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I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. @andrewcmccarthy

Roger Stone is the shiny object. The obstruction charges in his long-anticipated indictment , made public on Friday, are not the matter of consequence for the United States.Nor is the critical thing the indictment's implicit confirmation that there was no criminal "collusion" conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.What matters is this:And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime,The rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation - namely, the notion that the Trump campaign had "coordinated" in the Kremlin's cyber-espionage operation to meddle in the 2016 campaign - has beenharbored by political, law-enforcement, and intelligence officials who loathed Donald Trump. That there may be a thousand good reasons to dislike Donald Trump is irrelevant, for we are talking about investigations, not politics.Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false.of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage - nothing but the Clinton-campaign generated, unverified Steele dossier. The months-in-the-making Stone indictment is just the latest proof of that.Yet investigators were not just content to let the country believe there was a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy;. Even as they indicted people for providing misleading information and then failing to correct the record,- the statement issued by FBI director James Comey, with Justice Department approval, just two months after Trump took office; and the statement issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein two months later, when he reiterated Comey's testimony in appointing Special Counsel Mueller.Let's assume for argument's sake that the special counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Russian intelligence orchestrated the hacking of the Democratic email accounts (i.e., the servers or accounts of the DNC and Clinton-campaign chairman John Podesta). As I have noted on other occasions, I accept the U.S. intelligence agencies' finding that Russia is the culprit.And Mueller's indictments of Russian intelligence officers, individuals, and corporate entities aretrying to put to rest any questions about Russia's culpability. As the prosecutors well know,; it is evidence of nothing. Given that Vladimir Putin is never going to extradite his operatives to face U.S. criminal charges, Mueller's team well knows that their allegations are freebies -But again, let's give them that one, the foundation of the narrative. As the prosecutors have further developed their allegations, we've learned that Russia obtained the emails through its hackers and somehow got them to WikiLeaks, which then got them into mainstream publications.in its hacking and troll-farm operations: The Kremlin neither needed nor sought help from Trump; its operations actually predated Trump's candidacy; and sometimes it operated against Trump. Moreover,- the indicted Russians have no connection to the Trump campaign, and the indicted people in Trump's orbit have no connection to Russia's hacking.So now we have the Stone indictment.It alleges no involvement - by Stone or the Trump campaign - in Russia's hacking. The indictment's focus, instead, is the WikiLeaks end of the enterprise - i.e.,that gave rise to the investigation,after the hacking. And what do we learn? That the Trump campaignwhat WikiLeaks had. That is, in addition to being uninvolved in Russia's espionage, the Trump campaign was uninvolved in Julian Assange's acquisition of what Russia stole.The Stone indictment reads like an episode of The Three Stooges. Stone and two associates - conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerry Corsi, and left-wing-comedian-turned-radio-host Randy Credico, respectively denominated "Person 1" and "Person 2" - are on a quest to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton and when Assange is going to publicize it. But that does not suit Stone, who has cultivated an image of political dirty trickster and plugged-in soothsayer.That is, it's a clown show. A despicable one, at that. Assange is an inveterate anti-American who has done incalculable damage to U.S. intelligence operations.How interesting that Robert Mueller led the FBI during those debacles and has special incentive to dig into the WikiLeaks-Kremlin connection. And how interesting that Assange was a heroic figure to the Left, and the bane of the national-security Right, before his apparent distaste for Hillary flipped the script (at least for blind Trump and Clinton partisans). In any event, we have Stone and Corsi racking their brains about how to ferret out what Assange has got, and to understand the timeline in which he might release it - hoping against hope that it will kill off the Clinton bid. And we have Credico, Stone's radio-host pal, dealing directly with Assange (mainly by interviewing him), then passing information along to Stone while imploring Stone to keep his (Credico's) name out of it.Meanwhile, Stone tells his friends in the Trump campaign that he has heard WikiLeaks may have information that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign. After the hacked DNC emails are published in July 2016, 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.""Was directed"? Naturally, you're