On Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted Roger Stone Jr. on seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, witness tampering, and making false statements. Stone, a longtime adviser to and friend of President Trump, has long been under scrutiny for his communications with Russian hackers during the 2016 election and alleged coordination with WikiLeaks to help Trump. The FBI arrested him early Friday.
Several former Trump campaign advisers and Stone associates have reportedly told Mueller's investigators that the self-proclaimed "dirty trickster" was a conduit for inside information from WikiLeaks, which released hacked emails damaging to Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton. "Stone, a self-described dirty trickster who began his career as a campaign aide for Richard M. Nixon and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election," The New York Times notes. "His brash behavior made him less of a subject of news media scrutiny than other current and former aides to President Trump — like the character in a whodunit who readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime."