Everyone knows that Trump and Stone are joined at the hip, right?
by digby
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| Trump and Stone’s 1999 presidential trial run |
I’m noticing a theme emerging among various reporters and analysts, (Jonathan Swan of Axios and former TIME editor Rick Stengel come to mind) in which they cynically assume that if the Mueller investigation is focusing on silly clowns like Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone this whole thing is probably just a great big nothing burger. They seem to think this probe needs to uncover a massive, high-level conspiracy between Putin and Trump to be legitimate. That’s simply not true.
Everyone needs to remember that Donald Trump himself is one of those silly clowns. Roger Stone has been his political guru for years. It was Stone who recruited him for his short-lived Reform Party bid in 2000. He tried to get him to run for NY Governor but they mutually decided that Trump should make his bid for President instead.
Stone and Trump are in this together, always have been. The idea that such a close, longstanding intimate of the president, a man whose entire identity is “dirty trickster” going all the way back to Richard Nixon (whose face he has tattooed on his back) is completely missing the story. That Trump is so closely associated with this “clown” in the first place is outrageous. That this “clown” was out there working on Trump’s behalf in the netherworld of hacking and sabotage is completely predictable.
It’s also completely obvious that Trump himself would have been in on it.
Whether Mueller can prove that is yet to be determined. But dismissing Stone as a silly fringe player ignores the fact that this also describes Trump. And Trump is no fringe player anymore. He’s the president of the United States.
Consider as well that Nixon was taken down by a botched “3rd rate burglary” done by a bunch of misfits trying to sabotage the McGovern campaign. Nixon wasn’t working with a foreign government on that particular operation (although he had a history of doing similar in the 1968 campaign) he was caught because his team worked with fringe crackpots like G. Gordon Liddy to implement a criminal conspiracy.
As Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward way back when: “… the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand…”
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