Roger Stone arrived on Capitol Hill to testify before the Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Friday, but invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Emerging after a 90-minute session, the self-proclaimed right-wing dirty trickster said he refused to answer any questions, calling the committee’s probe an extension of the investigations into former President Donald Trump.
“I question the legitimacy of this inquiry,” Stone said. “This is witch hunt 3.0.”
Stone asserted that he took the Fifth because he fears Democrats would twist any sworn testimony to gin up accusations of perjury.
“(It’s) not because I have done anything wrong,” he insisted to reporters.
The committee, which includes seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans, likely hoped to ask Stone about his role in planning the attempted insurrection and the pro-Trump rally that led to it.
In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Stone, convicted of seven felonies, by intervening in extraordinary fashion in a criminal case that was central to the Russia investigation and that concerned the president’s own conduct.
The move came just days before Stone was to begin serving a 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
The House select committee wants to know everything it can about the effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory It has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and examined thousands of documents, including explosive text messages detailing what amounts to a pro-Trump coup attempt.
A handful of Trump allies have used various legal tactics to avoid telling the committee all of what they know about his effort to overturn the election results.
Law professor John Eastman, who penned a harebrained legal memo urging Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results from states Biden won, has said he plans to take the Fifth.
Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department official who was deeply involved in efforts to gin up bogus fraud claims, initially cited Trump’s executive privilege claims, which courts have so far rejected. But he also now plans to cite the Fifth Amendment.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows initially cut a deal to cooperate with the committee. He handed over thousands of damning documents, including text messages from GOP lawmakers pleading in vain for him to get Trump to stop the riot in real-time.
Meadows, whose White House memoir was published this month, later flip-flopped and said he wouldn’t testify after all. He cited Trump’s claim to executive privilege and accused the committee of acting in bad faith because it also issued subpoenas for his phone records.
The House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress on Tuesday after he ceased to cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee investigating the Capitol insurrection — making it the first time the chamber has voted to hold a former member in contempt since the 1830s.
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