Robert Mueller puts final touches on kitchen sink indictment of Roger Stone
Back when Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced the indictment and arrest of Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, he took a kitchen sink approach. Mueller brought so many different kinds of felony charges against Manafort, you needed a flow chart to track them all. The charges ran the gamut, from Manafort’s criminal ties to the Kremlin, to garden variety financial fraud. It’s now clear that Mueller is about to drop the same kind of kitchen sink on Trump’s oldest friend Roger Stone.
Over the past twenty-four hours we’ve learned that Robert Mueller has landed the two witnesses that he seems to think are key to nailing Roger Stone. The first was Stone’s former underling Andrew Miller, who fought hard not to testify, suggesting that his testimony is damning, and that he didn’t want to give up Stone. However, a judge ruled that he must testify immediately. Then today we learned that Stone’s friend Kirstin Davis, previously convicted of running a prostitution ring, voluntarily met with Mueller’s team on Wednesday.
We still don’t know precisely how these pieces fit together. But after Robert Mueller spent the past several weeks bringing in more than a dozen people from Roger Stone’s professional and personal life to testify against him, these two witnesses seemed to be Mueller’s primary focus. At one point, when Miller was trying to convince a judge to let him not testify, Mueller had five of his own people at the hearing, which underscores how crucial this testimony is.
What stands out the most here is that there is nothing to suggest that either Miller or Davis has anything to do with the Trump-Russia election scandal. It’s a given that Robert Mueller will indict Roger Stone for conspiring with Kremlin-controlled cyberterrorist group WikiLeaks during the election. But it’s just as clear that Stone will also be indicted for his various other unrelated criminal scandals. As we’re seeing in the Paul Manafort trial, it’s those other scandals that can end up being the shortest path to a conviction.
