The single most important sentence in the Roger Stone indictment
John Avlon is a CNN senior political analyst and anchor. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN)Footage of armed FBI agents storming Roger Stone's Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home was dramatic. But the real drama was in the 24-page indictment filed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Beyond Stone's shocking text messages detailed in the court document, one sentence really jumps out. It appears innocuous at first, buried on Page 4. But it raises questions that could potentially lead to evidence of collusion and embroil President Donald Trump himself.
Here's the sentence: "After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign."
There's a lot to unpack here, but the key phrase is this -- "a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases."
The question isn't which senior Trump official contacted Stone, but who directed this person to do so. The only logical possibilities could fit in a phone booth. It's conceivable that the only people senior officials would take that kind of direction from would be either Trump or Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman at the time.
And perhaps those two men are about the only folks who would have held Stone in high enough esteem to ask another campaign official to enlist the notoriously dirty trickster as a middle man for such a suspect mission. Keep in mind that Stone is Trump's longest-serving political adviser. Their relationship dates back decades, and the political strategist has counseled Trump on his political flirtations long before his presidential campaign launched in 2015.
And Manafort was Stone's partner at the consulting firm Black, Manafort and Stone -- which, among other firms, was once referred to as "the torturer's lobby." Stone was no longer an official campaign adviser by August 2015, but aides said Trump still spoke to him during the campaign.
The date pegged to the order to contact Stone is significant as well. On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks released its first batch of hacked Democratic National Committee emails after Julian Assange teased the drop. It's safe to assume the release was on the campaign's mind. And the DNC had already said in June 2016 that it had been hacked by Russian-backed entities. It was also known that WikiLeaks served as a clearinghouse for Russia, and as CIA chief, Mike Pompeo would later call WikiLeaks "a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia." This was the consensus of US intelligence services at the time.
It struck so many as strange that the Republican candidate and many of his most public advocates would embrace WikiLeaks -- and Russia -- so publicly. Just five days after that first WikiLeaks release, Trump made one of his most infamous statements. During a July 27 press conference, Trump appealed directly to Russia to hack the emails of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
Candidate Trump's cheerleading of WikiLeaks only picked up over the course of the campaign, as did Stone's contacts with alleged intermediaries Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico (referred to as Person 1 and 2, respectively, in the indictment) and WikiLeaks (Organization 1).
The requests grew more specific and appeared targeted to reinforce campaign narratives, which were also being echoed by social media memes being pushed by Russian trolls. After WikiLeaks dropped another bombshell on October 7, an associate of a high-ranking Trump campaign official texted Stone saying, "Well done."
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Over the course of the next month -- the critical final four weeks of the campaign -- Trump publicly mentioned WikiLeaks 137 times, according to Politifact.
That's a lot of evident interest about WikiLeaks from Trump himself. The hacked emails were clearly top of mind. And now we know that Stone had been tasked with relaying information about potential Clinton dirt. The open question is who asked him to do it. That sentence in the Stone indictment suggests it could go to the very top of the Trump campaign.
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/25/opinions/most-important-sentence-roger-stone-indictment-avlon/index.html
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