Before Donald Trump became Commander-in-Chief, powerful politicians used to let other people disparage the truth and attack critics on their behalf. Jerome Corsi was one of those other people, an artist of the dog whistle and I’m-just-asking-the-question routines, who electrified viewers of Fox News and listeners of Rush Limbaugh by saying the kinds of grotesque falsehoods that senators and congressmen dared not. Corsi first made his name by swift-boating John Kerry, during the 2004 Presidential campaign, but he hit the right-wing big time with the rise of Barack Obama. In 2008, he published a best-selling book called “The Obama Nation”—say it quickly—a canonical text for those who considered Obama “a corrupt, enraged, anti-American, drug-dealing, anti-Israel, pseudo-Christian radical leftist, black militant, plagiarist, and liar, trained as a Muslim and mentored by a menagerie of Marxists, Communists, crypto-Communists, and terrorists,” as Hendrik Hertzberg put it when the book was published. After Obama won the Presidency, Corsi became a guiding light of the birther movement, whose members insisted that Obama had been born somewhere other than the U.S., and was thus disqualified from serving as President—the same racist, denialist movement that Trump himself goosed to great effect as a precursor to his 2016 Presidential run.

Corsi, who is seventy-two and has a doctorate in political science from Harvard—and therefore likes “Ph.D.” to appear after his name—is now enmeshed in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible ties between Trump’s Presidential campaign and the Russian government. Two weeks ago, during one of his regular video live streams, Corsi announced that he expected to be indicted for giving false information to the special counsel. An indictment has yet to materialize, but, this week, after saying that he had rejected a plea deal, Corsi made public a draft court filing that outlined the allegations Mueller was prepared to make about him.

There has long been speculation that one possible link, or chain of links, between Russia and the Trump campaign involved Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate and Republican operative. The theory holds that Stone—who, in August, 2016, infamously predicted, in a tweet, that it would soon be the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s “time in the barrel”—got early word that WikiLeaks had obtained Podesta’s e-mails, which the Mueller team has alleged were originally stolen by Russian government hackers. (Stone and WikiLeaks have denied this.) The document that Corsi shared with news outlets, however, states that on July 25, 2016, a few days after WikiLeaks first released internal Democratic National Committee e-mails, Stone e-mailed Corsi and instructed him to “get to” Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the past several years. Corsi then forwarded that message to a person who has been identified in media reports as Ted Malloch, a London-based academic who has also attracted Mueller’s attention. (Malloch “has some apparent connection to British politician Nigel Farage who had reportedly been in contact with Assange,” the Washington Post reported. He said, “No and no comment,” when the Guardian asked him, this week, if he had acted on Stone’s e-mail request.) On August 2nd, Corsi wrote back to Stone, saying, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” The e-mail went on to make an explicit, though garbled, reference to Podesta. “Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton],” Corsi wrote, according to the court document, adding, “That appears to be the game hackers are now about.”

What is Corsi’s game, making such a document public? One striking commonality between the people targeted by Mueller’s investigation so far is how no one has cracked to the point of expressing remorse. (One exception, arguably, is Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, though technically he was charged by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, not by Mueller.) Corsi, facing possible prison time, is likely doing what he knows: muddying the waters, going on the attack. On Tuesday night, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program and claimed to be the target of a “political witch hunt.” After years of portraying himself as the possessor of information “they” don’t want you to know, he said that he didn’t actually have any inside information in the summer of 2016, when he e-mailed Stone with “word” about WikiLeaks. He had merely “figured out” that the group had Podesta’s e-mails by “connecting the dots.”

The irony that someone who spent years making baseless arguments about the illegitimacy of one President is now a target of a federal investigation that may well undermine the legitimacy of another is almost too on the nose. In any case, Corsi is not about to let a sales opportunity get by him. Two weeks ago, when he first announced that he expected to be charged, he asked his supporters for their thoughts, prayers, and cash. “I tried two months to coöperate with the Mueller investigation, and what I’m going to get in return is indicted,” he said. “I do ask your assistance in donations. PayPal is set up right now.”

A previous version of this post misstated the subject of Corsi’s Ph.D.