A visibly angry judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A visibly angry judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Roger Stone to stop speaking publicly about U. S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal case against him or else he will be sent to jail pending trial.
In a tense court hearing on Thursday, U. S. Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia said that Stone’s apology and explanations for why he posted a photo of her next to the image of the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram account were not credible.
Jackson made her ruling after a highly unusual hearing in which Stone, who is charged with crimes related to Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U. S. election, took the stand to testify about the posting.
Stone’s seemingly contradictory statements and at times foggy recollections about the post’s origins during a cross-examination by the government frustrated Jackson, who later concluded he “could not even keep his story straight on the stand.”
Stone, a longtime Republican political operative, friend of Trump and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster,” was arrested on Jan. 25. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of making false statements to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.
Besides probing the conclusions of U. S. intelligence agencies that Moscow ran an operation to hack Democratic Party computers and spread disinformation to undermine candidate Hillary Clinton and the American electoral process, Mueller is also investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow officials.
