Maybe
twenty-nine FBI agents in tactical combat gear and a fleet of SUVs with K-Force
LED lights flashing wasn’t enough to flush out the arch-villain Roger Stone
from his South Florida hide-out. Ever consider that? He might have charged out
of the place like John Wayne in Rio
Bravo, brandishing a spatula or a shoe-horn, since he didn’t happen
to have a Colt-45 on hand. Maybe they should have sent in a SEAL team and the
Boston Patriots offensive line for back-up. Anyway, they got their man! And CNN was there to record it,
thanks to their 2018 hire of FBI former special agent Josh Campbell, who had
been FBI Director James Comey’s majordomo in a previous career incarnation.
Isn’t it a small world? Somehow Josh got wind of the pre-dawn raid.
Roger
Stone is not everybody’s cup of antifreeze. I don’t want to go too tweet-mean
on the guy, but let’s face it, physically he does look a little like
Zippy-the-Pinhead — if, say, Zippy had made it to community college and learned
how to manage a four-in-hand necktie. Mr. Stone represents a certain kind of
stock character in American politics: The Joker. In the Batman sense of the role: the
sociopathic trickster. He made his bones cooking up gags for “Tricky Dick”
Nixon, and carved out a long career as a behind-the-scenes political
black-opster on the Republican side. American politics, in my lifetime anyway, is just one long game
of innuendo —
proctology as practiced among the goodfellas in
the electoral trade — and ole Roger was famous for finding new and comical ways
of putting it to the
opposition.
And so, the FBI came a’calling to indict him
on various felony counts of lying to them, witness tampering, and obstruction
of justice, charges that could put him on ice until the end of his days —
unless they can crack him like a four-minute egg for a rich yolk of confession
about Mr. Trump’s scheme to sell Arkansas to Vladimir Putin, or something like
that.
As I often point out here, history is a
trickster, too. Things fly out of left field from it all the time. Pink
elephants, black swans, honeybadgers, World Wars, flash crashes, and Roger
Stone. I have a theory that Mr. Stone, in his twisted way, will turn out to be
a sort of unlikely hero in this subplot of the Mueller inquisition. How might
that work? Despite the attempt to squeeze him on charges that will bankrupt him
and send him off to die in the federal cooler, Mr. Stone will do what he said
on the courthouse steps: he won’t bear false witness against Mr. Trump. What
that really means is something else: he is willing to step into a court-of-law
and face down Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors.
Mr.
Mueller does not want this case to be tried in court, I assure you. In the
event, an awful lot of dark evidence will emerge from the defense side of the
room about the criminal malfeasance among the Mueller Team, and their reliance
on the Clinton network of fixers, grifters, and rogues who cooked up the
years-long Russian Meddling-and-Collusion flimflam in the FBI going way back to
the spring of 2016. Mr. Stone’s case is not unlike the case against General
Mike Flynn, who was sent to the doghouse for three months in December by
Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan to reconsider his guilty plea. Judge Sullivan may know that the
charges against Gen. Flynn amount to prosecutorial misconduct by Mueller, and
Sullivan is interested in trying the case to see what might come out. It will
be March before anyone knows whether Gen Flynn got his mind right in the
matter.
Mr.
Stone, on the other hand, is ready for combat. He has unashamedly set-up a
legal defense fund support site (Google it) because this is America where you
have to be a hedge fundster to defend yourself in a court-of-law against a
battalion of federal inquisitors who never have to submit invoices for billable
hours. For most US citizens, this is like being dragged into a
gunfight with a letter-opener against a battery of howitzers. Surely everybody
in the land, including me, has a low opinion of Roger Stone and his reputation
as a political bottom-feeder. But I salute his courage in going to trial, if
only to see the evidence laid out on both sides.
Meanwhile,
I’m wondering about something else. Of course, Mr. Trump eventually caught hell
on the government shutdown. But in reopening it for three weeks, does this
allow for the confirmation of William Barr as Attorney General? And when that
happens, might it change the flow of events in the RussiaGate show?
