Indictment reveals a campaign official was directed to contact Stone about ‘damaging information’ – but who gave the order?

The criminal indictment of Roger Stone is packed with the kind of colourful details one might expect from the flamboyant rogue, who has been dealing in dirty tricks for more than 40 years.

Who is Roger Stone, the longtime Trump ally caught in Mueller's net? Read more

Between threatening an associate’s therapy dog and quoting his political hero Richard Nixon, the indictment also described Stone urging a witness to “do a Frank Pentangeli” – the mobster who lied to Congress in The Godfather Part II.

But it is the dry prose of Robert Mueller’s 12th paragraph that is most likely to have Donald Trump sweating on Friday, after his government’s FBI agents arrested his longtime friend and adviser in a dramatic pre-dawn raid in Florida with guns drawn.

It states that after WikiLeaks had begun releasing hacked Democratic emails, “a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton campaign”.

Sign up for the US morning briefing

This direction was given to the senior Trump campaign official after 22 July 2016 – more than a month after it was reported that it was Russian government hackers who had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems.

Several questions naturally follow: who was the senior campaign official? Who gave the order? And could it have been candidate Trump himself?

Mueller’s primary task as special counsel was to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” on the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election campaign.

Since then, Trump has repeatedly said there was “no collusion”. His loyalists have worked to raise the bar in the public’s mind, so that anything short of Mueller finding a secret deal with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will clear Trump of wrongdoing.

But running through Mueller’s indictment of Stone and his charges against Russian hackers last July is the makings of a case that there was, in fact, coordination.

In short, Mueller said on Friday, Trump, or his most senior aides, ordered a trusted associate to bring them into the loop on the fruits of what they knew to be a Russian government hack of American victims – and on the schedule for its publication. Trump’s team could then shape their campaign tactics around this calendar.

And last July, Mueller hinted at evidence of coordination in the other direction. His indictment of the Russian hackers said they attempted “for the first time” to break into email accounts used by Clinton’s personal office “after hours” on 27 July 2016.

“At or around the same time, they also targeted 76 email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign,” Mueller wrote.

That day, at an event in Florida, Trump urged Russia to search for the approximately 30,000 emails that Clinton was found to have deleted from her private server on the grounds that they were not related to government work.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, in now notorious remarks. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Play Video 0:44 Roger Stone explains his role in Trump's team in 2016 – video

The full extent of the coordination remains unclear. Mueller, who tends to release only what he needs when he needs to, may have emails, text messages and testimony shedding more light on how the Trump campaign capitalised.

We may never know. It is possible that, unlike Stone and many of his hapless associates, at least some people involved managed to avoid, in the memorable phrase of Stringer Bell from HBO’s The Wire, “taking notes on a criminal conspiracy”.

Trump-Russia inquiry: who has Mueller charged and who might be next? Read more

But Mueller on Friday hinted that there was more to come. Stone, he said, “spoke to senior Trump campaign officials” – plural – about what information WikiLeaks had on Clinton and “was contacted by senior Trump campaign officials” to find out the release schedule.

Certainly, people around Trump seemed particularly pleased with Stone’s activities on a day when they needed help the most. On 7 October 2016, one month before election day, a recording was leaked in which Trump boasted about grabbing women by the genitals.

Within a couple of hours, WikiLeaks began publishing emails stolen by Russian operatives from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. The documents caused further disruption in the Democratic camp and took some heat off Trump.

Shortly afterwards, the indictment says, an associate of Trump’s campaign chief, Steve Bannon, sent Stone a text message.

“Well done,” it read.