Roger Stone has long feared he would be slapped with a gag order if he got indicted — and he’s readied a plan to make sure he won’t have to stay silent.
The federal judge in Stone’s case, Amy Berman Jackson, has already hushed a coterie of others caught in special counsel Robert Mueller’s dragnet, including Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and their attorneys. They were quieted after one of the lawyers told reporters that Mueller’s case was “ridiculous.”
Jackson will have a much longer record of public commentary from Stone to work with when the longtime Donald Trump associate appears Friday afternoon for his first status hearing tied to the special counsel’s charges that he lied to Congress and obstructed the House investigation into Russian election meddling.
If Stone is gagged, his contingency plan is already in place. He’s got a well-known First Amendment attorney on his legal team who represented the rap group 2 Live Crew against obscenity charges in the early 1990s. And Stone has designated a pair of close friends as spokesmen in the event he and his lawyers are told to stop talking.
Until then, Stone won’t stop chattering. READ MORE: