Roger Stone takes the 5th in riot probe

“Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is now appearing to reverse course on the probe and saying its findings are “something the public needs to know.””

Stone said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination “to every question” they asked him. Don’t they start by asking his name? How can that incriminate him?

(Now that I think about it, admitting “I am Roger Stone” is an admission that you are someone with seven felony convictions, so maybe he has a point.)

13 thoughts on “Roger Stone takes the 5th in riot probe

  1. Re: Scoopy’s question on avoiding the inheritance tax. Since that thread closed, I guess it’s okay to post here.

    No, that’s not a possibility. If the joint account is of a large enough amount ($15,000) I believe half of the account is deemed to have been ‘gifted’ to the heir(s) and is subject to the gift tax.

    Of course, there are ways to cheat this, mainly through setting up a whole bunch of bank accounts at under $15,000, but that can be very cumbersome.

    I believe wealthy people most attempt to avoid their heirs paying inheritance taxes through complex trusts that are beyond my understanding. This is one of the things tax lawyers earn big money for.

    I was a junior accountant before getting my masters in economics and in the small office I worked in we used to comment how it was the tax lawyers and not the accountants who did all the real complicated work. Of course, accountants who work for large corporations or the senior accountants who work for one of the big accounting firms might disagree.

    In a similar semi off topic, my auditing instructor told the class that at one time some important people were thinking of shifting internal auditing to engineers. This was before the major use of computers for corporate financial systems though (think checks and hand written ledgers) and now audit accountants tend to also be experts in computer systems.

    1. I was going to mention that the actual name is Gift & Inheritance Tax. Estate tax usually refers to state rather than federal tax. It seems to me if half the account balance is a gift, the other half will later become an inheritance anyway. They’re treated exactly the same. Don’t forget that the totality of gifts from a personal estate are lifetime cumulative. I forget, but whether income tax liability is also incurred might depend on the joint account holder’s relationship to you.

      Depending on where your money came from, this can be a double or even triple tax. That is, you paid income tax on it already, but heirs still have to pay GIT out of your estate. A spouse is the exception. No GIT when your (widowed) spouse gets your half of the joint property.

    2. I don’t think that is 100% correct.

      “A common co-ownership interest is the joint tenancy with right of survivorship. This gives co-owners equal rights to use and occupy the property during their lifetime. Upon the death of the first co-owner, the property automatically devolves to the surviving co-owners without passing through probate – this is the right of survivorship part. The deceased person’s interest in the property never forms part of his estate at death.”

      1. I think that’s right, at least as far as real property (land). There are various ways title to property can be held by multiple people. Joint tenancy with right of survivorship means that when one person dies, the other person doesn’t inherit. Rather the dead person’s interest merely disappears. Honestly I am not sure is more than 2 people can hold property that way. The best way to hold property, I was taught, is only available to married couples. It’s called “tenancy by the entirety”. In the case of joint tenancy with right of survivorship, if one owner is sued to recover a debt the person owed the debt can force a Joint tenancy with right of survivorship to be converted into Tenancy in Common and force a sale of the property. In tenancy by the entirety, if one spouse owes a non marital debt, the couple can’t be forced to sell. The person or entity owed the money has to wait for the couple to sell on their own or hope the spouse with the debt doesn’t die first.

    3. Accounting and income (personal or corporate) tax preparation are two very different things. Tax prep uses some of the concepts of accounting, but it is much more like being a lawyer, because knowledge of tax law and regulations are what is important. An accountant may not know much more about income taxes than anyone else.

      BTW, the tax code is NOT enormous because the IRS wanted it to be. It is huge because of A) the elaborate lengths people will go to get out of paying taxes (like selling assets at a loss to their wife) and B) because rich people and big corporations lobbied Congress to create loopholes, which Congress obligingly did.

      1. I was employed by a small office that did a lot of personal and small business tax filings, small business financial accounting mostly focusing on dentists and some small resource extraction companies (I guess there is something of a connection between dentistry and extraction) and auditing the financial statements of unions. I gather the auditing of union financial statements was at that time a provincial yearly requirement.

        The issues that involved the tax lawyers were mergers between the resource companies. There is fairly complex financial accounting regarding mergers (even for private small businesses) that is taught in an upper level accounting course, but in the cases we handled, the tax lawyers did all of that work for us.

      2. Adam, you seem to know stuff. As more spillover from the earlier thread – what is your opinion of the idea of funding the government (or parts of it) through a tax on stock sales?
        Assuming such a thing could ever get passed, of course.

    4. If my last name started with an N instead of an M, I very likely would have become a tax attorney. At my law school, all first years took the same classes. But second and third years got to register based on their year and where their name fell in the alphabet. The way it worked out, I wasn’t able to get into Federal Income Tax until my last semester. It turned out I had an aptitude for it and it was one of three A’s I earned during law school. Towards the end of my last semester, my tax professor stopped me after class to talk to me and said “you are going to register for my upper level tax classes, right?” I told him it was tempting, but that I’d rather graduate. One tax class, even with an A, wasn’t going to be enough to get a job with a tax firm. If I wanted to do tax law, I would have had to get an advanced degree, an LLM in tax. I thought about it seriously, but I just didn’t feel like I could afford another year of school. The road not taken. If I had taken that route odds are I would not have been stopped at the red light where I was rear ended by a garbage truck. But for all I know I might have ended up working on an upper floor of the WTC.

