Mueller and his process crime manufacturing

Jonathon Turley:

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The raid on Stone’s home clearly made for great television, but the Stone indictment hardly makes for a great collusion case. Let’s be honest. After more than a year of investigation, Mueller nailed a gadfly on false statements, witness tampering and obstruction rather than illegal collusion with Russia.

That's what has been happening all along. Mueller has almost exclusively charged non-Russian defendants with either false statements or other process crimes.

This does not mean that Mueller cannot reveal a wealth of evidence of collusion that he will release in the final scene like some Agatha Christie novel. Yet, coverage has been saturated with speculation on possible collusion angles without observing that little evidence has been raised in numerous and lengthy indictments since July 2017.
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Mueller however seems to have a strikingly inconsistent approach to these targets. With some targets, Mueller followed the common practice of allowing them to surrender. For Manafort and and Stone, Mueller carried out heavy-handed raids. With Michael Cohen, Mueller matter-of-factly in a footnote noted that he made various false statements but was allowed to simply correct them. With Stonethe allegedly false statements were all related to part of his congressional testimony regarding the meaning of prior public statements and past written communications with Wikileaks.
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The main issue however remains the lack of objectivity of the coverage of the indictment. Stone has featured prominently in theories seeking "smoking gun" evidence of collusion. There is nothing smoking in this indictment. There is no suggestion of involvement or knowledge by Stone in the hacking. Stone has suggested that he was a conduit of hacked information from Wikileaks but he later insisted that he was not actually speaking to Julian Assange and that he had no direct knowledge that Russians were responsible for the Democratic hackings. The indictment does not contradict that later account.
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The important thing is that, even if Stone and the campaign did seek the email information, it would not be a crime. The crime is the conspiracy to hack the email system. Campaigns often seek confidential information obtained by journalists, leakers, whistleblowers and others. Indeed, the Clinton campaign (while denying its role before the election) funded the Steele dossier investigation to dig up dirt on Trump, including dirt from Russian intelligence figures. Even if Stone implicated Trump in seeking the information, it would merely establish the type of dirty politics that Stone expressly embraced as his curious calling and talent.

Nailing Roger Stone on false statements was hardly a challenge. Stone could not give an interview without contradicting himself on national television....
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I suspect the raid on Stone was caused by someone on the Mueller team who was angry with him for his defiance of their investigation.  It looks like retaliation for his sometimes outlandish statements.  There may be some on the Mueller team who are gloating over this, but their conduct is as appalling as that of Stone.  It is another example of manufactured crime in an attempt to extort testimony against the President.  The prosecution of these cases is something that is reprehensible.  They have run this investigation like an extortion racket.