The amazing thing about this scandal is how much of it happened in the full light of day.
Roger Stone’s best trick was always his upper-class twit wardrobe. He seemed such a farcical character, such a klaxon-alarm-from-a-mile away goofball—who could take him seriously?
Aldrich Ames, Richard Hanssen: They had tradecraft. They didn’t troll people on Instagram or blab to reporters. They behaved in the way you would expect from people betraying their country: conscious of the magnitude of their acts, determined to avoid the limelight.
Stone could not have been more different. He clowned, he cavorted, he demanded limelight—which made it in some ways impossible to imagine that he could have done anything seriously amiss. Bank robbers don’t go on Twitter to announce: “Hey, I’m going to rob a bank, sorry not sorry.” Or so you’d expect.
Yet Stone is the central figure in the greatest scandals in U. S. history. Ames, Hanssen, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss before them—none of them worked with a foreign intelligence service to help a candidate for president of the United States. Stone did. And now he will receive a commutation of his sentence from the president he served.
The amazing thing about the Trump-Stone story is how much of it happened in the full light of day. A (very) partial timeline:
On August 4, 2016, Stone told listeners to a paid conference call that Julian Assange would continue to release information “that is going to roil this race.”
On August 8, he told a Republican group he had been in contact with Assange and that more drops were coming.
On August 14, Stone began Twitter direct messaging with the Russian unit that hacked the emails, and then soon after posted the DMs on his website, Stone Cold Truth.
On August 21, he tweeted: “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel,” evidently referencing the then-forthcoming cache of emails phished by Russian intelligence from John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
On October 2, a Sunday, he tweeted that the next WikiLeaks dump would come on Wednesday.