  2. Hi Scoop. I replied to this message many hours ago. Since that Jerry Springer campaign ad went through without a hitch, I thought I’d risk it again and included a link to a YouTube video from a law professor on why you should never ever talk to the police. At least this time I understand why my comment was held up for moderation. I just wanted to let you know that comment is sitting in whatever box comments in need of moderation sit.

  3. There is a reason Roger Stone’s attorney(s) presumably advised him to assert his 5th Amendment rights in response to every question. That’s because your right to remain silent can be considered waived if you begin answering questions about a subject but try to plead the 5th in response to later questions. That is known as “selective assertion” and is generally not allowed. For example:

    Q Theo, were you at the party on December 18th?

    A Yeah, my buddy Cockroach and I were there together.

    Q Was the defendant, Dr. Cliff Huxtable, also at the party?

    A Yes, my dad was at the party.

    Q Did you see the defendant slip pills into that girl’s drink?

    A I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me.

    In that example, Theo would mostly likely have been deemed to have waived his 5th Amendment privilege, not because he wasn’t being accused of a crime, but because he began testifying about what happened at the party.

    I am going to go out on a limb and say Roger Stone would not have waived his 5th Amendment rights by giving his name. But the line of where questions are safe to answer without waiving and where privilege will be waived is not always clear and may depend on the opinion of the judge overseeing your trial for contempt of Congress. It’s safer to just refuse to answer all questions. Since most Senators and members of Congress are lawyers, they know why witnesses who assert usually refuse to answer all questions. Of course politicians being politicians, they love making witnesses assert their right to remain silent again and again and especially love mocking them for refusing to answer innocuous questions. This week it was the Democrats and Roger Stone. A decade ago it was the Republicans and Lois Lerner.

    1. I read an analysis of this the other day, and the author insisted that selective assertion in general is allowed for a non-party witness, but disallowed for the defendant, or for a party to the crime.

      Theo, as a witness and not accused of a crime, would not be required to reveal having committed a completely unrelated crime that might make him the subject of a completely separate trial. As I understand it, if his crime is previously failing to report the roofies, then he might be compelled to answer, because he was a party to the crime that the defendant is accused of and waived his 5 rights when he agreed to talk about it. On the other hand, if the crime he is trying to hide is completely unrelated to this trial (say – he reported the crime from minute one as required by law, but the reason he saw the roofies is because he was having sex with an underage girl in the next bed, which nobody knows, but would come out on cross-ex ), then I fail to see how he could be compelled to testify unless granted immunity.

      One other article I read said also that the right to plead the fifth selectively might depend in certain circumstances on whether he was compelled to testify under subpoena or was a completely voluntary witness.

      Tricky matter, that.

      1. Honestly, I am not really all that expert on selective assertions and the 5th Amendment. But I do know that concern over inadvertently waiving the privilege is why witnesses that are invoking often refuse to answer any questions. My Cosby example was intended mostly to be humorous. But as to when a witness might be able to truthfully claim answering might tend to incriminate them even when they are innocent of any crime, I defer to Regent Law Professor James Duane. He gave a talk entitled “Don’t Talk to the Police” that has been viewed on YouTube more than 16 million times in the last 9 years. It’s worth a watch.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

        When I was a social studies teacher in the Bronx, I would do a lesson each term on the students rights, including when dealing with police. I wasn’t quite as definitive in my advice. Instead of telling them never to talk to the police, I told them if they thought the police might be looking at them as someone that had committed a crime they should ask for a lawyer and then remain silent until they speak to that lawyer. I didn’t want them to remain silent if they were a victim or uninvolved witness. I had one student, from my honors class no less, that was arrested for allegedly stealing a cell phone. Unsurprisingly, he said he was innocent. Because public defenders are overworked, I offered to speak with his lawyer to make sure my student understood all the issues in his case. The first thing his lawyer said to me was “it would have been better if he hadn’t spoken to the police.” That pretty clearly demonstrated I was a poor teacher and/or that student didn’t belong in my honors class.

        Seriously though, 50 years of TV and movies should have taught nearly everyone that they should always ask for a lawyer when they are arrested and questioned by the police. But in the moment, people are afraid that if they refuse to answer questions or ask for a lawyer they will look guilty. There have been many many cases where people stopped by the police consent to the police searching their car even though they know there are drugs, murder weapons, or dead bodies in the car. Some of these cases end up in Constitutional Criminal Procedure casebooks so law students can wonder how defendants could have been so stupid. I am sure most weren’t exactly geniuses, but I think it was more an issue of panic. Someone is stopped and they start to panic while also struggling not to appear nervous. Paramount in many cases must be the thought “don’t look guilty.” Maybe they think asking for permission to search is a trick and they only search the car when the person says no. Some of those people end up with the rest of their lives in prison to regret their answer. If they had only listened to their 9th grade social studies teacher they might have gotten away with it.

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