Thread by @SethAbramson

Understand that, given his age, Roger Stone now faces more than enough charges to keep him in prison until he dies. A key purpose of these 7 charges is to find out *what else Stone knows and did and with whom*. Ignore those who say this is all Mueller had.

This is a *beginning*.

2/ While by no means would we ever expect someone facing the 50 years in consecutive sentences Stone is theoretically facing to actually get that, Stone is 66, so even the possibility of facing 10 years of actual time creates a risk for him that he'd never again be a free man.

3/ Stone isn't the ideal guy for a cooperation deal because—from a certain standpoint and in a certain light—he's a true believer in his form of "political ratfuckery," but his regular contacts with senior Trump campaign officials suggest he does have a story to tell if he wants.

4/ We also know that for months Mueller has been intensely intrested in learning how frequently Stone was in touch with the Trump campaign and who precisely he spoke with, which suggests he's trying to gauge how much access Stone had to internal campaign discussions on collusion.

5/ And one of the people Roger Stone was in contact with the *most* was Donald Trump himself, which underscores that these 7 charges bring the Mueller probe much closer to Donald Trump than many who think this is all just about Stone, Jerome Corsi, and Randy Credico will realize.

6/ And I'll say again what I've said in Proof of Collusion and everywhere else: crimes besides conspiracy can be collusive crimes, including tampering with witnesses, obstructing justice, and telling lies to feds to hide your collusion with a hostile foreign intelligence service.

7/ So all those who say these charges have nothing to do with Donald Trump, and those who say these are not crimes of collusion, and those who say that these charges represent all that Mueller has or plans to have against Stone or senior Trump campaign officials are *dead wrong*.

8/ Contrary to the false info Trump has fed America for many months now, lying to the feds is only going to be charged if the lie is as to a material fact in a probe. What that means is the *content* of these lies is every bit as important or more important than the fact of them.

9/ Indeed, it was in anticipation of charges just like these that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Roger Stone all tried to convince America that charges of this sort are mere "process crimes" that have no substantive content. Read this indictment—you'll see the lie in that immediately.

10/ I think it's clear now that Ari Melber was onto something yesterday in detecting that Jerome Corsi had suddenly turned on Roger Stone. This indictment suggests Mueller did indeed, as we always suspected, want Stone much more than Corsi, and wanted to turn Corsi against Stone.

11/ And the reason Mueller cared and cares about Roger Stone infinitely more than Jerome Corsi is quite simple: the former was in regular contact with Donald Trump.

12/ So I suspect we are seeing Corsi and Credico [anonymously] referenced throughout this indictment not so much because they are likely to be indicted at some point, though that is certainly still possible, but because Mueller wants to use these men as cooperators against Stone.

13/ I wonder whether Mueller already has or soon will go back to Corsi with the plea offer he previously made and Corsi rejected, or possibly a slightly worse version of it, to see if today's indictment and arrest of Stone has changed Corsi's mind at all. Perhaps it will have.

14/ A rather obscure note that I still feel compelled to make: when Roger Stone was allegedly "fired" from the Trump campaign in mid-2015, there were stories that ran saying that the firing was a sham and the plan was to have Stone operate for Trump independently of the campaign.

15/ That a Trump campaign official immediately directed someone to reach out to Roger Stone after the first WikiLeaks leak in July '16 underscores the role that Stone must have been playing after his "firing," which was to work behind the scenes *on behalf of* the Trump campaign.

16/ My point is that if Stone flips on Trump, the amount of information we're going to get about not just what Stone was up to during the campaign but what Donald Trump himself *knew* Stone was up to will be absolutely staggering and a major nail in the case against Donald Trump.