Roger Stone is pleased to be known as a campaign “dirty trickster.” A former Trump campaign aide and Republican operative, he has embraced his past as practitioner of the political dark arts. “One man’s dirty tricks,” he has said, are “another man’s political, civic action. He has warned that “Politics ain’t bean bag, and losers don’t legislate.” Going still further, he has articulated as one of his “rules” for success that “To win you must do everything.” Yet he has also insisted that, “Everything I do, everything I’ve ever done has been legal.”
This claim is now likely to be put to the test. News reports increasingly suggest that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is circling around Roger Stone and his associates in the Russia matter and that the legality of his “dirty tricks” is very much in question.
Stone’s argument that ”it’s all just politics” is close in kind to the First Amendment protection defenses that the Trump campaign has claimed it enjoys even if, as alleged, it had contacts with Russia and WikiLeaks. Like those defenses, Stone’s claims will be evaluated in the light of the still emerging but increasingly troubling facts of the campaign and its associates’ active connivance with the Russian cyber attack on the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. As the Watergate prosecutions showed, dirty tricks pursued to sabotage an opposing campaign are very much a legal issue. They are not easily passed off as good old-fashioned hardball politics, the kind that “ain’t beanbag”—especially when, as in this case, the fellow tricksters are a foreign government and its agents.
Stone and one of his associates, Jerome Corsi, appear to have conducted communications with WikiLeaks and the “Guccifer 2.0” cutout, and Stone had contact with at least one Russian national offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Most famously, Stone predicted in August of 2016 that something momentous involving Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta—his “time in the barrel”—was about to break, two months before Wikileaks distributed hacked emails of Podesta’s. Now Corsi has provided to the press what appears to be a draft plea agreement and statement of offense produced by Mueller’s office and awaiting Corsi’s signature, which provide new detail about the extent of alleged collaboration between Corsi, Stone, and Wikileaks. The statement of offense reveals an email Stone sent to Corsi in July 2016 with the request or instruction that Corsi, “Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails.”. Weeks later, Corsi replied that “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2d in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
Stone disputes that these emails “prove” that he had advance notice of the “source or content” of the stolen emails published by WikiLeaks. He says that he was merely “curious” about the pending WikiLeaks disclosures….
