It sure looks like Mueller and his team are closing in on Roger Stone. Sam Nunberg is cooperating, investigative reporters are uncovering emails Stone wrote asking for Julian Assange to publish hacked emails from 2011 from Hillary Clinton's account, and his finances are under scrutiny.
First, the quest for hacked emails. The Wall Street Journal reports that they have seen emails from Stone where he specifically requests Hillary Clinton's emails while at the State Department in 2011.
The emails could raise new questions about Mr. Stone’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in September, in which he said he “merely wanted confirmation” from an acquaintance that Mr. Assange had information about Mrs. Clinton, according to a portion of the transcript that was made public.
In a Sept. 18, 2016, message, Mr. Stone urged an acquaintance who knew Mr. Assange to ask the WikiLeaks founder for emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s alleged role in disrupting a purported Libyan peace deal in 2011 when she was secretary of state, referring to her by her initials.
“Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30--particularly on August 20, 2011,” Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Mr. Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.
The article goes on to say that no such emails were published, but it certainly gives rise to the notion that Roger Stone was glad to reach out to Assange and get whatever dirt he could find, regardless of the source.
But wait! There's more! CNN reports that Robert Mueller has been looking into Stone's finances, too.
The interest in Stone's finances could be tied to Mueller's charge of investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion, though another possibility is Mueller is pursuing something unrelated that turned up in the course of the investigation.
"The normal thing for a prosecutor in the course of your investigation is if you come across something that is itself worthy of criminal investigation, you don't turn a blind eye to it. You investigate," said CNN legal analyst Michael Zeldin, a former assistant to Mueller.
For his part, Stone is petulant, adamant, and unrepentant. "I sleep well at night because I know what I have and have not done," Stone told CNN. "There's no inappropriate activity pertaining to Russian collusion. I obtained nothing from WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. I never passed anything on to WikiLeaks or Julian Assange."
But you know, there's still that problem with Stone tweeting that it was soon to be John Podesta's time in the barrel. That one is a little harder to explain.
Roger has not yet been interviewed by Robert Mueller. I'm looking forward to the day he flips rather than endure the kind of prison time he likely deserves.
