Roger Stone's and Jerome Corsi's Time in the Barrel

By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

12 February 19

Why the mismatched operatives matter to Trump—and to the Mueller investigation.

oger Stone’s house, in Fort Lauderdale, is situated between a quiet street and one of the city’s canals, which are the only feature Fort Lauderdale shares with its Italian sister city, Venice. In a small room on the first floor, Stone keeps mementos of a career as a political consultant and provocateur which is now in its fifth decade. There are bumper stickers from Richard Nixon’s campaigns for President and photographs of Stone with candidates for whom he’s worked. There’s one of Arlen Specter, the late senator from Pennsylvania, and several of Stone with Donald Trump, whose political aspirations Stone has championed since the nineteen-eighties. When I visited him, on a quiet afternoon in early January, the room also featured a reminder of the crisis that was enveloping him—and his characteristic response to it. In a pair of cardboard boxes, there were dozens of polished rocks, which Stone was autographing and selling: “Roger stones,” to benefit his legal-defense fund. As subsequent developments have demonstrated, he is going to need to sell a lot of them. Shortly before dawn on the morning of January 25th, F.B.I. agents pounded on the door of Stone’s house and arrested him, following an indictment obtained by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. The F.B.I. also searched Stone’s house, his office, and the apartment in Harlem that he used to share with Kristin Davis, the former madam and onetime New York gubernatorial candidate.

According to Matthew Whitaker, the acting Attorney General, Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election is “close to being completed,” but Mueller has not yet said whether he believes that anyone on the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interests in order to defeat Hillary Clinton. Nor has he said whether he believes that the President obstructed justice by firing James Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Nevertheless, Mueller’s legal filings, which include indictments and sentencing memorandums, have created an almost novelistic narrative, featuring rich portraits of the political and personal motivations of a large cast of characters. Mueller has shown that Russian citizens and companies created a stunning array of fake social-media accounts to boost Trump and damage Clinton, and that Russians hacked and released, notably to WikiLeaks, the e-mails of prominent Democrats, including John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Mueller and other prosecutors have also established that certain people around Trump have lied to the authorities about their ties to Russia. This group includes Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser; Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer; George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign aide; and Roger Stone.

The Stone indictment reads like a political black comedy. It stars a pair of mismatched operatives, Stone and the right-wing author Jerome Corsi, who, without formal connections to the Trump campaign, went on a transatlantic quest for dirt. Mueller’s indictment does not charge Stone with any involvement in the hacking, but accuses him of lying to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his (and Corsi’s) efforts to pry loose the hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks. Stone is also charged with trying to coerce Randy Credico, a New York media figure and a sometime friend of Stone’s, into joining his efforts to interfere with the work of the House committee. According to the indictment, Stone, in order to prevent Credico from sharing what he knew, sent menacing e-mails to him, including one that said “Prepare to die,” followed by an expletive. He also threatened to steal Credico’s thirteen-year-old therapy dog, a Coton de Tulear named Bianca.

Stone has responded to Mueller’s charges with fevered hyperbole. “Those who think the Mueller investigation will die out with a whimper are dreaming,” he told me on the phone in early February, after his arraignment in federal court in Washington, D.C. “This is a pretext to allow them to remove both Trump and Pence and replace them with Leather Face—I mean, Nancy Pelosi—and then she can appoint Hillary Clinton as V.P. That’s been the agenda from the beginning.” He has vowed to contest the charges at trial. “We’re going to fight them on every piece of evidence, fight them on every witness. We are going to concede nothing.”

Corsi has not been charged, but, in December, he sued Mueller for three hundred and fifty million dollars, saying that the special counsel had engaged in prosecutorial misconduct and illegal surveillance, among other misdeeds. In this civil case, which is pending, Corsi is being represented by Larry Klayman, a Washington lawyer and eccentric best known for filing multiple lawsuits against Bill Clinton’s Administration. Also in December, Corsi published an e-book, “Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt,’ ” which recounts his experiences with Mueller’s team and what he calls being “mentally tortured by Mueller’s Deep State prosecutors.”

If Stone and Corsi had not turned up in the Mueller probe, they might have been just a pair of waning satellites in the right-wing solar system. Stone once cut a glamorous figure, with his bodybuilder’s physique and his bespoke suits from London. But, at sixty-six, he is out of shape, he hasn’t played a major role in a campaign in ages, and he scratches out a living by giving speeches, doing a little corporate consulting, and writing for fringe publishers and Web sites. (The house on the canal is rented.) Corsi is seventy-two, and spent most of his life as a marginal academic and a nomadic businessman. In middle age, he began writing books whose conceits—“Swift-boating,” “birtherism”—became shorthand for journalistic irresponsibility. Corsi, who earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1972, stamps “Ph.D.” after his name on the cover of his books as an almost poignant plea for respectability.

In appearance and temperament, Stone and Corsi seem to have little in common. Stone, who dyes his hair platinum blond, dropped out of George Washington University to work on Nixon’s reëlection campaign. He calls himself “a libertarian and a libertine” as well as “a trysexual—I’ve tried everything.” Corsi is a long-married suburban burgher who lives in a McMansion in New Jersey. Stone once took me to his favorite sex club in Miami, to show me where he once talked to a prostitute who he said had information on Eliot Spitzer, the former governor. In New York, Corsi took me to the Harvard Club, where he greeted several staff members by name.

A jury will resolve the question of Stone’s guilt, and Mueller will decide whether to charge Corsi, but the geriatric bad boy and the literary charlatan have a wider significance. Stone and Corsi are, respectively, the progenitor and the expositor of the world view of the current President of the United States. Stone’s vulgar narcissism and his insistence on claiming victory at all costs anticipated Trump’s. Stone has Richard Nixon’s face tattooed on his back and Nixon’s values imprinted on his soul; the amoral ruthlessness of the thirty-seventh President passed, through Stone, to the forty-fifth. Corsi tells stories the way Trump does, starting with the desired conclusion and then arranging facts to support it. He cultivated Trump’s obsessions, including genetic purity, as reflected in claims that Obama was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii; contempt for the two-party system and the political élite, particularly the Bush and Clinton families; and fear and suspicion of the American intelligence agencies and their purported involvement in events such as the Kennedy assassination and the decision to invade Iraq. Through the crucible of the Russia investigation, the fates of these men have become linked, and their cases will help determine the outcome of the epic clash between the special counsel and the President.

When I had lunch with Stone in Fort Lauderdale, he was confident that he would not be indicted but weary from the toll of the investigation. He was haunted, too, by the situation of Paul Manafort. The two had been friends, and occasionally partners, for decades. When Stone and I spoke, Manafort was in prison. He now walks with a cane, apparently hobbled by gout, awaiting what may amount to a life sentence, following his conviction last fall in two cases brought by Mueller, for tax evasion and other crimes.

Stone first met Manafort when he was a teen-ager and they were both starting out in Republican politics. Stone saw that Manafort had developed a unique field of expertise. “Manafort and I are both from Connecticut, which was the last state in the country that still selects its candidates in statewide conventions,” Stone told me. “And the rules are identical to the national-convention rules, as are the Young Republican National Federation rules, as are the College Republican National Convention rules—so Manafort was very familiar with the rules.” By 1973, when they were in their twenties, Manafort and Stone were helping to run the campaign of a fellow Connecticut native, Terry Dolan, for president of the College Republicans. (Dolan lost to Karl Rove.) Four years later, Manafort managed Stone’s run for president of the Young Republicans. They both worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, and then they joined Charles R. Black, Jr., to form the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, and Stone—which thrived for the better part of the decade, often representing dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, of the Philippines, and Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, as well as other outré clients.

After that, they mostly went their separate ways. Manafort continued consulting for foreign leaders, notably for the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort made many millions and spent lavishly, especially on his own wardrobe, which included a fifteen-thousand-dollar ostrich-skin jacket, as Mueller’s prosecutors pointed out during his trial. Stone and Manafort have been in touch only sporadically in recent years, but Stone was among those who suggested to Trump that he hire Manafort as the campaign’s manager for the 2016 Republican Convention. Trump then promoted Manafort to chairman of his campaign, and his tenure there, though brief, is what brought him to Mueller’s attention.

Stone acknowledges that he has had nowhere near the financial success that Manafort enjoyed after their partnership ended. “Manafort was rolling at a much higher level than yours truly,” he told me. “I mean, I don’t have any foreign bank accounts, I don’t own any real estate, I don’t own any stocks and bonds.” Stone objected to Manafort’s exotic taste in clothing, but mostly on aesthetic grounds. “It’s not just that Manafort’s suits were expensive, it’s also that they didn’t fit,” he told me. “I haven’t bought a new suit in twenty years, because, first of all, when you have custom-made suits—which I originally had to do because I had forty-six-inch shoulders and a thirty-two-inch waist; I don’t have the thirty-two-inch waist anymore, but I did—that means you can’t buy anything off the rack, because when it’s altered the pockets would be next to each other in the back of the trousers. But, more importantly,” he said, tailors “put a lot of fabric in the seams, so as you get older and fatter, the clothing can be let out. So if you take care of the garment and it’s well made to begin with, it should last you a lifetime.”

In 1979, when Stone was a young fund-raiser for Ronald Reagan, he paid a call on Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer who had been counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Cohn suggested that Stone recruit his friends Donald and Fred Trump to the Reagan cause. Stone visited Donald Trump, who provided office space to the campaign, and a friendship of sorts was born. As Trump recounted in the 2017 Netflix documentary “Get Me Roger Stone,” “Roy thought Roger was a very tough guy. Roy knew some very tough guys, I will tell you that. But Roy always felt that Roger was not only tough, but a smart guy, and very political.” When Stone opened his lobbying shop, Trump’s airline and casinos (which all later went out of business) were early clients. Stone saw bigger things for Trump. “In the media age, charisma matters. Kennedy, Reagan—Trump has it,” Stone said. “As with Nixon, there’s a twin compulsion there. He doesn’t mind being hated by the ruling two-party élites, but he wants to be appreciated for his accomplishments.” Stone first took Trump to New Hampshire as a potential Presidential candidate in 1987, and he encouraged him to enter the race in almost every subsequent cycle. (Before this past election, Trump came closest to running in 2000 and 2012.)

Stone and Trump’s relationship has had its ups and downs. When I profiled Stone for this magazine in 2008, Trump told me, “Roger is a stone-cold loser. He always tries taking credit for things he never did.” But, by the time he was interviewed for the documentary, Trump had softened. “I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s actually a quality guy,” Trump said. “He loves the game, he has fun with it, and he’s good at it.” Stone initially had a role with the Trump campaign, but in August, 2015, he and the candidate had a falling-out, and Stone left. (Trump said he was fired; Stone said he quit.) In an interview earlier this month with CBS, after Stone’s indictment, Trump called Stone “somebody that I’ve always liked” and “a character.” The two may never have had a conventional alliance, but they had more or less the same enemies.

Stone and Trump have long avoided defining themselves by party politics. Indeed, for many years it wasn’t clear which party Trump belonged to, and during his 2000 flirtation with a Presidential run he considered doing it as a third-party candidate. This was in line with Stone’s belief that Trump’s real adversary, both then and now, was “the deep state”—a term with a hazy definition. “It’s what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex,” Stone told me, “but it’s broader than that. It’s the intelligence agencies, the entire national-security apparatus, and it doesn’t change, regardless of who is President.” Stone elaborated on the definition in his foreword to a new book, “The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President,” by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, an American writer who lives in England. Stone refers to the “two-party duopoly” that brought about “endless wars” in the Middle East and “the erosion of civil liberties” at home. “The Republicans and the Democrats, the elites of both parties, were working together, the Bushes and the Clintons, whose policies and truths were largely indistinguishable,” he writes. Trump represented a rejection of the deep state’s hegemony, and now, according to Stone, the deep state was fighting back: “We are witnessing the beginning of the collapse of an illegitimate effort to reverse what the Deep State could not do in the 2016 election.” Stone has a daily show on the Internet outlet Infowars, which is owned by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been banned from Twitter and other social-media sites for his abusive behavior and who has claimed that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, did not take place. Stone devotes much of his show each day to the perfidies of the deep state. He, too, was banned from Twitter, in 2017, after he posted a series of tweets directed at CNN personalities in which he called Don Lemon an “ignorant lying covscuker.”

If Stone helped define Trump’s obsessions, then Corsi, who found his way into Trump’s world through a more circuitous route, justified them. Corsi grew up in East Cleveland, where his father was an official with a railroad union and a fervent Democrat. Corsi’s father often travelled to Washington, and he had an unusual method for dealing with his unfocussed son. As Corsi recalled during our meeting at the Harvard Club, “My father, when I was a kid, a truant from school, used to park me in the Senate gallery—that’s where he could babysit me—and he’d say, ‘Jerry, now, your job is to sit here all day and watch it. When I come back, I’m going to ask you about it, and you’ll either get a good grade or a bad grade. So you sit here. You can go to the rest room, but don’t leave. And when I get back I will know what they did and I want to see what you know.’ ”

Corsi caught the political bug and became an accomplished debater at Case Western Reserve University. In the late sixties, he started graduate school in government at Harvard, where his adviser was Michael Walzer, the noted left-leaning political theorist. Corsi wrote his dissertation on prior restraint and the right to protest, a hot topic after the Pentagon Papers case. Walzer, who is now based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, recalls little about Corsi as a student, but he wrote a prescient letter of recommendation for him in 1971, the year before Corsi received his doctorate. “I believe him to be a strong candidate for a job at a good university,” Walzer wrote. “Jerry writes easily and well . . . he will certainly be a prolific scholar. . . . I have been a little overwhelmed by his productivity.”

Notwithstanding Walzer’s hopes, Corsi never found a secure home in academia. He bounced around several campuses for about a decade, and began consulting for government agencies, work that seems to have pushed him further to the political right. Under contract with a unit of the Department of Justice, Corsi later wrote, “one of my assignments was to work undercover with the FBI to penetrate the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a vocal organization of anti-war activists whose public figurehead at the time was none other than John Kerry.” Eventually, Corsi concluded, “I could never truly succeed in an academic environment that was beginning to be dominated by leftists.”

For the next two decades, Corsi lived at various times in Colorado, Oregon, and New Jersey, and worked in bank marketing. He was a regular at the Plaza Hotel, which at the time was owned by Donald Trump. Corsi told me, “I would say the relationship was pretty typical for the owner of a major property and I’m a V.I.P. customer, and of course he’s going to be cordial.”

The turning point in Corsi’s career came in 2004, when Kerry ran for President. Corsi teamed up with John O’Neill, who served with Kerry in Vietnam, and they rushed out a deeply misleading book, called “Unfit for Command,” which accused Kerry of falsifying and exaggerating his Navy combat record as a commander of a Swift boat. “John Kerry would like many people today to view his service in Vietnam as one of honor and courage,” the authors wrote. “But the real John Kerry of Vietnam was a man who filed false operating reports, who faked Purple Hearts, and who took a fast pass through the combat zones.” As the Kerry campaign temporized about whether to ignore the slurs or respond to them, the book reached No. 1 on the Times best-seller list. Douglas Brinkley, a Presidential historian at Rice University, who wrote “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War,” told me, “Corsi’s book is filled with falsehoods, a fake history masquerading as some kind of truth. It was an unvetted attack document, a political hit job—but the important point is that it worked. Kerry never figured out how to respond to it, and he lost. So the book created a niche and fuelled other false narratives, like the birther movement, with Obama.”

Corsi has spent the rest of his career filling that niche, becoming a kind of ersatz Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for the alt-right. With the energy that Walzer recognized decades earlier, Corsi began turning out best-sellers at a pace of nearly one a year. The books had copious details, hundreds of footnotes, and monstrous distortions of key facts. In 2008, Corsi produced another No. 1 best-seller, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” which claimed that the Democratic nominee “is and always has been a radical on the far left.” (Among Corsi’s bill of particulars was a three-page section headed “Obama Fails to Hold Hand Over Heart During National Anthem.”) Three years later, Corsi published “Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President.” Written with sneering condescension, and featuring racially inflammatory chapter headings such as “The Strange Case of the Obama Mama,” the book never came close to proving its thesis—that Obama was born in Kenya. It, too, was a best-seller.

As a prominent birther, Corsi became better acquainted with Trump. He travelled to Hawaii with investigators affiliated with Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who shared Trump’s obsession with Obama’s birthplace. Corsi told me that he spoke to Trump several times regarding his research. “He would call me, or they would e-mail me and say, ‘Mr. Trump would like to speak with you,’ and I would get a time and he would call and he would have some issues on his mind that he wanted to review, and the conversations would typically last ten, fifteen minutes—very polite,” Corsi said. Stone, who was in contact with Trump at this time, responded cautiously to Trump’s embrace of the birther issue in the lead-up to the 2012 election. “Trump asked me what I thought of the controversy regarding Obama’s birth certificate—not because he really wanted to know my opinion, because I think his opinion was already formed,” Stone told me in Fort Lauderdale. “And Trump said, ‘Do you know this guy Jerry Corsi?’ I said, ‘I only know of him. Why?’ He said, ‘Well, because I’ve been looking at his book’—he doesn’t read books—but he said, ‘I’ve been talking to him.’ ” Stone observed that the polling on the birther issue was strong among Republicans, but Trump decided against a run in 2012.

Corsi remains a birther. In our conversation at the Harvard Club, he told me that Obama’s release of his “long-form” birth certificate, which was in part a response to Corsi’s book and Trump’s provocations, did not settle the issue. Arpaio’s “people in forensic analysis,” he said, “were able to prove that it had been forged.” Ben LaBolt, an assistant press secretary in the Obama White House, was responsible for handling “the whole birther issue,” which he called “an attempt to define Obama as ‘the Other’—as un-American.” He told me, “Corsi was the leader of the early birther effort before the 2008 election, and Trump took over for the reëlect.” He went on, “Obama was born in a hospital in Honolulu. There was a birth certificate. There was an announcement in the newspaper. It was just a totally normal situation.”

The connective tissue of Corsi’s work is an insistence that the world is not as it appears—that he is revealing secrets that powerful forces want to preserve. Trump was the perfect candidate for a world beset by conspiracies, because, as he put it in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” This idea is explored in Corsi’s book “Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump,” which came out last year. According to Corsi, the four previous Presidents were all “traitorous,” and supported “the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of the top levels of the US national security apparatus, including the White House, the National Security Council, and numerous intelligence agencies, including the CIA.”

Like Stone, Corsi begins his definition of the deep state with Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, but he winds up lumping virtually everyone opposed to Trump under the same rubric—the federal bureaucracy, Democrats, the news media, and international organizations. There is, he writes, “an extra-Constitutional Deep State willing to use the black political arts of false-flag attacks, funding of mainstream media propaganda, and even assassination of heads of state to dominate US politics by controlling both political parties.”

The fear of an enormous conspiracy conjured by Corsi, and more or less embraced by Stone, sounds like an invention of the Internet era, but it actually represents a venerable strain of American political thought. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Bernard Bailyn, a historian at Harvard, upended the study of the American Revolution by revealing the centrality of conspiracy theories for the leading minds of the era. Previously, the primary influences on the Framers were thought to be Enlightenment figures such as Locke and Montesquieu. But, as Bailyn spelled out in his classic “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” the colonists were also shaped by the views of the radicals behind the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. This led the Revolutionaries to believe “that they were faced with a deliberate conspiracy.” Bailyn noted that the Declaration of Independence, after its famous opening lines, consists mostly of an “enumeration of conspiratorial efforts” against the American colonies. This preoccupation “serves to link the Revolutionary generation to our own in the most intimate way.”

Bailyn was writing in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the fulcrum of modern conspiracy theories. Both Stone and Corsi wrote books about the assassination for its fiftieth anniversary, in 2013. Stone blasts out his theory in his title, “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.” His book, written with a former journalist named Mike Colapietro, is an extended diatribe against Johnson, but it offers little in the way of proof (because there is none) that he was complicit in his predecessor’s murder. Corsi’s book “Who Really Killed Kennedy?” portrays the assassination as the product of the deep state. He explores the purported roles of the C.I.A. and organized crime in the murder and, in answering the question of “who really killed JFK,” concludes, “all of the above.”

