.
And that is there is nothing criminal here.
There was no corrupt intent to break the law criminally, and the reason is that everything that they allege in the indictment involves protected speech, Under the First Amendment, in fact, the highest level of protected speech is political speech.
And that, the court has said, is so sacrosanct, you can't criminalize that.
And number two, the other side says, wow, you can't go into a bank and say, hey, this is a stick-up, give me your money.
Well, when you said, hey, this is a stick-up, that speech, is that what Trump is saying, that he can say that kind of speech?
No, that's basically a false comparison.
What they're overlooking Is that there's another clause in the First Amendment, and that is the Petition Clause.
Under that clause, Americans and citizens have a right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Just like how Jack Smith conceded on page two of his indictment that, yes, you can have speech, and even false speech is protected by the First Amendment, so too Petitioning for redress of grievances, it's not up to the government to decide whether your grievance is legitimate or not.
That's up to you, the petitioner.
So Trump had a basis for claiming that the election was stolen or that indeed there was fraud committed.
And so what did he do?
He peacefully petitioned Mike Pence, who was there counting the votes, to at a minimum pause the electoral count and send it back to the states to have them do an audit or recheck for 10 days.
That is perfectly legal speech, it's perfectly the right to petition, and also with Georgia, When he called up the Secretary of State for Georgia asking about checking on votes that may have been fraudulently cast.
There too, he was petitioning a government official to look into this.
He wasn't ordering him with authority that if you don't You know, I'm going to take these criminal actions against you, or what have you.
So all of this is protected speech, as well as protection under the Petition Clause.
Now, besides that main argument, there's another important argument that's on the same level, I would say, as challenging the authority of Jack Smith.
And that is, All the speech and petitioning that Trump undertook for the January 6th indictment here in D.C., he was President of the United States.
Unlike the Mar-a-Lago case, he was having those documents allegedly after he left office.
Here in D.C., Those allegations are making Donald Trump was President of the United States.
And there's case law that says that his carrying out what he perceives to be his duties has absolute immunity.
Absolute immunity as President of the United States.
Now, what's good about that argument, Roger, is that if they make that argument and the district court denies it, That argument is directly appealable to the Court of Appeals because after all, if in fact he does have absolute immunity, why is he going through all this trial of witnesses and expenses and so forth?
So that argument will get up to the Court of Appeals and even if then the Court of Appeals denies it, I think there's at least five votes in the Supreme Court to uphold the absolute immunity of President Trump.
I think there's five votes on my challenge to Jack Smith that it violates the separation of powers to have somebody plucked from the public and saying you're now a special counsel.
By the way, you recall that Bill Barr, Appointed John Durham to be the special counsel to look in his Russiagate.
Well, the good thing about that was that John Durham was and still is a sitting United States attorney.
There was no problem or flaw with his legitimacy because he already was appointed by a president and confirmed by the Senate.
Anyway, so that's another big argument, this official immunity that they'll make.
And the January 6th case.
And then there are other arguments they can make that probably won't work in terms of changing the venue out of D.C.
That's been tried by some of the January 6th defendants, and the courts have routinely denied that.
But here's one interesting angle to that that might be an alternative, and that's this.
Jack Smith indicted Trump on count four saying, you defrauded all the people who voted for Biden of their vote by trying to get the votes overturned.
Well, who's the victim of that crime?
All the people who voted for Biden.
And here in DC, 94% of the people, the citizens, voted for Biden.
So I would think that what argument could be made is if, Your Honor, you're not going to transfer this case to a more fair district, then when I get to selecting the juries, we get to only appoint those who did not even vote in the election and did not vote for Biden.
Because if they voted for Biden, that's like saying, oh, if a bank robber is being tried for robbing a bank and you had money at that bank, You can say, well, I'm a victim of that crime.
You can't be on the jury panel.
I'm sorry.
So that argument, I think, may have some currency and we'll see how that goes.
So there's several of these arguments, procedural arguments, I think they'll make.
They're also talking about having this judge recused.
This judge is, of course, a liberal Obama-appointed judge.
She formulates with the Boies & Schiller firm in New York, the big Democratic firm that had his clients as part of the Steele dossier.
Now, to be sure, she left the firm after that, but she still has those connections, number one.
And number two, today, the Trump attorneys just filed, just a few minutes ago, Their opposition to, and this gets into what you talked about at the top of the show, Roger, regarding whether documents that the government turns over to Trump can be shared.
