Roger Stone talks to reporters outside a courtroom in New York, Thursday, March 30, 2017. Stone, a longtime political provocateur and adviser to President Donald Trump, is being sued over a flyer sent to 150,000 New York households during the state’s 2010 election that called the Libertarian Party candidate for governor, Warren Redlich, a “sexual predator.” Stone says he had nothing to do with it. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

I think people of good will everywhere can unite behind the proposition that Roger Stone is a chancre on the human spirit. You can agree with that and still believe that he was abused by the Mueller investigation.

Apparently, Stone’s involvement in this whole drama was his attempt to establish some sort of backchannel to WikiLeaks to get documents hacked from the DNC or from Hillary Clinton to use for whatever nefarious purpose Stone could come up with. This interest in Wikileaks is what led directly to Stone’s indictment and the pre-dawn raid on his house that was totally not leaked by the FBI to CNN so they’d have a camera crew on site. (Anyone who believes the silly cover story put out by CNN, who didn’t even show its audience the respect of telling them a believable lie, is too stupid to come in out of the rain.)

As it turns out, even if Stone was trying to contact Wikileaks it was a big “so what?”

Embedded in Barr remarks is an important qualifier: Trump campaign collusion with WikiLeaks could not be an illegal conspiracy because WL publication of the emails was not a crime since WL didn't help hack them. pic.twitter.com/4E9TpxhUx0

— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) April 18, 2019

Barr says that the Wikileaks document dumps would not be a crime unless the publisher actively took part in the hacking. Having so defined it, he says no one associated with the Trump campaign "illegally participated" in the publication, not saying if they participated otherwise.

— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) April 18, 2019

I think everyone knew that if the New York Times publishing stuff from Wikileaks that harmed America was great journalism, then Roger Stone publishing stuff from Wikileaks that harmed Hillary Clinton was not a crime. If the Russians hacked the DNC or Clinton and gave the resulting information to Wikileaks, using that information was fair game.

This further clouds Stone’s indictment. It looks like he was questioned about a non-criminal act for the sole purpose of contriving to catch him in something that could be called a lie and used to indict him.

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