Cosplaying Supervillain Roger Stone Meets Robert Mueller's Real-Life Feds - Rick Wilson

Stone lied to the Special Counsel because he trusted WhatsApp, which is a grandpa mistake of the first order.

Rick Wilson
01.25.19 4:40 PM ET

There were two ways Roger Stone’s morning arrest could have played out.

The first scenario is the one Roger rehearsed in his mind a hundred times; his attorney would have been notified well in advance, giving America’s number one parody cartoon supervillain time to assemble some typically foppish confection: perhaps a purple morning coat, spats, hand-tooled lemur-skin calf boots, a jaunty top hat, a monocle, and an exotic cravat tied in a knot typically used only in vigorous German fesselspiele games. He would stride toward the waiting federales with a louche swagger, his bejeweled walking stick in hand. He would smile for the assembled cameras and toss off some bon mot that communicated both searing contempt and breezy insouciance.

Instead, a second, real-world scenario obtained. A frowzy, shocked Roger Stone woke to the sound of “FBI, WARRANT! OPEN THE DOOR!” in the predawn hours. The FBI may not be getting paid, but that didn’t stop them from rolling hard on Stone’s lair, arresting him, and booking him into the Broward County jail. Stern but polite FBI agents arrested Stone on seven counts of lying to Congress and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Two things must have rankled Stone most. First, a CNN stringer was on the scene to a provide video of the raid. Second, Stone appeared in court handcuffed and shackled clad not in one of his usual dandy-lad getups, but rather in a plain blue Polo shirt. Just wait until Roger gets issued prison Crocs and a polyester-blend jumpsuit that doesn’t match his spray tan.

Stone is charged with obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering. Sorry, Trump fans; one of your heroes is about to either die in prison or flip on your cult leader. These charges, narrowly and surgically crafted, are enough that even a fairly slow jury would send Roger up the river long enough that a 66-year old man faces slim odds of coming out alive. The indictments draw yet another line of communication between Trump’s campaign (and likely Trump personally) and the efforts of Russia to elect Donald Trump, in this case via Stone’s relationship with GRU affiliate Wikileaks. The indictment is full of dumb, damning details.

All of Trump world seems to forget that Mueller has all the receipts, phone records, emails, text messages, metadata, and financial records. Stone lied to the Special Counsel because he trusted WhatsApp, which is a grandpa mistake of the first order. Stone lied in Congress because he believed that the House Republicans would sit on his transcript and he would never be held to account. Those lies met with the hard reality that elections have consequences. Donald Trump incinerated 40 GOP House seats, and so the Democratic majority shared the transcript the GOP had suppressed with Mueller. It wasn’t partisan; they had evidence of Stone committing multiple crimes in the form of lying to Congress.

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