Let me just clear this up.
This is not a gag order like what happened to you with Judge Amy Bourbon Jackson, where she gagged you from even talking about your case.
This is a protective order that the government filed on Friday And said that before we turn over any of these documents, we want to make sure that they're not disseminated to the public, that Trump can't even look at them, it's only for the attorney, etc.
Well, a couple of things.
They had, the judge ordered them to file their response by five o'clock today.
So she basically gave them less than one business day To reply to it, even though they asked for, hey, can you give us a couple more days till Thursday?
She said, no, I want it in by five o'clock today.
Well, under the DC local rules, any motion that's filed by any party, the other side has 14 days to respond to it.
So one indication of how This judge is already showing her partisanship is by giving the Trump people only one day to file the response.
Now, what do they say in that response?
This will be on the news tonight.
They're saying, look, these documents that they're going to give us, they may not, some of them be public, but they're not sensitive classified grand jury material.
Those we can see, Can be kept under a protective order, but we demand that the government's documents that there and witnesses and still so forth that are not classified that we be able to share them with the public with the media and quite frankly.
The question is, where is the media?
In all the cases, in your case and other cases, media filed all kinds of motions saying, hey, this is a First Amendment, courts should be open to the public, none of the secret stuff.
Their silence speaks volumes here, because I guess they don't want to have some of the damaging information come out, including exculpatory documents.
Because as you know, under the rules, of the criminal court, the government's obliged to turn over not only incriminating documents, but exculpatory or documents that would exonerate the defendant.
And so the judge in this case will decide that motion, probably within the next few days, although Trump attorneys have said, Look, let's have a hearing on this.
This is too important to rush this through.
And the government is Not really cooperating in terms of saying, OK, well, you only have to keep secret the grand jury material.
So that's another issue they're going to be talking about in the next coming days.
I thought, frankly, the decision by the Trump legal team not to question the protective order in Florida was an error.
They also did not oppose the barred contact list.
That's a list that the government gives the defendant of people he's not allowed to talk to.
Now, fortunately, the judge did not impose such a barred contact list, but I believe she's agreed to a hearing on that subject down the road.
This becomes much more important in D.C.
So, for example, if a member of Trump's campaign staff were potentially a witness in this case, Donald Trump would not be able to talk to them.
Between now and his trial to me that is extraordinarily problematic, but then that's what this entire case is about election interference in my case.
We moved for the judge to recuse herself after she praised the jury for a woman and it was learned that the jury for a woman had attacked both me regarding the very case in which she had been selected as a juror and Donald Trump in her Twitter and Facebook postings, but kept them on a private setting during jury selection and during the trial.
And then tried to quietly delete them after the trial, except for she got caught.
To me, it was a definite sign of bias.
She said in a voir dire in jury selection, she was vaguely familiar with who I was, and she wasn't familiar with the case.
But her own social media postings contradicted that.
Unfortunately, the judge did not agree.
We also moved for a change of venue that was also denied.
I think it will be denied here.
Look, I think the Trump legal team is about to find out something shocking.
In the District of Columbia, the Constitution, the law, the rules, the evidence, and the facts really don't matter.
They honestly don't matter.
So I think the President is in for a very, very rough ride.
We may have a protective order today.
Mark my words, before this is over, They will seek to gag him.
Why?
Because he's a great communicator and he will defend himself against these politicized charges.
This is part of the presidential campaign.
This is an effort to hamper, to hobble his presidential campaign.
And it boils down, as I understand it, I'm a non-lawyer, to his state of mind, mens rea.
In other words, Donald Trump will honestly believe that he lost the election.
But entered into a conspiracy with others to hold on to power to delay the certification of the Electoral College, then perhaps there's a crime here.
But I don't believe that there's any evidence, nor do I believe that they can produce any proof that Donald Trump ever believed that he had lost.
I don't think he believed it then.
I know he certainly doesn't believe it today.
Now just because someone may have argued with him that that was the case doesn't mean that the President agreed with them.
So if Bill Barr should pop up, for example, as a witness and say, I told the President that he lost, that doesn't mean the President agreed with him.
That just means it was Mr. Barr's attention.
Perhaps Mr. Barr's worried about this case in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where there's evidence that he knew well about election fraud, election irregularities, and he did nothing about it.
Derelict in his duties.
Actually, he himself should be sanctioned for that.
Whole different question.
