Lawyer and Internet sleuth “Techno-Fog” posted a tweet Friday announcing that Stone’s defense team had made a request before the court where he was tried but has yet to be sentenced.
https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1228439574252343296
The demand for a new trial comes a day after the federal judge in the case, Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, rejected his request for a new trial, according to the Washington Examiner.
The news site reported:
According to the judge’s ruling, unsealed on Wednesday afternoon, Stone’s argument that a new trial was warranted hinged on two main claims about why the juror, whose identity was concealed in the filing, should have been removed. The first was because the juror is employed at a division of the Internal Revenue Service, which Stone claimed “works hand-in-hand with the Department of Justice prosecuting criminal tax matters.” The second was because Stone claimed the juror “violated the court’s order to avoid media coverage of the case.”
Berman Jackson, however, rejected both of those claims and argued that the GOP operative’s defense team “has not presented grounds for a new trial” under appropriate rules nor has shown “any reason to believe there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.”
That seems comical considering what was discovered about the lead juror in the days after the trial concluded.
As reported by Fox News, former Memphis City Schools Board President Tomeka Hart revealed in a Facebook post she was the foreperson of the jury that convicted Stone. She explained that she was angered after the four government lawyers handling Stone’s prosecution quit the case when the Justice Department intervened to recommend a lower sentence than the seven-to-nine years they were seeking.
‘Should automatically trigger a new trial’
“I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis -- the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial," Hart wrote in the post. "It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice.”
Investigative journalist Mike Cernovich managed to uncover several of Hart’s tweets, all of which were disparaging of President Trump, one even addressing him with the hashtag #KKKPresident.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1227764653071036416
In an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson after Hart’s bias was reported, the network’s chief legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, a former superior court judge in New Jersey, said she must have been deceptive about her views when she was being questioned by defense attorneys and prosecutors in the pre-trial phase.
“This is information that she must have hidden from the lawyers and the judge, who interrogated her before she was put on the jury,” he said, as reported by BizPac Review.
“The purpose of the interrogation is to weed out people that have a bias prejudice, knowledge of the case or interest in the outcome,” he explained. “She obviously had a prejudice against Roger Stone — a bias in favor of his prosecution and an interest in seeing him convicted that should automatically disqualify her.”
Earlier in the day on Thursday, Napolitano told “Fox & Friends” that kind of obvious bias is normally “an automatic trigger for a new trial.”
“The proper thing for the judge to do,” he said, “is to bring this juror back in the courtroom in the presence of Roger Stone and his lawyers, and in the presence of the four prosecutors who have since resigned … and interrogate this woman in order to determine whether the bias influenced her guilty vote and whether that bias was passed on to other members of the jury,” he said.
We won’t hold our breath.
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