How Roger Stone’s murder threat impacts his plea deal against Donald Trump

| 3:08 pm EDT May 27, 2018
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By his own admission, Roger Stone has spent the past four decades going Full Thug in the political world, yet he’s always managed to survive it. There’s a reason why: he knows when and how to cut and run, and who to sell out. Now that a grand jury is on the verge of indicting him for serious crimes that may include espionage charges, it’s inevitable that Stone will do what he always does: he’ll cut a plea deal against Donald Trump in order to survive. However, there’s a new twist: Stone recently threatened to murder a witness.

In a sign of how badly things are slipping away from Roger Stone, it turns out that six weeks ago he privately threatened to kill his (former) friend Randy Credico if he testified against him in the Trump-Russia scandal. This comes on top of an earlier report from last month that Stone threatened to kidnap Credico’s dog. Stone made these threats via email, so there’s proof he said these things.

We’ll have to leave it to the grand jury to decide whether Stone’s “Prepare to die” threat counts as a criminal threat against Credico’s life. At the least, this means he’s looking at witness intimidation charges. Of course this will pale in comparison to whatever charges Stone is indicted on for conspiring with Russia to alter the outcome of the election: espionage, conspiracy against the United States, take your pick. But something like witness intimidation, or the perjury that Stone also appears to have committed, is far quicker and easier to prove. It’s the kind of cut-and-dry charge that prompts someone like Stone to realize he’s screwed and cut a deal. Even if he thinks he can beat espionage charges at trial, he’s not beating the simpler charges.

So if Roger Stone is capable of thinking logically and rationally, this new revelation will serve to greatly increase the odds that he cuts a plea deal. The question of course is whether Stone has been making death threats against witnesses as a coldly logical tactic, or because he’s cracked under the pressure. If he’s lost the ability to think rationally, he may not cut a plea deal after all. But Robert Mueller has so many other cooperating witnesses against Trump, it may not matter.