What Roger Stone does not understand



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Nixon considered everything – ALL – as a political campaign to win or lose. With the whole world divided between his adversaries and his allies. And because of this vision of the world, Nixon thought everything was justifiable under the sign of victory. The ends have always justified the means.

Which brings me to Stone's Instagram post earlier this week, in which he placed what looked like a line of sight of a gun next to a picture of a gun. Amy Berman Jackson, the federal judge who oversaw her accusations of lying to Justice Department investigators about contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. This same post accused the special advocate, Robert Mueller, of being a "jack of all trades" and suggested that the proceedings were a "witness trial" because Jackson had been appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama .

It's just out of the Dirty Politics 101 manual. Wild your opponents. Ask questions about their motives. Attack, attack, attack.

What Stone does not understand – and what Nixon never has – is that he is no longer campaigning politically. He is in the legal fight of his life. And the rules of the law are very different from the rules of politics. (The rules of politics are, in general, that there are no rules.)

Stone has survived – and has sometimes thrived – thanks to his desire to descend lower than anyone else in the political world. Shoot towers, or try to shoot towers, which other people would dismiss as too sordid or too dangerous.

Stunts like, for example, display an image of someone with a crosshair next to it, then delete the image, and then apologize for having it displayed – all the while knowing that the # 39 image has been diffused in the public consciousness so that the mission is accomplished.

Jackson nodded at Stone's ransom reputation in court on Thursday. "Roger Stone understands perfectly the power of words and the power of symbols," she said. "There is nothing ambiguous in the line of sight."

Then she placed a full order on Stone – which means that he absolutely can not speak publicly about the case. Because in the legal world, actions have consequences.

Point: Stone, like many personalities adjacent to Trump who were involved in the investigation of Russia, seems to consider this as a simple big public relations campaign to win. Thursday's decision throws him a drop of cold water on this line of thought.

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