Or perhaps he's a little gun shy about the fact that he knew Hunter Biden's laptop contents were genuine, were authentic, and he seems to have done nothing about that other than Burying it with a local prosecutor.
So I'm not sure what Mr. Barr's motives are.
Very recently he said that perhaps the special counsel would not have a case if Roger Stone hadn't told the president, when you lose, you should claim victory.
Sorry, but that's not even remotely what I said.
What I said was, if the matter is undecided, if it is up in the air, if it's in dispute, This is the advice that Secretary of State James A. Baker gave to President George W. Bush.
The same advice that Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy gave his son, Senator John Kennedy.
It's politics.
At no time did I say, if you think you lost, if you know you lost, you should claim you won.
Never said anything of the kind.
My language might have been a little coarse, but I know exactly what I said.
What do you think the prospects here Uh, are, uh, for Vice President Pence to be, uh, to be a witness.
Now I read Mr. Pence's book with interest.
Uh, and when lawyers who represented President Trump argued with him that he had the authority to delay the certification of the Electoral College and send certain electors back to the state legislatures for re-examination, he wasn't sure.
So he saw a constitutional lawyer and he got legal advice.
President Trump was getting legal advice.
The idea of two lawyers disagreeing.
As you know, Paul, that happens all the time.
But it seems to me that everybody in this case who is a defendant with the president, at least those that we can identify, they're all lawyers and they all seem to have bought into a legal theory.
Whether that theory is correct or incorrect is less important than whether they acted in good faith.
If they believed it was correct, if Trump believed it was correct, then he cannot have acted in a corrupt manner.
Am I wrong?
No.
All right.
Uh, we may have had a technical issue.
There are, uh, rainstorms, uh, I know in, uh, in Washington, DC, we're going to try to, uh, reconnect.
Uh, we're talking with Paul Kaminar.
Now would be a very good time for me to talk to you about our sponsors.
That would be the great folks at MyPillow.com.
Now MyPillow is, as everyone knows, uh, the principal business endeavor.
And the company of Mike Lindell.
Mike Lindell is the ultimate happy warrior.
He is not only one of the greatest capitalists and believers in free enterprise and one of the greatest salesmen in American history, he's also the number one advocate for free speech and for election integrity.
So when you go to MyPillow and you make a purchase, you're not only getting a great product, But you're also helping Mike Lindell, MyPillow.
Mike Lindell is being sued by one or maybe it's more than one of the voting machine companies.
He's elected not to settle those lawsuits.
He's going to fight.
That takes enormous resources.
But Mike is a fighter.
So please go to MyPillow.com and use promo code STONE.
And here's why.
It helps Mike Lindell.
It helps MyPillow.
It helps FrankSpeech.com, the platform where we do this show every day.
It helps Roger and Nydia Stone, and it helps us keep the lights on.
Let's talk about a brand new product.
It is the MyPillow Kitchen Towels.
The MyPillow Kitchen Towels.
Have we got a promo for this?
All right.
Do we have a graphic for this?
Okay.
All right, so let's go back to our guest, Paul Kaminar, a member of the D.C.
Bar, who very ably represented me in my case, although since all my constitutional rights were violated in the pretrial motions, mounting any kind of defense was extraordinarily difficult.
Paul, are you with us?
All right, we'll give him a second.
Here I have a couple of key questions here.
All right, I think I'm back.
If you want to make an order at MyPillow.com, You can go online to MyPillow.com obviously, but you can also call 800-544-8939.
That's 800-544-8939.
Let's talk about some of these great products.
First and foremost, MyPillow 2.0.
This is the most revolutionary new pillow that Mike Lindell has introduced in over 20 years.
It uses a patented Cooling technology and right now when you use Promo Goldstone, they go for $89.98 and Mike Lindell throws in a second pillow absolutely free.
So Mike Lindell likes to say that a good night's sleep is based on both temperature and height.
This pillow provides both is always cool to the touch.
It is a modern scientific miracle.
I guarantee you're going to throw out all your old MyPillows.
You've probably given them away to the Salvation Army or some of your relatives or friends.
You're going to want the new MyPillow 2.0.
I'm a great lover of the men and women's bathrobes.
There aren't many of these left.
I believe they're still on a Close out sale.
This is a rich, plush terrycloth with a broad shawl collar.
They're extraordinarily durable.
They've now been marked down as low as $49.98.
Check out the great bathrobes.
There is nothing more comfortable first thing in the morning when you enjoy that first cup of coffee.
