Roger Stone

President Trump isn’t supposed to be watching television at 9:30 am tomorrow. The White House has scheduled him to attend events that are supposed to make him look above the fray. But that’s also when Attorney General William P. Barr will take a breather from targeting asylum seekers and hold a press conference on Thursday morning to discuss the release of the Mueller report.If his previous performances are anything to go by, Barr’s comments will be directed directly at Trump in another bid to curry favor with him. Meanwhile, Trump himself is saying that he may conduct his own press conference: ‘Maybe I’ll do one after that, we’ll see.

Undisclosed location, Florida In January, when heavily armed FBI agents swarmed my south Florida home in the predawn hours to arrest me for a series of process crimes, it changed my life far more than I ever imagined. The judge in my case has issued a gag order so I am not permitted to discuss the case, the prosecution, the court or the specific charges against me and will not do so here. As the judge said, the place for talking is in court — and that time will come. *** A vast American television audience was allowed to view the spectacle
 of my arrest, because CNN arrived
 15 minutes before the FBI swat team. CNN denies it was tipped off, instead chalking its good fortune up to a ‘hunch’. President Trump asked in a tweet 
‘Who alerted CNN?

The most fascinating thing about the Michael Cohen hearing may not be what Michael Cohen said, but what Republicans didn’t. They made no attempt to defend Donald Trump other than to disparage Cohen’s character with metronomic regularity. Cohen was a liar. A bad man. He enriched himself. But how do you derogate someone who has already confessed to swimming happily in Trump’s swampy waters? The other tack they pursued was to declare the hearing a circus or a charade. Protestations were profuse. O tempora o mores! Washington, we were told, is a ‘hellhole.’ (At least Republican lawmakers forbore from deeming it a shithole.

There are at least two tasty dishes in the smorgasbord today: one is the latest action of the fourth branch of the US government, the one run by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller. The other is an announcement from the head of the second branch, the executive, that the month-long government furlough would be suspended for three weeks, until February 15, while House leaders pretend to negotiate with President Trump over the issue of border security and, in particular, appropriating funds to build a wall along vulnerable parts of our Southern border. Both dishes look promising, so let’s take a taste of both. First, the Stone soup, or perhaps I should say Stone in soup, for that would seem to be where Roger Stone, colorful Trump ally and Wikileaks expert, has been firmly placed.

Robert Mueller is getting stoned. Not in any corporeal sense, I hasten to note. Rather, his investigation appears to be focusing on any ties that the Trump campaign may have had to the voluble former Nixon operative Roger Stone. Like Michael Cohen, who once proclaimed that he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, Stone is now noisily professing his loyalty to the president. ‘The special counsel pokes into every aspect of my social, family, personal, business and political life, seeking something — anything — he can use to pressure me, to silence me and to try to induce me to testify against my friend Donald Trump,’ Stone declared in a recent video. ‘This I will not do.

It’s becoming a cliché but it bears repeating: in the Trump era, media and politics have merged like never before. The Fox News channel serves as something like, in American baseball terms, a Triple-A farm team for the White House. Most recently called up to play for the Yankees is John Bolton, America’s new national security advisor. Other alumni that have gone in -- and out -- of the White House include Mercedes Schlapp, Tony Sayegh and Sebastian Gorka, the last of whom has, for now, found himself back at Fox.Both Gorka and John Bolton have used the president’s media diet, heavy on the Wall Street Journal and Fox, to their advantage.