thinking, "was directed by whom?" By Trump? Could be . . . Stone says it was not, but who knows? The point, however, is not who did the directingto reach out to Stone.Plainly, the campaign was not involved in the hacking,. And it had no involvement with WikiLeaks' operations, so it turned to Stone, who had held himself out as a knowledgeable source. But Stone, too, was unsure. Mueller alleges: "STONE thereafter told the Trump campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by [WikiLeaks]" (emphasis added). The prosecutor has to say "potential" because Stone did not have solid knowledge of Assange's intentions - he tried to find out from others (including Credico, who had contact with Assange), but they did not know for sure exactly what Assange had and whether or when he would publish it.Mind you, it is not a crime to know that bad people have damaging information about your political opponent, nor to try to nudge them to publish it at the time most opportune for your political favorite. Here, the Trump campaign did not even know what WikiLeaks had. Its best source was Stone, but, like the campaign, he was pressing sources who might have the information about WikiLeaks that he lacked. No surprise, then, thatInstead, Stone is charged with seven counts of obstructing congressional investigations - by giving misleading testimony, withholding and lying about the existence of records responsive to a congressional request, lying about his communications with Credico, and attempting to influence Credico to lie or refuse to testify. These are serious charges, and while Stone may have cards to play on the allegations that he made misrepresentations (more on that another time), the special counsel appears to have daunting evidence that Stone tampered with Credico's testimony - a charge that involves Stone's cheesy exhortations that Credico ape the stonewalling of both Stone hero Richard Nixon and "Frank Pentangeli" (the Michael V. Gazzo character who famously develops witness-stand amnesia in Godfather II).The salient fact is that the evidence-based narrative from which Mueller derives these obstruction charges underscores that the president and his campaign were not complicit in Russia's hacking of Democratic accounts. That's not new news. It is completely consistent with indictments Mueller has been filing for a year.Why does that matter? Well, if I may beat a dead horse, in February 2017, Comey, then the FBI's director, gave this astonishing public testimony at a House Intelligence Committee hearing:Understand:1. It is standard government practice never to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.2., which target foreign powers, not individuals, and which are classified.3.This is especially true when the subject, whether a person or an entity (like the Trump campaign) is of interest to a counterintelligence investigation - again,, and subjects whose suspected connections to foreign powers are being scrutinized should never be disclosed.4. It is simply not true that, as a matter of course in a counterintelligence investigation, the Justice Department and FBI do an assessment of whether any prosecutable crimes have been committed. Instead, whenever agents happen to stumble upon evidence of a crime, they always consider whether to prosecute. This is not a routine aspect of counterintelligence investigations; it is an unremarkable fact applicable to all kinds of inquiries - even background investigations of applicants for government employment.That is to say:Any thinking person would have taken Director Comey's disclosure, in disregard of several law-enforcement and intelligence protocols, to signal that the new president could be conspiring with Russia in an espionage scheme, for which he - or at least officials in his campaign - might very well face criminal charges.It has to have been obvious to investigators for months that this suggestion was misleading. Yet there has been no correction of the record. For month after month, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the special counsel have been content to allow the presidency to be enveloped in a cloud of suspicion that necessarily infects the administration's capacity to govern, to conduct foreign relations, and to deal with Congress.Why?Doing so would merely have removed the specter of traitorous conspiracy from the White House. It would not have compromised Mueller's ability to investigate Russia's interference in the election; it would not have undermined Mueller's probe of potential obstruction offenses by the president. (And while it is not Mueller's job to discourage the president's puerile "witch hunt" tweets, if the public had been told that the Justice Department withdrew its highly irregular public statements about Trump's possible criminal complicity in Russia's espionage, presidential tirades about the investigation would have ebbed, if not disappeared entirely.)We are not just talking about having our priorities in order - i.e., recognizing that the ability of the president to govern takes precedence the prosecutor's desire for investigative secrecy. We are talking about common sense and common decency: The Justice Department and the FBI went out of their way to portray Donald Trump as a suspect in what would have been the most abhorrent crime in the nation's history. It has been more than two years.