All right.
All right.
We're going to go back to Paul Kaminar.
We're going to overcome some technical issues, but he is with us on audio.
Paul, welcome back to the Stone Zone.
Thank you.
Sorry about that.
We're having a big storm here.
The government shut down a couple hours ago.
They're talking about tornadoes, so we may lose connection again, but at least I got the audio so we can continue.
One thing I want to just pick up before we got cut off, Roger, is that another major defense, and you alluded to it, is that Trump is going to rely on advice of counsel.
Uh, there are six unindicted co-conspirators and their attorneys.
And the primary one is John Eastman, a constitutional scholar who did the thorough memo explaining to Trump, uh, how Mike Pence can... Sounds like we may have had a power failure there.
I want to point out that Paul Kaminar has his natty-looking pocket square.
For those who haven't read my book, Stone's Rules, leaving your house, if you're a gentleman, in a suit or a sports jacket without an appropriate pocket square in your pocket, well, that would be like leaving your home naked.
It's something you do not want to do.
We might as well talk politics.
We'll see if we can reconnect with our guest.
He did tell me that there were actually tornado warnings in Washington, D.C., and we knew that it was more than possible that we would lose the connection, but frankly, I thought the guest was so good that we should bring it.
We had a video of Mel K. I don't know whether we still have that up, but if so, perhaps we could roll that?
I don't know if I can get it.
Okay, let me know when you find it.
In the meantime, this is the Roger Stone Show.
If you missed my show on WABC Radio this weekend, well, you can still listen to it by going to wabcradio.com, or even better, by going to the 77 WABC Radio app.
I strongly recommend that you download Every Sunday from 3 to 5 on Sunday afternoons, I host the Roger Stone Show.
Previous guests have included President Donald Trump, General Michael Flynn, country and western superstar John Rich, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump impeachment attorney David Schoen.
This most recent weekend we had a terrific show.
First of all, we had David shown second time on the show to help us break down the indictment in DC and the implications thereof.
We also had Dave Goodside, who is the last of the great New York restauranteurs, saloon keepers, and we talked about the pursuit of the perfect hamburger.
So if you're a lover of the perfect burger, if you're searching for the perfect burger, you're going to want to check that out.
And then lastly, Joel Gilbert came on to talk about the very suspicious questions that are arising regarding the death of Barack Obama's chef in Martha's Vineyard.
New developments in that case.
The state of Massachusetts has, I hope you're ready for this, they've lost the blood sample from the late Tafari Campbell.
That's right.
Somebody threw it out by mistake.
So there can be no toxicology report.
And we have no idea whether Mr. Campbell had drugs in his bloodstream or not.
When you combine that with the fact That the Massachusetts State Police and the Edgartown Massachusetts Police refused to tell us who the other person was who was paddle boarding with Mr. Campbell at the time of his death.
They say it was a woman, but they refused to identify that woman's name.
They also declined to say who called in the distress call to the police.
They said initially that Barack and Michelle Obama We're not on Martha's Vineyard.
Then they say, well, they were on the vineyard, but they weren't home.
I've been to Martha's Vineyard.
It's not that big.
They refuse to say whether or not the call came from the Obama compound.
We do know based on the immediate reports that Barack Obama declined to be interviewed by the police.
And it took the Obamas nine days, nine days to put out a formal statement.
I find that extraordinarily suspicious.
Now, unfortunately, there is a double standard here.
Some of the major First Amendment free press organizations in New England have brought us questions, have charged That there are irregularities here and that the state's public record laws are being violated.
Anyway, go to wabcradio.com.
Right now you can listen to that great show where Joel Gilbert joined me to talk about the Obamas.
Paul Kaminar is going to try to join us here yet again.
Yeah, can you hear me, Roger?
It's your back.
Yeah, okay.
Well, I hope for a while, but like I said, I'm here, so I might be losing you again.
Anyway, I don't know whether last time I got back on, I talked about the defense of counsel, of advice of counsel defense.
That's also going to be raised prominently in this January 6th case, because Donald Trump relied on the advice of Professor John Eastman, a well-known constitutional scholar, that Mike Pence could put a temporary halt to the counting and send it back to the states.
So there was nothing illegal about that.
And even Mike Pence never said that what Donald Trump did asking him about that was criminal.
Again, Donald Trump was petitioning for redress of grievances with Mike Pence.
So that's one argument that I think They're going to have to deal with, and like I said, Mike Pence may be the best witness for Donald Trump.
