While Donald Trump and his House Republican allies continue to act to sabotage the investigation into Russian election hacking and possible (at this point, likely) collaboration with those efforts from U.S. persons, Trump ally Roger Stone let on that he is fully expecting to be indicted as a result of that investigation.
“I am prepared should that be the case,” Stone said on "Meet The Press" after being asked if he was ready for a possible indictment. “But I think it just demonstrates, again, this was supposed to be about Russian collusion, and it appears to be an effort to silence or punish the president’s supporters and his advocates.”
Stone reiterated that he felt Mueller’s team has found “no evidence whatsoever of Russian collusion,” so he speculated that they may work to connect him to other crimes instead.
“It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” Stone said. “I would chalk this up to an effort to silence me.”
The phrase "extraneous crime" is a wonderful one. I did not collude with Russian operatives, but have a suspicion investigators are going to find out about some of my extraneous crimes seems, at this point, to be standard dinner table conversation for each member of Trump's team to be caught up in the investigation. From Flynn to Manafort to Stone, you can't toss a meatball without hitting a Trump aide square in the extraneous crimes.
But there is indeed evidence tying Stone to Russian collusion—evidence that Stone bragged about, when it served his purposes, but has sought to distance himself from since. Stone himself appeared to brag of advance knowledge of the contents and planned release date of a trove of Democratic emails by Wikileaks, and communicated directly with "Guccifer 2.0", now known by intelligence officials to be a Russian military officer, about documents stolen from the DNC throughout the summer. The man was talking to a Russian hacker about the documents released by Russian hackers, but he's not worried about that; instead, his mind is focused on extraneous crime.