Roger Stone arrives for his sentencing at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, DC on February, 20, 2020.

A federal judge on Thursday denied a request for a new trial by President Donald Trump friend Roger Stone, who was convicted last fall of lying to Congress and witness tampering, flatly rejecting his claim of juror misconduct.

Stone, 67, had sought a new trial based on his allegation that the jury forewoman lied on a questionnaire as the panel was being selected.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson's denial of that motion theoretically sets the stage for the Republican political operative to begin serving within two weeks a 40-month prison term for felonies related to lying to a House committee about his discussions with members of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Jackson had suspended that sentence from taking effect until she ruled on the motion for a new trial in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

But Stone is certain to appeal his conviction now that his bid for a retrial has failed.

And it is not clear if he will be denied a release bond while that appeal is pending, particularly given the coronavirus outbreak. Attorney General William Barr has urged the Bureau of Prisons to release inmates who are eligible for home confinement and vulnerable to Covid-19 because of their advanced age or underlying health conditions, in an effort to limit infections in federal lockups.

Stone's lawyer, Seth Ginsberg, when asked for comment about the ruling said ''At this point, we are reviewing the decision and will determine how to proceed in the coming days.''

Trump has not ruled out pardoning Stone, a Florida resident who has for decades embraced a public persona of a dirty political trickster.

The president has repeatedly criticized the prosecution of Stone, who was charged in the case by then-special counsel Robert Mueller.

In her ruling, Jackson rejected Stone's argument that the jury forewoman, Tomeka Hart, had lied during jury selection and had exhibited such a bias against Trump on social media that it should have ruled her out from deciding Stone's fate.

That argument had been supported in late February by Trump himself, in a Twitter post.

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"The defendant has not shown that the juror lied; nor has he shown that the supposedly disqualifying evidence could not have been found through the exercise of due diligence at the time the jury was selected," Jackson wrote in her decision Thursday.

"Moreover, while the social media communications may suggest that the juror has strong opinions about certain people or issues, they do not reveal that she had an opinion about Roger Stone, which is the opinion that matters," the judge wrote.

"The assumption underlying the motion – that one can infer from the juror's opinions about the President that she could not fairly consider the evidence against the defendant – is not supported by any facts or data and it is contrary to controlling legal precedent," Jackson wrote.

"The motion is a tower of indignation, but at the end of the day, there is little of substance holding it up."

Jackson a number of times called out Stone's lawyers for raising the issue of Hart's social media posts only months after jury selection and after the trial was finished. She noted that they had failed to discover those posts during jury selection or the trial, even though they were public.

"At the time of the trial, though, the defense made a strategic choice not to look for social media information. None of the seven lawyers or the two jury consultants on the defense team performed the rudimentary Googling that located this set of Facebook and Twitter posts," Jackson wrote.

And the judge at one point in her decision referenced Stone's earlier political hero, President Richard Nixon, citing a 1975 ruling in which the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia "refused to equate views about President Nixon with an inability to be impartial to someone who worked in the White House, an even closer connection than the one here."

Stone has a tattoo of Nixon's face on his back.

Jackson, in a separate order, said, "The defendant must surrender for service of his sentence at the institution designated by the Bureau of Prisons at such time as he is notified by the U.S. Probation or Pretrial Services Office, but no earlier than fourteen days after the date of this order."

Stone was convicted last fall in Washington federal court of seven felony counts.

Jurors found that he lied to a House committee about talked with Trump's presidential campaign about his efforts to get information from the document disclosure group WikiLeaks about emails stolen by Russian agents from John Podesta, the head of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, and from the Democratic National Committee.

The emails were made public by WikiLeaks in 2016. Disclosures of their contents embarrassed Clinton's campaign and the DNC.

Jurors also found that Stone had threatened his associate Randy Credico, a New York comedian, in an effort to get Credico to back up his misstatements to the House committee.

In February, as Stone's sentencing date approached, a controversy erupted over Trump's public statements about the case, and over the involvement in the case of Attorney General William Barr.

The uproar led directly to Stone's request for a new trial.