He's certainly going to be cross-examined, as well as all these other witnesses, because like you said, for example, you said that Bill Barr said he told Trump, no, there's no fraud here.
Well, we'd like to know what his information was.
I suspect that all these people who said you lost the election were basing it on second- and third-hand information.
And the liberal media keeps on saying, well, he went to 61 courts and lost, so he should have known he lost.
Wait a minute.
Those courts basically said that we can't reach the merits because of procedural issues like you lack standing and so forth, there's not enough time.
Because part of the fraud that took place, as you well know, was that you had states like Pennsylvania change the rules of the voting in the middle of the game during COVID.
Under state law, you have to make changes by the state legislature.
You can't just have the state election officials saying, oh, I think I would extend the votes to pass the election day.
Oh, I think I'm going to allow mail-in voting and count the votes afterwards.
So that was the flaws that the courts didn't really address.
So these arguments that the courts already looked at that is not it.
So what's going to happen here is a trial.
on this very issue of the fraud.
His attorney said that this trial could take maybe six to nine months to go through all these state issues, all the fraud ballots, etc., and we're going to get to the bottom of it.
So this will take place well into the election and may even, depending upon the appeals, etc., continue till after the election.
But make no mistake about it, this is a political persecution by the Biden administration going after their chief political opponent.
This case would never have been brought, or none of these cases would have been brought, if Donald Trump were not running for president.
So, you know, again, this is the situation we find ourselves in.
And now we're probably going to have yet a fourth indictment down in Georgia with Fannie Willis, the county prosecutor, saying that there was a fraud going on in terms of having the Secretary of State look at the votes that were cast there.
So, you know, Trump is, you know, getting support from his base right now.
As you know, he's running even in the general poll.
Heads up between him and Biden, I think is 43 to 43.
So, you know, this could be an interesting turnout.
And as for the media saying, well, they're going to be convicted, he would be put in jail.
That's not going to happen.
Number one, I don't think he's going to be convicted.
Number two, I think he will win on appeal with some of these legal arguments.
And number three, because the Secret Service is required by law to be with President Trump at all times, they can't be there in prison.
So best to probably give him home detention.
And then if he's elected, he can pardon himself or other ways to have the case dismissed.
So that's where we are today.
And hopefully the public is not going to go after him.
I find it interesting that at the end of the Trump presidency, when there was some speculation that he would pardon himself and other members of his family, perhaps foreseeing this persecution Not because they did anything wrong, but because they didn't want to be put through this living hell that I have been put through.
Then you had legal scholars like Professor Lawrence Tribe and others arguing that no, he didn't have the authority to do that.
Mark my words, when Joe Biden pardons Hunter and his brother Jim and himself, which he ultimately will do, you heard it here first, after the election, but before a new term begins, then Uh, and then people like tribal say, Oh no, it's perfectly all right.
This is the, this is the worst two term justice system I've ever seen.
And people need to recognize that much of this is kind of like Russian collusion.
It wasn't just to try to, to remove Donald Trump.
It was also designed to cover up the, the, uh, their own epic corruption.
The people around Hillary Clinton made hundreds of millions of dollars from their associations.
With associates of Vladimir Putin.
There was indeed Russian collusion.
It just wasn't with Donald Trump or the Trump campaign.
So the entire Russian collusion hoax was both defensive and offensive.
This is totally true here.
These charges against Donald Trump, the ones that Andrea Mitchell keeps referring to on MSNBC as unfounded, God, it's time to put her out to pasture.
There's very solid evidence here of extortion, bribery, money laundering, influence peddling, illegal lobbying, and straight bribery.
I mean, millions of dollars transferred from China, from Russia, from Romania.
I remember very distinctly in the debate when President Trump said your son got $3.7 million From the wife of the mayor of Moscow and Joe Biden said, you're a liar.
Well, Trump was wrong.
It wasn't 3.7 million.
It was 40 million.
Uh, and Joe Biden was son of a bitch avoided being on the Russian sanctions list.
How incredibly coincidental was that?
Uh, the country shouldn't have to go through this, but I must say, having spent time with president Trump in the last Couple weeks.
He remains amazingly upbeat, amazingly confident, amazingly calm, amazingly resolute, amazingly determined.
A lesser man would have wilted under this kind of pressure, under this kind of stress.
That's just not Donald Trump.
I actually think he thrives on battle.
