I’ve never paid much attention to Roger Stone in my weekly game of Trump Indictment Bingo. It’s not that I thought Stone was unimportant. He’s actually VERY important, and he connects a lot of dots, especially between Wikileaks, the hacking of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, the side deals with Julian Assange and Russian operatives and more. No, I didn’t pay much attention to Roger Stone because it was quite clear that he was always going down. He couldn’t open his mouth without incriminating himself ten different ways, and he opened his mouth and spilled his guts regularly, on cable talk shows and emails and phone calls. Indicting Roger Stone was the “low hanging fruit” of Robert Mueller’s investigation. It was always a matter of “when” not “if.” So… the “when” is today, this morning, in Florida.

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was arrested by the FBI on Friday after being indicted in the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Stone was charged with seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, according to Mueller’s office.

Stone, who has been under scrutiny for months by Mueller, has acknowledged exchanging messages during the 2016 campaign with Guccifer 2.0, a Twitter persona that U.S. intelligence officials say was a front operated by Russian military officers who conspired to hack Democratic emails. Stone, who served briefly as an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015 and then continued to informally advise him, publicly cheered on WikiLeaks as it released emails hacked from Democrats during the race and before the election claimed he was in contact with the group’s founder, Julian Assange, whom he called “my hero.”

The special counsel’s office said Stone will make an initial appearance later Friday at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. Stone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

[From The Washington Post]

The FBI raided Stone’s Florida home at 6 am this morning by pounding on his door and identifying themselves as FBI. They took him into custody there. The charges are in connection (as WaPo says) with Stone acting as the go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian operatives who were hacking the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party, and then Stone was heavily involved with the hacked emails being published on Wikileaks. God, I needed this news today. The past few weeks have been weirdly brutal.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.