Judge Schools Stone While Shooting Down His Request To Get Her Kicked Off His Case

Political strategist Roger Stone speaks at the American Priority Conference on December 6, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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Judge Amy Berman Jackson doesn’t have time for Roger Stone’s attempt to get her kicked out of his criminal case.

On Sunday night, Berman Jackson flatly rejected Stone’s request that she recuse herself because she had said the jurors in the case had served “with integrity,” which Stone claimed indicated bias against him.

First, the judge pointed out in the six-page filing, her “very general comment” about the jurors was not in response to Stone’s allegations of bias of one of the jurors.

Berman Jackson also said that she had not made the comment outside the courtroom and that her making the observation Stone objected to was a standard component of her duty as a judge.

“In other words, judges cannot be ‘biased’ and need not be disqualified if the views they express are based on what they learned while doing the job they were appointed to do,” she wrote.

Finally, Berman Jackson dinged Stone for making the request simply because he wanted to make a story out of it to further portray himself as a victim of an unfair and partisan-driven trial, as he and President Donald Trump have claimed.

“At bottom, given the absence of any factual or legal support for the motion for
disqualification, the pleading appears to be nothing more than an attempt to use the Court’s docket to disseminate a statement for public consumption that has the words ‘judge’ and ‘biased’ in it,” Berman Jackson concluded.

Read filing below:

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