The whole Roger Stone thing is so bizarre.

[Imperialism Inc.]

If all we had was his private Twitter exchange it would seem he really had no contact with Assange. He was going around publicly saying he had an inside track to wikileaks. Wikileaks publicly corrected him, and then the twitter exchange happened. Based on that exchange it looks like he really didn't talk to them, at least until after the election.

So it kind of looks like he was just conning the Trump campaign and making himself look more important than he was.

Except...

He had intermediaries. Both of them claim they never actually made contact with Assange either. Robert Mueller seems to have believed them. One of them went so far as to visit the Ecuadorian embassy and take a picture of it. Except, there is no record of him ever going in. Given Assange's status as the most surveilled person on the planet it would be essentially impossible for him to go in to see Assange and not have a record of it.

So, maybe Mueller was right, he didn't actually contact Assange and he was just conning Stone.

Except...
He sends some bizarre messages about how the Clinton campaign is going to die. He claims, and Mueller seems to have believed him, that he was just drunk on the plane and talking smack based on public information.

This last bit seems a bit much to swallow but I don't know. What do you think, was it just a conman conning another conman who in turn was conning the presidential campaign of another conman? Could be. What would be more Trumpian than that!

At any rate, Bannon made clear in his testimony that he thought Stone was orchestrating the releases. That seems to be false but would help explain why Trump obstructed justice so much. He and his campaign thought they were working with Russia the entire time!

[Baitball Blogger]

1. Many of us in Florida are not surprised. Not one iota.

In the nineties, if someone walked into our cities with the same over-blown promises that Trump made to get elected, they were given the keys to the city. It took gadflies to come out and question people's backgrounds and do the proper vetting. And they had to have connections to get their stories in the paper.

[Karadeniz]

2. I don't know what precisely is the truth, but I think Mueller s.conclusion was correct and

Should be incriminating. Mueller said that Trump knew Russia was helping his campaign and accepted it. He didn't alert any authorities. He accepted foreign help.

Hubert Humphrey described his experience with the USSR during his campaign. A Russian came to him personally and expressed a desire to help. Humphrey was so nice...thank you for your interest, very nice of you, how thoughtful...but I'm sure we have all our bases covered at this point...but thanks for the offer...bye!