What just happened to Roger Stone’s Trump-Russia pal Jerome Corsi?
On Monday, far-right conspiracy theorist and alleged Trump-Russia player Jerome Corsi announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had informed him that he was just days away from being indicted. Yesterday morning, CBS News reported that Mueller could be dropping indictments that day. Corsi was about to sit down for a media interview when his lawyers got a phone call from Mueller’s office; he promptly blew the interview off. Now today, Corsi’s situation is simply confusing.
Earlier today Jerome Corsi tweeted that “At my lawyer’s advice, I have gone into ‘No Comment.'” This suggests that yesterday’s phone call from Mueller’s office did indeed spook him. That said, Corsi is still a free man and still tweeting, meaning that he wasn’t indicted (or at least not indicted and arrested) yesterday. So what’s the deal?
There are couple of plausible explanations here. One would be that Robert Mueller’s office called Jerome Corsi yesterday and advised him to stop doing interviews or the charges against him could get worse. Another would be that Mueller called and offered him a plea deal if he flips on his pal Roger Stone, and part of that deal included shutting up.
Some have skeptically asked if Jerome Corsi might be faking this entire thing. But if he falsely claimed that prosecutors had told him he was about to be indicted, in an attempt at raising funds for a nonexistent legal defense, that would simply open the door for Mueller to hit him with fraud charges. Also, there’s no getting past the fact that prosecutors have tipped off CBS News about impending indictments; Corsi couldn’t fake that. Our expectation is that Corsi really is being imminently indicted, and the phone call he got yesterday made him realize that it’s in his best interests to go silent.