Stone told me that he and Corsi first connected when they exchanged e-mails about their Kennedy books and bonded over their mutual disdain for the Bush family. Both strongly supported Trump’s candidacy (notwithstanding Stone’s unceremonious departure from the campaign staff), and their shared enthusiasm prompted them to meet, in February, 2016. Corsi hosted a dinner at the Harvard Club that appealed to Stone’s Dionysian appetites. “We began with martinis, proceeded to a vintage French Bordeaux, topped off by the Harvard Club’s London-style roast beef,” Corsi wrote in his recent e-book. “By the time the dinner was over, it was clear our complementary skills in politics could be combined to Donald Trump’s benefit.” Corsi was working as a journalist, mostly for right-wing Web sites such as WorldNetDaily, but advocacy for Trump became his predominant interest. He wrote, “I had crossed over from the reporter’s role to work behind the scenes as a political operative, working secretly with Roger Stone to engineer events that would affect the news cycle favorably for the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.”

Stone and Corsi saw their opportunity to help Trump in July, when, the week before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released thousands of e-mails that had been obtained during a hack of the Democratic National Committee. The e-mails showed that Party officials used their influence to advance the candidacy of Hillary Clinton over that of Bernie Sanders, and this revelation threw the Convention into an uproar. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had boasted publicly that he had more e-mails that he would release to embarrass the Clinton campaign. Stone and Corsi resolved to find out what else WikiLeaks had and to hasten its delivery into the political bloodstream. The chance to further embarrass the Democratic candidate, especially close to the election, was the kind of dirty trick that Stone had always sought to spring.

Stone reached out to his friend Randy Credico, whose peripatetic career included time as a standup comedian, a radio talk-show host, and the director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, named for the late civil-liberties lawyer. Credico worked for the foundation along with Kunstler’s widow, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, herself a well-known lawyer, who had contact with someone affiliated with WikiLeaks. Over the summer, Credico had Assange as a guest, by telephone, on his New York-based radio show. Stone recalled, “Credico tells me it’s coming in October. He never says what it is, other than that it’s devastating, it’s a bombshell, it’s dynamite.” (Through a spokeswoman, Kunstler said that she assisted Credico in booking Assange for his radio show but did not pass any information from Assange to Credico.)

Stone also pressed Corsi to do his part, e-mailing him on July 25th to ask that he go to Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London “and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails.” Corsi passed this request to his friend Ted Malloch, the author of the book about the deep state, who was trying to help the Trump campaign from England. Corsi asked Malloch to visit Assange at the Embassy—where Assange had taken refuge to escape extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and molestation—and to learn what he could about WikiLeaks’ plans. (The case against Assange was later dropped.) Malloch asserts that he did not speak to Assange and did not give any information to Corsi. Corsi e-mailed Stone on August 2nd, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. . . . Impact planned to be very damaging.” Corsi claimed that he did a “forensic analysis” of the e-mails that WikiLeaks had already released and that, solely by the application of logic, he figured out that Assange was probably going to release John Podesta’s e-mails next: “I started with each e-mail and said, ‘Who sent them and who did they send them to?’ And I mapped these all out, and I started developing a tree—who was contacting who and where the lines of communication were. And suddenly it hit me. There were about ten officials that were handling ninety per cent of these e-mails. And none of them were John Podesta. Now, I knew John Podesta’s e-mails had to be in that server.”

While Stone and Corsi were trying to figure out Assange’s plans, Stone’s friend Manafort was facing a crisis. After the Democratic Convention, news reports began linking Manafort to shady dealings as a political consultant. In Fort Lauderdale, Stone recounted the series of events: “Manafort is getting the shit kicked out of him for his business dealings in Ukraine.” Stone said he had read that Podesta had ethics issues of his own. (These allegations have not been substantiated.) Stone took to Twitter to argue that Podesta’s problems would turn out to be worse than Manafort’s. On August 15th, he posted, “@JohnPodesta makes @PaulManafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas.”

On August 21st, Stone issued the most scrutinized tweet of the entire Mueller investigation. It read, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.” Among the unresolved controversies about the tweet is whether, and in what way, “the Podesta’s” was a typo. Did Stone write “the” instead of “be,” meaning it was going to be Podesta’s time in the barrel? Or was Stone saying “the Podestas’ time,” referring to John and his brother, Tony? Stone said that the August 21st tweet meant both Podestas, but this may be a position he has adopted to make the tweet look less prescient and thus less suspicious. On October 7th, WikiLeaks began releasing an enormous tranche of John Podesta’s e-mails. Coverage of their contents consumed a great deal of the last month of the campaign, and proved highly damaging to Clinton. If the August 21st tweet referred to just John Podesta, Roger Stone had predicted the WikiLeaks disclosure six weeks before it happened.

