Judge Amy Brennan Jackson plans to go full steam ahead with sentencing Stone.
Yesterday I wrote:
Once upon a time, this sort of [juror] bias [as evidenced by Tomeka Hart] would have been something liberals would have recognized as disqualifying. But now, since it hurt Trump and Stone, I predict that the judge, Obama appointee Amy Berman Jackson (who presided over the Manafort trial as well as the Stone trial) will not see it that way.
So today we have this exceedingly unsurprising news, via The Hill:
A federal judge on Tuesday refused to delay Roger Stone’s sentencing amid the fallout over the Trump administration’s decision to intervene in the case against the president’s longtime ally.
The sentencing will move forward on Thursday at its originally scheduled time, the judge said, despite a new effort from Stone’s defense team to get a new trial.
Note the way the entire thing is framed. Those are the first two paragraphs of the story, and the focus is on Trump’s comments (which Barr said did not influence him) rather than anything about Hart. It’s obvious why it’s written that way.
The article doesn’t go into just why Stone’s attorneys are asking for a new trial until paragraph number seven, which goes like this:
It’s unclear what grounds Stone’s legal team is citing in its request for a new trial, but one of the lawyers acknowledged to The Hill last week that it was investigating the social media activity of a member of the jury.
h/t SH