quote:

Roger Stone, a longtime Republican strategist and sometime confidant of President Donald Trump, was arrested in Florida on Friday after being indicted in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 U.S. election.

Stone, 66, is facing seven counts: one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

The indictment goes to the heart of Mueller’s investigation and could pose serious risk to Trump. It lays out how Stone, after leaving his campaign in 2015, continued communicating regularly with unnamed senior campaign officials in the summer of 2016 about an organization matching the description of WikiLeaks -- and how a “senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone.”

That’s when Wikileaks was publishing Democrats’ emails that Mueller has previously alleged were obtained by Russian government hackers in an effort to interfere with the presidential election.

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Stone was also charged with witness tampering, a crime that strikes at the heart of the judicial process. There are numerous allegations in the indictment of Stone urging others to lie. Those urgings clearly run afoul of the witness tampering statute. And, if that’s all there was to it, a summons might be the way to go.

But there is a more compelling reason to arrest him. The devil is in the details. Read, for instance, page 20 of the indictment, where prosecutors note that Stone emailed one witness and called him a “rat” and a “stoolie” and threatened to take that witness’s dog away from him. In another email that same day to that same witness, according to the indictment, Stone wrote “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].”

Law enforcement simply does not hand a summons to someone who threatens to kill a witness and trust that person to act responsibly with it. No conscientious prosecutor would think a summons appropriate there, or think that a threat to kill a witness is simply what targets of grand jury investigations routinely do.

The witness tampering alleged here is more than just someone asking another, “pretty please,” to lie. Rather, it includes a death threat against a witness: “Prepare to die [expletive].”

Was Stone kidding? Maybe. Was it hyperbole? Perhaps. He can explain that after his arrest.

Arresting Stone was lawful, appropriate and fully justified by his own words and conduct.

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Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
When did Mueller's team know about those "prepare to die" emails? If the answer is, "months ago," then that weakens the objective case for the pre-dawn raid, and strengthens the notion that it was for "shock and awe."

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Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
Oh, and something is wrong in Roger Stone's head.

There he was on CNN talking about the case, something any competent defense attorney would have begged him not to do.

*AND* he actually memorialized his threats in texts. God only knows what else he said/did that is not included in the indictment.