He thrives on crisis.
And let's face it at this point at 77 years old.
He could just, you know, he could choose the easy life.
He could play golf every day.
He could play with his grandchildren.
He could live the greatest life in the world.
He chooses to do this not because he needs to go down in history as one of our greatest presidents.
He's actually already achieved that.
He's doing this because he loves the country and he hates seeing what is happening to the country.
This, on the other hand, raises The weaponization of our political, of our criminal justice system to a level of corruption and political motivation unlike anything I have seen.
I have predicted for some time that he would be charged in DC because they're petrified that he might actually get acquitted in a trial in Florida.
Let me ask you this, Paul.
What of reading grand jury testimony that was actually given in DC to a Florida jury in order to bring an indictment?
Shouldn't the jurors have an opportunity to question those who've testified before the grand jury?
I saw that Judge Cannon took a shot at Jack Smith today in her own motion.
Yeah, that's an interesting legal argument.
And I think there's some good legal arguments that could be made about using the grand jury testimony up here to have it do double duty down there.
Because keep in mind that Donald Trump has due process rights that are being violated in all these cases.
And I think there probably will be some rulings, hopefully in Donald Trump's favor down there in Florida, and possibly that can result in appeal.
But these arguments that are being made Are good ones, and they're trying to rush through this trial, both in Florida and here in DC, because they don't want all the facts to come out.
But this is going to take months and months, well into the debate season next spring, and I dare say even up to the election, if not after that.
All right, I think we have to leave it there.
Paul Kaminar, a DC attorney, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, also represented me personally, in my case, a great, great lawyer.
He is not the only legal scholar, Professor Stephen Calabresi and Gary Lawson, both agree with him about the illegality of the appointment of Jack Smith.
It will be interesting to see whether Trump's lawyers raise that argument in Florida.
I certainly hope they will do so.
Final question, Paul.
Some say that Mr. Trump's lawyer, President Trump's lawyer, by the way, in the D.C.
arraignment, they continued to refer to him as Mr. Trump, which I found Extraordinarily disrespectful.
He is President Trump.
But some have said that the President's lawyer, John Laureau, by laying out all of his defenses in public, really just gives the government more time to prepare their motions to prohibit those specific lines of defense.
What do you say to that?
Yeah, I don't think that's a really legitimate argument.
I mean, the arguments that he's laying out as a defense basically are ones that even scholars and legal pundits are saying that are involved in the case, number one.
And number two, by laying them out, it's showing the American people how unfair this criminal indictment is because of these legitimate defenses under the First Amendment, advice of counsel, and so forth.
So I think without him telling the public these defenses and going toe-to-toe with the likes of MSNBC and CNN and so forth.
The liberal media will have a monopoly of it.
So at least we're making our arguments on the other side.
And, you know, they're going to make some pretrial motions on both sides.
And it's just a matter of to see how the judge rules on these motions.
But I think it's important that the defense be laid out both publicly as well as in court.
And this recent filing they just did a couple hours ago shows that they're really going after the government and calling their number on a lot of these shenanigans that they're up to.
All right, we have to leave it there.
Thank you to my friend Paul Karanar for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
Until tomorrow at five o'clock Eastern, four o'clock Central, where you can find us every day, please go by StoneZone.com, StoneZone.com.
That's where you can see every one of our previous shows.
You can also see the latest that I have written or other key articles that I think the mainstream media is trying to conceal from you.
And when you're there, drop by the StoneZone.com shop where you can get your very own Roger Stone or a copy of my book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ, a copy of my book, Stone's Rules.
These are great gifts.
If you want to buy an autographed copy for yourself, StoneZone.com.
God bless you and Godspeed.
You're watching Lindell TV.
When I invented my pillow, my passion was to help each and every one of you.
And 20 years later, all of your support is what keeps us going.
Because of you, we've been able to create thousands of USA jobs and help millions get the best sleep ever.
To thank you, my employees and I are bringing you a limited edition MyPillow.
The Giza Elegance MyPillow is made with my patented adjustable fill, the most amazing cotton, and a two-inch pipe cusset.
It has four custom loft levels, Machine washable and dryable and you get my 60 day money back guarantee and 10 year warranty.
Go to MyPillow.com or call the number on your screen.
Use your promo code to get your limited edition 20th anniversary MyPillow queen size.
Retails for $69.98, now only $19.98.
That's right, get a queen size MyPillow for only $19.98.
▲
Export Selection