Roger Stone has always struck me as a weird guy. He says ridiculous things and he does ridiculous things. Unlike many of the people a politicized DOJ went after to try to get at Trump over the last three years, Stone was actually a fairly easy target and basically served himself up on a silver platter.

But just because someone is a slimy figure, that does not mean they deserve to be railroaded by the justice system. If Stone hadn’t been an associate of Trump, he would have never been prosecuted. Further, even the person he supposedly intimidated as a witness said he thought Stone was joking. Despite that, it took AG Bill Barr stepping in to stop a completely unjust sentence from being handed down via the machinations of partisans within the DOJ.

Now, Stone is free of his gag order and he’s speaking out, love him, hate him, or indifferent.

My interview with an un-gagged Roger Stone, coming soon… https://t.co/6MlVimTWt0

— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) May 15, 2020

In true Stone fashion, he says he regrets nothing. I’d think he might regret making threats, joking or not, to a witness in a criminal investigation, but I guess not. Regardless, Stone also points out that there’s never been any other proof put forth that anyone but Randy Credico was the course of his many Wikileaks tweets, which formed the basis for the left to claim he was somehow colluding with the Russians (even though Wikileaks is not Russia). The government made the case that Jerome Corsi was actually Stone’s source, though Corsi never testified and the actual evidence of that was scant.

Stone does make a good case for being singled out, as Credico himself threatened a witness and appeared to be doing it in a serious fashion.  Later, Stone aired more grievances, including the financial burden he shouldered and the gag order that kept him from defending himself publicly throughout the ordeal.

But the biggest part of the above clip is when Stone describes a deal put forth by the proseuction in which they wanted him to “confess” to talking to Donald Trump about Wikileaks and the Russians. That was, of course, always the play here. As I said, Stone was only prosecuted because of his connections with Trump. They wanted to “flip” him and get him to claim that the President was actually behind nefarious Russian collusion. Since that wasn’t true, Stone refused the deal despite being offered a recommendation of no jail time.

I always try to be honest about how I feel about people. I’m not a Roger Stone fan, but I’m much less of a fan of a politicized justice system. When you look at what the DOJ was attempting to do in getting Stone to turn on Trump and couple that with a very selective prosecution, it’s clear this was all about politics. That shouldn’t be the case.