Roger Stone’s text messages may have just finished him off – and given Robert Mueller a path to Donald Trump
With seemingly just days to go before Roger Stone is indicted and arrested by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the big question has been whether Mueller merely has enough evidence to eventually convict Stone at trial, or if Mueller has the kind of slam-dunk case that’ll force Stone to quickly cut a plea deal against Donald Trump. We may have just gotten our answer.
Roger Stone and radio host Randy Credico discussed portions of the Trump-Russia scandal in writing during the 2016 election, according to text messages obtained by NBC News. They appear to show that Credico knew WikiLeaks was just days away from releasing something that would severely damage Hillary Clinton, and that Credico informed Stone about it. This blows up Stone’s longstanding claim that he had no idea what was coming, and that his infamous tweet about John Podesta’s time in the barrel was indeed precisely what we’ve always thought it was. But there’s more.
There are two key questions here. First, these text messages from Credico make no specific mention of the fact that WikiLeaks would be releasing the emails of Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman at the time. Yet Stone specifically stated that Podesta was about to be on the hot seat. So how did Stone know that detail? If these text messages represent the entirety of the discussion between Credico and Stone, then someone else would have had to tell Stone about the Podesta aspect, meaning that Stone would have also had another WikiLeaks backchannel.
Second, did Roger Stone turn around and tell Donald Trump about this before it happened? It’s hard to imagine Stone wouldn’t have gone running to his close pal Trump about such a thing, but it would have to be proven. In one text message, Credico asked Stone, “Why can’t you get Trump to come out and say that he would give Julian Assange asylum?” This suggests that Trump was indeed planning to do so after the election, and just didn’t want to announce it in advance. If so, this arguably points to Trump having been in on the WikiLeaks plot all along.
That said, the best way to nail Donald Trump on this is if Roger Stone cuts a plea deal. That’s likely to come down to just how overwhelmingly thorough Robert Mueller’s case is against him. It’s not about whether Stone can be proven guilty, but whether there’s so much evidence, Stone looks at the indictment and realizes he has no chance of winning at trial. As we’ve seen by now, Trump is not pardoning any of these goons to keep them from flipping, and Stone has surely figured that out.
