The other night I read Jeffrey Toobin‘s New Yorker piece on Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, and who knew what and when about the Wikileaks documents dumps that affected the 2016 presidential election. Also how. If there’s a what and when, the next question is how. 

They seem like small-timers, by the way. They‘re sad little men scurrying along the sidelines and trying to get into the game. Doesn’t mean they‘re not the key to unlock this thing. 

I didn’t know Corsi's oeuvre. I didn't know, or I'd forgotten, he was the man who co-wrote the swiftboating attack on John Kerry. Which is odd, given Corsi's supposed distaste for the Bush family. “Stone told me,” Toobin writes, “that he and Corsi first connected when they exchanged e-mails about their Kennedy books and bonded over their mutual disdain for the Bush family.” Toobinn doesn't clarify. 

Much of the piece is about the quackery and the scurrying, and I began to flash on Joe Pesci's character from “JFK”—that kind of crazy marginality—when I was reminded of Stone's potential importance in the case: 

For a person who is usually categorical in his statements, Stone is cautious when describing Trump's involvement in the quest for WikiLeaks' documents during the campaign. “I have no memory of ever talking about WikiLeaks with him,” Stone told me in Fort Lauderdale. ... Stone's indictment speaks of an unnamed person, possibly Trump himself, who “directed” a senior campaign official to tell Stone to find out what was coming from WikiLeaks.

There's also this good sum-up of the Russian affair so far:

The Russians helped Trump, and the Trump people lied about the Russians. But why did so many people lie to Mueller and the other investigators? Were they lying to cover up crimes—or were they lying simply because they are liars?

How awful that we have to spend so much time on idiots like Stone and Corsi. We have to parse the meaning of Stone's tweets like he's James Joyce. This is the most infamous one, from August 21, 2016: “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.”

Here's Toobin:

Did Stone write “the” instead of “be,” meaning it was going to be Podesta's time in the barrel? Or was Stone saying “the Podestas' time,” referring to John and his brother, Tony?

What these quacks have created in the smithy of our soul.