The substance of the footage the committee aides viewed, and whether it included any raw footage or material that isn’t expected to appear in Guldbrandsen’s forthcoming film, was not immediately clear.
The Danish documentarian’s crew also captured images of Stone using his cellphone, which showed contacts via an encrypted app with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. Stone’s contacts within both far-right groups have come under scrutiny from the select committee and DOJ.
Notably, in the recent court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago by federal investigators, the FBI indicated that it had recovered a document it dubbed “Executive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone, Jr.”
www.politico.com/...
“See you in prison,” Stone wrote that evening in a message to another Trump associate.
As a mob ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, hurried to pack a suitcase inside his elegant suite on the fifth floor of the Willard hotel. He wrapped his tailored suits in trash bags, reversed his black face mask so its “Free Roger Stone” logo was hidden, then slipped out of town for a hastily arranged private flight from Dulles International Airport.
“I really want to get out of here,” Stone told an aide, as they were filmed at the hotel by a Danish camera crew for a documentary on the veteran Republican operative. Stone said he feared prosecution by the incoming attorney general, Merrick Garland. “He is not a friend,” Stone said.
Stone allowed the filmmakers to document his activities during extended periods over more than two years. In addition to interviews and moments when Stone spoke directly to the camera, they also captured fly-on-the-wall footage of his actions, candid off-camera conversations from a microphone he wore and views of his iPhone screen as he messaged associates on an encrypted app. Reporters from The Washington Post reviewed more than 20 hours of video filmed for the documentary, “A Storm Foretold,” which is expected to be released later this year.
The footage, along with other reporting by The Post, provides the most comprehensive account to date of Stone’s involvement in the former president’s effort to overturn the election and in the rallies in Washington that spilled over into violence on Jan. 6.
Stone privately coordinated post-election protests with prominent figures, and in January he communicated by text message with leaders of far-right groups that had been involved in the attack on the Capitol, the footage shows. The filmmakers did not capture conversations between Stone and Trump, but on several occasions, Stone told them or his associates that he remained in contact with the president.
Stone did not permit the filmmakers to record him for a 90-minute period covering the height of the violence on Jan. 6. A Stone aide blocked a cameraman from entering his hotel suite, claiming that Stone was napping, the cameraman said. When he eventually got inside, Stone was speaking on his phone.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
DOJ has released the memo that Ed O’Callaghan and Steven Engel used to claim there wasn’t evidence to charge Trump with obstruction.
A key part of it is a claim that the evidence in Volume I was “conclusive” that there wasn’t evidence to charge any of Trump’s flunkies with conspiring with Russia.
Only at least O’Callaghan knew that the evidence wasn’t conclusive. On Page 178, the Mueller Report they claimed was conclusive revealed that they had referred Stone for further investigation into whether he had conspired with Russian to hack.
The Office determined that it could not pursue a Section 1030 conspiracy charge against Stone for some of the same legal reasons. The most fundamental hurdles, though, are factual ones.1279
1279 Some of the factual uncertainties are the subject of ongoing investigations that have been referred by this Office to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.
DOJ covered that footnote up for another 20 months, releasing it only the day before the 2020 election.
From that point forward, Barr had to make sure that DOJ wouldn’t pursue that investigation into Stone, because it would expose the lie at the core of his cover-up.
www.emptywheel.net/...