Roger Stone says he shouldn't be subject to a gag order because he's less popular on Instagram than Kim Kardashian

Roger Stone
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office said Friday it would support a "narrowly-tailored" gag order for Roger Stone, President Trump's longtime adviser and friend who last month was indicted by Mueller's team on seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, witness tampering, and making false statements.

"The order would be supported by a finding that there is a substantial likelihood that extrajudicial comments by trial participants will undermine a fair trial," Mueller's team said. The statement cited recent television appearances in which Stone discussed "the merits of the charges, the nature of the evidence, the identity and credibility of trial witnesses, and the motives of the prosecution."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"While Roger Stone may be familiar to those who closely follow American politics, he is hardly ubiquitous in the larger landscape of popular consciousness," Stone's lawyers wrote. "An example of how limited and narrow his public presence is, is that Kim Kardashian has 59.5 million followers on Twitter. By contrast, Roger Stone has no Twitter account at all and, thus has no Twitter followers. On Instagram, Kim Kardashian has 126 million followers. Roger Stone’s Instagram following amounts to 39 thousand subscribers."

Stone is not on Twitter because the social network suspended his account in 2017. His Instagram account, where Stone is marketing "Roger Stone did nothing wrong" shirts, is indeed less popular than that of the most ubiquitous reality television star of the last decade.

Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.