Mueller's weak case against Stone

Red States:

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“Mueller’s investigation revealed Stone’s contacts with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and hacker Guccifer 2.0 during the 2016 campaign.”

So, what did Mueller’s investigation “reveal” on this question? Not nearly as much as the repeated recitation of innuendo and guilt-by-association being passed off as “facts” in the media would lead you to believe. But that “innuendo” is what French seemingly relies on to form his views about Roger Stone.

Out the outset let us note that the Mueller Report found that the Guccifer 2.0 persona was the creation of Russian GRU operatives, and first appeared on June 15, 2016, to take credit for the hack of the DNC and DCCC databases.

Now let us work backward by starting with the last thing Mueller said about Stone’s contacts with Guccifer 2.0. At Page 44, the last sentence of the first paragraph stated:

“The investigation did not identify evidence of other communications between Stone and Guccifer 2.0.”

That is a definitive statement, so if we look at what proceeded it, we have – according to Mueller’s Report — everything about communications between Stone and Guccifer 2.0. With those as our operational parameters, here is what the Report states at P. 44:

In early August 2016, Stone publicly protested Twitter’s suspension of the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account. After it was reinstated, GRU officers posing as Guccifer 2.0 wrote to Stone via private message “thank u for writing back… do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs I posted?”

On August 17, 2016, GRU added “please tell me if I can help u anyhow … it would be a great pleasure to me.”

On September 9, 2016, the GRU – again posing as Guccifer 2.0 – referring to the stolen DCCC documents posted online and asked Stone “what do u think of the info on the turnout model for democrats entire presidential campaign.” Stone responded “pretty standard.”

The next sentence after Stone’s answer “pretty standard” is where the Mueller Report states “The investigation did not identify evidence of other communications between Stone and Guccifer 2.0.”

That’s it. Two messages in August (one of which is not dated), and one exchange of two messages in September. That’s the extent of “Mueller’s investigation” revelations about Stone’s contacts with Guccifer 2.0. Shocking. How did the Republic survive such an assault?

Maybe it was Stone’s communications with Assange that keep French up at nights looking out for Cossacks because of Stone’s “contacts.”

The problems on that front start with the fact that the Mueller Report doesn’t provide any evidence of contacts between Stone and Assange – and that’s a pretty big problem for French’s diatribe.

At Page 54, as part of the Report’s section about Roger Stone, the caption of subparagraph (c) reads:

“Roger Stone’s Efforts To Communicate with Wikileaks”

When you have to put “Efforts” in the middle of a caption on the section covering the existence of contacts between two parties, you sort of “give away the game” with a concession that you didn’t find any actual contacts. That should have been a clue to French that Mueller had looked for contacts between Stone and Wikileaks/Assange, but hadn’t found any. But that assumes that French actually read the Mueller Report, rather than rely on narrators at The Bulwark and Lawfareblog.

When you read the Report, you quickly realize that although Stone did brag about having been “in contact” with Assange, he later “clarified” it to say that his contact was through an intermediary “journalist,” and he had never met or spoken to Assange directly. It later turned out that – as reported by Mueller – that wasn’t even true because the intermediary, Jerome Corsi, never spoke to Assange either, although Corsi told Stone he had.

The closest Stone came to Assange was asking Corsi on July 31 in an email to arrange contact with Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London through a person Corsi knew in London named Theodore Malloch. Malloch told Mueller he got the request from Corsi to make contact with Assange – Corsi wanted to interview Assange — but Malloch never acted on the request, and he never transmitted any information back to Corsi about Assange.

That didn’t stop Corsi from lying to Stone two days later in an email dated Aug. 2, telling Stone that Malloch had given him information. Corsi wrote in an email to Stone “Word is friend in the Embassy plans 2 more dumps….” and he goes on to explain the “details” — none of which turn out to be correct.

The Mueller report states that at a GOP event for the “Southwest Broward Republican Organization” on Aug. 8, Stone made a public claim that “I actually have communicated with Assange,” ostensibly a claim about his conduit through Corsi. But what Corsi had told him was a lie. Corsi was making it all up in order to make himself look important to Stone. Corsi gives away his lie by ending his message with “I expect much of the next dump focus setting the stage for Foundation debacle”. No information was ever released about the Clinton Foundation, and Corsi hadn’t been told anything about the Clinton Foundation — or anything else — by Assange or anyone who spoke with Assange.

The fact that Stone bragged about non-existent events to Bannon, Gates, Cohen, and others doesn’t make them real. But THAT is the innuendo that has been peddled by the press and NeverTrumpers like David French who so badly want it to be true that Roger Stone WAS a connection between the Trump Campaign and the Russian GRU.
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There is much more.

This case is so weak it is surprising that it got to the jury where a Trump hater was the forewoman.  A more ethical prosecution team would never have brought the case to the court in the first place.  You have a nothing burger communication of sorts with Gucifer 2 with no evidence that Stone was even aware that it was a Russian run operation.  And then you have Corsi lying about his contacts with Wikileaks to Stone.

On top of that, we now know that Mueller and his team had to know by this time that the whole Russian collusion story was a hoax concocted by Steele in his discredited dossier.  We also know that the government had lied to the FISA court in order to spy on Trump and his campaign about the bogus collusion allegations.  Every one of Mueller's cases appears to be a bad faith operation and an attempt to extort testimony out of Trump associates or entrap the President in a bogus obstruction of justice charge.