Roger Stone is on borrowed time
Will Roger Stone end up with a prison sentence? That’s for a judge and jury to decide. But when it comes to the prospect of Stone being indicted and arrested in the Trump-Russia scandal, that now seems all but inevitable. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been revealed to be focusing too heavily on Stone for this not to be going anywhere, and soon. Federal grand juries indict people far greater than 99% of the time. So what happens once Stone is indicted?
That’s when we’ll see if Mueller offers Stone a plea deal or simply goes ahead and arrests him. Stone appeared on MSNBC earlier this month and asserted that Mueller had never even so much as contacted him about Trump-Russia up to that point. Mueller’s general pattern has been that if he doesn’t bother contacting someone he’s investigating, he tends to arrest them as soon as they’ve been indicted.
Still, Mueller’s primary goal is to get to Donald Trump, and Stone’s decades-long friendship with Trump, along with his unique role in communicating with WikiLeaks and Russian hackers while he was an informal Trump campaign adviser, means that Mueller will likely end up offering Stone a deal after he’s been arrested. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether Stone will decide to sell out his friend Trump, or take his chances at trial. But it looks like we’ll get that answer soon.
Robert Mueller already has the cooperating testimony of Sam Nunberg and at least one other Roger Stone associate. Mueller also detained and subpoenaed yet another Stone associate this week, Ted Malloch, who is set to testify in two weeks. How many more witnesses against Stone does Mueller need? He already has more than enough to convince the typical grand jury to indict. It would be reasonable to expect Malloch is his final witness against Roger Stone, who is clearly on borrowed time.
