Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, found it hard to believe that any prosecutor would charge Corsi with knowingly making a false statement after allowing him to amend his testimony. “I would be shocked if there weren’t more evidence of his lying if he is ultimately charged with making false statements to federal officials,” Goldman told me.

Corsi has also added a new twist to the saga, claiming that he plans to file a complaint with Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker over Mueller’s team’s alleged recommendation that he keep his plea deal a secret from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

“FINRA requires by law that I immediately report anything that might affect my ability to hold securities licenses,” Corsi explained. “So I asked the special counsel’s team how they expected me to fulfill my legal obligation to FINRA if they want me to keep the plea deal a secret. And they said, ‘You don’t have to tell FINRA because this will all be under seal.’ So I told them I was going to file criminal charges against them with Whitaker, because they just advised me to commit a crime.” The former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, who prosecuted white-collar crimes, including commodities and securities fraud, in the Northern District of Illinois, noted that FINRA is not a government agency—so failing to report a sealed plea deal is not a crime. The special counsel’s office declined to comment.

Mueller has not gone easy on witnesses who appear to have lied to federal agents—Corsi is the fourth witness caught up in the probe who could soon be facing charges for lying to investigators. However, unlike the former national-security adviser Michael Flynn, the former Trump-campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos, or the lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, all of whom pleaded guilty and struck a deal with Mueller’s team, Corsi is apparently resisting any kind of cooperation. “They can put me in prison for the rest of my life, but I’m not going to lie,” Corsi said.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, told me in an email that Corsi’s pledge not to cooperate means either that he knows Mueller is bluffing and doesn’t have enough evidence to charge him, which is “unlikely,” or that Corsi now finds himself “on the wrong end of an indictment.” If Corsi had decided to cooperate, Honig explained, “it would have been Mueller announcing Corsi’s cooperation along with the indictment of Stone (and perhaps others). Now, it’ll be Mueller announcing an indictment of Stone and Corsi (and perhaps others) all together.”

Roger Stone, meanwhile, should be taking note of Corsi’s ordeal, former federal prosecutors told me. Any inconsistencies between Stone’s testimony and what Mueller has learned could hypothetically lead to federal charges. While Stone has long denied that he discussed WikiLeaks’ plans with Bannon or any other campaign official in 2016, for example, emails from Stone made public last month belie that claim. On October 4, 2016, three days before the Podesta emails were published, Stone emailed Bannon predicting “a load” of new WikiLeaks disclosures “every week going forward.” (Stone told the Post that he “was unaware of this email exchange until it was leaked,” adding that “we had not turned it up in our search.”)