The Kremlin comes out swinging for Roger Stone
If Roger Stone’s goal is to convince everyone that he didn’t conspire with the Kremlin during the 2016 election, the dumbest way possible for him to go about it would be to have the Kremlin come out swinging on his behalf. So of course, that’s precisely what’s happening.
Roger Stone has revised his earlier claim that the FBI tipped off CNN about his pre-dawn arrest. He’s now claiming that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lieutenant Andrew Weissmann tipped off CNN. This is of course ludicrous. It’s the last thing Mueller’s office would ever do. For that matter, one of the grand jury witnesses publicly ran his mouth the day before the arrest and gave away that someone was likely getting popped the next morning.
But don’t try telling those facts to Roger Stone, who is now apparently basing his criminal defense around these false claims about Mueller and CNN, which wouldn’t help him even if they were true. Tellingly, the Kremlin-controlled publication Russia Today, also known as RT.com, has helpfully run an article parroting Stone’s claims.
All that does is tell us that Vladimir Putin is trying to help out Roger Stone, which is a bad sign when it comes to Stone’s claim that he has no past or present affiliation with Putin’s people. In any case, the more Stone runs his mouth about this nonsense, the more quickly the judge will make good on her threat to hit him with a gag order.