Stone and Corsi would seem to be in a position to answer one of the major questions in the Mueller investigation: whether anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign knew more about the WikiLeaks disclosures than has so far been acknowledged. Since the American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers stole the e-mails and provided them to WikiLeaks, proof of any nexus between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign might establish collusion, and possibly crimes like conspiracy to defraud the United States. Stone’s August 21st tweet at least suggests that he had some inside knowledge of WikiLeaks’ operation. Stone’s and Corsi’s explanations for the events leading up to Stone’s tweet are highly suspect. Stone insists that he received some vague information from Credico, but Credico interviewed Assange for the first time on his radio program on August 25th, four days after Stone’s “barrel” tweet.

Corsi’s explanation—that he logically surmised that Podesta’s e-mails would be released—is equally dubious. There was nothing about the prior disclosures that would give Corsi any basis to predict that Podesta’s e-mails would also be made public. The D.N.C. hack revealed the contents of just seven in-boxes on the group’s internal system, and Podesta did not even work at the D.N.C. Subsequent investigations revealed that Podesta was hacked in another operation, which used a different form of attack. The evidence indicates that someone told Corsi that Podesta’s e-mails were going to be disclosed, rather than that he figured it out on his own. If that’s what happened, it remains unclear who told him.

Stone’s and Corsi’s accounts of these events have diverged in recent months. Corsi now says that on August 30th Stone asked him to create “an alternative explanation”—that is, a cover story—for how he came to write the August 21st tweet. In his account, Stone was nervous about being accused of having an inside source at WikiLeaks, so, Corsi said, he obliged by writing an e-mail that backed up Stone’s claim. As Corsi described it to me, “My interpretation of it was that I was providing an explanation for Roger’s tweet about Podesta and the barrel. I was giving him an alternative explanation to say, ‘It was really Corsi who had been telling me about all the work that Podesta had been doing in Russia.’ ” When I spoke to Stone, he denied having asked Corsi to come up with a cover story, and said that his explanation for the tweet has been consistent from the beginning—that it was really about the Podestas’ business, not about WikiLeaks. Stone told me last week, of Corsi, “He’s certifiably insane, and he has told multiple provable lies.” (Last week, Corsi sued Stone for defamation, arguing that Stone’s public statements about him were designed to intimidate him and to coerce him into giving false testimony at Stone’s upcoming criminal trial. Corsi seeks damages “in excess of $25,000,000.”)

Corsi has chronicled his dealings with Mueller’s office in his e-book. His most bizarre accusation is that one of the prosecutors, Jeannie Rhee, a prominent Washington lawyer, attempted to intimidate him with her choice of clothing during his grand-jury testimony. “I was shocked to see that Rhee was wearing what appeared to be an expensive, possibly designer-made see-through blouse,” he wrote. “Maybe my seventy-two years were showing but I had never imagined any woman would appear before a grand jury exposing her breasts to public view through a see-through blouse.” The special counsel’s spokesperson declined to comment on this or any other subject.

Before Mueller’s prosecutors indicted Stone, they tried to elicit a guilty plea from Corsi. Last November, Mueller’s team made its position clear in an unusually specific way, presenting Corsi’s defense lawyer with a draft set of charges against his client, which laid out the series of lies it believed he had told during an interview with the special counsel’s office. (Corsi disclosed the draft to the public when he rejected a plea deal offered by Mueller.) According to the draft, Corsi lied by saying that he had declined Stone’s request to approach WikiLeaks or ask another person to approach WikiLeaks. In fact, the prosecutors stated, Corsi had tried to reach WikiLeaks and had recruited Malloch to help in the process. Notwithstanding the existence of a substantial number of e-mails that appear to undercut Corsi’s statements to prosecutors, he has refused to plead guilty and is, to date, in legal limbo.

