Despite his loud protestations, Roger Stone has increasingly drawn the attention of Robert Mueller and his team, who have begun to pick apart the “dirty trickster’s” inner circle, questioning everyone from his ex-drivers to his assistants to his friends. And so on Wednesday night, the man himself, theatrically clad in a Picasso-style beret and a “Stone Cold Truth” T-shirt, declared that come what may, he would never betray his longtime confidant, Donald Trump. “It is now abundantly clear that [Mueller] intends to frame me on some conjured-up, concocted offense in an effort to leverage my testimony against the president of the United States,” he said. “I will be targeted in an effort to trump up charges against me to get me to turn on Donald Trump. Not happening.” He added that he will “never roll on Donald Trump,” and for good measure reassured his audience, referring to the former Richard Nixon counselor who confessed to being party to serious crimes committed by the president and his associates, “John Dean I am not.”

It’s almost impossible that Stone, who is such a Nixon fanboy that he has a portrait of the former president tattooed on his upper back, deployed the comparison by accident: Dean, as Stone well knows, was witness to myriad attempts by the Nixon administration to thwart the investigation into Watergate. His metaphor, then, doesn’t suggest that Trump is innocent—rather that Stone will go to any lengths to protect the president, who happens to be guilty as sin. Nor is he alone in his assumption that Trump has committed a crime: when the office of Trump fixer Michael Cohen was raided, even Trump’s allies operated under the assumption that either Cohen, or the president, or both, had done something illegal. “Michael will never stand up [for Trump]” if he faces charges, former prosecutor Jay Goldberg, who represented Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s, told The Wall Street Journal. On a scale of 100 to 1, where 100 is protecting Trump completely, Goldberg said he told the president that Cohen “isn’t even a 1.”

Ultimately, Trump’s potential guilt may matter less to Stone than his own. Though he has repeatedly proclaimed his innocence, and predicted last week that he would be charged with “some extraneous crime,” Mueller has apparently zeroed in on Stone’s election contacts with Julian Assange and hacker Guccifer 2.0. In recent weeks, the special counsel has reportedly probed Stone’s relationship with Paul Manafort deputy Rick Gates, and subpoenaed John Kakanis, who worked as Stone’s driver, accountant, and operative. (In an e-mail to Reuters at the time, Stone insisted he would soon be cleared of all alleged wrongdoing, and that “I sincerely hope when this occurs that the grotesque, defamatory media campaign which I have endured for years now will finally come to its long-overdue end;” a lawyer for Kakanis declined to comment.)

Some, like Congressman Joaquin Castro, hypothesize that Mueller’s order of operations means Stone will be next to fall. “Mueller laid the groundwork to show that there is this malignant force out there that was interfering with the American elections,” Castro told my colleague Chris Smith, referring to the special counsel’s indictment of 13 Russians accused of interfering in the U.S. election. “Once everybody can appreciate that, then he moves forward and says, ‘O.K., these are the Americans that were helping these bad people.’” Whether Stone numbers among those Americans remains to be seen. “The big question,” said Castro, “is whether the Russians had any help in distributing the hacked material, [or] really any guidance or direction or information sharing or data sharing with any Americans.”