For a person who is usually categorical in his statements, Stone is cautious when describing Trump’s involvement in the quest for WikiLeaks’ documents during the campaign. “I have no memory of ever talking about WikiLeaks with him,” Stone told me in Fort Lauderdale. Responding to persistent rumors that Mueller has a witness who says he heard Trump and Stone on a speakerphone discussing WikiLeaks, Stone said, “Prove it.” Stone’s indictment speaks of an unnamed person, possibly Trump himself, who “directed” a senior campaign official to tell Stone to find out what was coming from WikiLeaks. In public comments, Trump has denied ever speaking to Stone about the organization. It would not necessarily have been illegal for Trump and Stone to have discussed WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016, but, if it were established that they had, that would prove that the President has been lying to the public about his role.

Stone’s legal team plans an aggressive defense. His lead attorney will be Bruce Rogow, a prominent First Amendment lawyer from Florida. “Roger will definitely take the stand in his own defense,” Rogow told me. “It will be key to the case.” Stone said that he plans to call members of the House Intelligence Committee, including Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, to testify. (It’s not clear why their testimony would be relevant, as there is an official transcript of Stone’s statements before the committee.) Stone also said he would argue that any false or mistaken statements he made to the committee were immaterial, because he has not been charged with any underlying illegal conduct. The prospects for a guilty plea from Stone seem remote; it’s unlikely, given Stone’s record of inflammatory and false public statements, that the Mueller office would offer him a plea bargain in exchange for his coöperation and his testimony against others. A Presidential pardon is a possibility, but Trump, in his CBS interview, said that he had not considered pardoning Stone.

The most dramatic—and certainly the weirdest—part of Stone’s trial will probably involve the testimony of Randy Credico. Stone and Credico met more than a decade ago, when they were both advocating for marijuana legalization in New York. But the relationship has always been combustible—Credico is a man of the left and was a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016—and Stone and Credico are now estranged. “I don’t know why Roger gave up my name to them as his source about WikiLeaks,” Credico told me recently. “Why did he buckle without even getting a fucking subpoena? He gave up a name. That’s called ratting.” In addition, Credico has found his dealings with Mueller’s office daunting. “Those people are like Columbo and Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot combined, and you can’t fucking lie to them,” he said. “Why would you try? They have all the e-mails. They know what happened.”

The indictment states that, on several occasions, Stone told Credico that he should “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’ ” before the Intelligence Committee “in order to avoid contradicting Stone’s testimony.” As the indictment explains, “Frank Pentangeli is a character in the film ‘The Godfather: Part II,’ who testifies before a congressional committee and falsely claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know.” “But this is all wrong. Randy is an impressionist,” Stone told me, referring to Credico’s days as a comedian. “He does impressions. I was asking him to do his Frank Pentangeli impression. I wasn’t telling Randy to lie.”

The statement by the acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, that Mueller’s investigation was winding down drew attention because Mueller himself has been silent about his progress. To date, Mueller’s court filings have created a narrative that, although compelling, is distinctly postmodern in its sensibility. Individual stories often head in different directions and only sometimes intersect. The Russians helped Trump, and the Trump people lied about the Russians. But why did so many people lie to Mueller and the other investigators? Were they lying to cover up crimes—or were they lying simply because they are liars? The Watergate scandal was like Shakespeare—a drama that built to a satisfying climax. The Russia story is more like Beckett—a mystifying tragicomedy that may drift into irresolution. Did Trump collude, and did he obstruct justice? Mueller may never have the answers.

Criminal defendants customarily remain silent when they are facing trial, but Stone has used his indictment as another opportunity to defend the President, and himself. (Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding in his case, warned Stone not to have any contact with witnesses, but she has yet to impose a gag order, which would bar him from speaking to the news media.) Stone’s pose—hands raised in a “V”-for-victory sign, an homage to his idol Nixon—makes clear that he is relishing the fight. Corsi describes his struggle as spiritual. As he writes in his e-book, “The United States under the Deep State masters has begun to descend into a political Hell that I previously thought could only happen under Hitler’s Gestapo, Stalin’s KGB, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. My particular Kafkaesque nightmare is nothing more than punishment for the crime of being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and for having worked with Roger Stone to promote Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Corsi concludes with his own version of a serenity prayer: “I am with God. Are you?”