With a second season of the Rudy Giuliani Show well underway, the media mostly glossed over a mysterious story yesterday about Robert Mueller’s continued interest in professional ratfucker Roger Stone. It’s not surprising, of course, that the special counsel is reportedly probing Stone’s involvement with Russia, given his documented communications with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange and the Russian hacker known as Guccifer 2.0. But apart from soliciting funds to sue his enemies, Stone, until now, has remained mysteriously off the radar. While the vortex of the collusion melodrama has variously engulfed Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, George Nader, and many more, the once ubiquitous “dirty trickster”—a confidant of Donald Trump dating back to his casino days—has more or less disappeared from public view.

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So what are we to make of the sudden chatter surrounding Stone? According to CNBC, Mueller is probing the relationship between Stone and Gates, the former Trump campaign deputy chairman who has pleaded guilty to charges related to his work in Ukraine, and is now cooperating with the special counsel. Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity alleged that Stone is, indeed, a leading subject of the Justice Department probe, and that Mueller’s team has been asking questions about what he discussed with Gates at a series of meetings and dinners before and during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Stone’s attorney, Robert Buschel, did not deny that discussions took place between his client and Gates, but dismissed them as trivial. “Roger Stone did not have any substantive or meaningful interaction with Rick Gates during or leading up to the 2016 campaign,” Buschel said in a statement to CNBC. (Representatives for Gates and Mueller declined CNBC’s request for comment.) But there are substantive reasons to keep an eye on Stone, and to believe that Chekhov’s gun—lately pushed to the periphery by other characters—is about to make a return. Following Mueller’s indictment in February of 13 Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election, legal experts I spoke with noted the conspicuous absence of charges tied to the D.N.C. hack and the hack of the personal e-mail account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. “I am just assuming that the investigation is continuing apace on that front and I would anticipate you see something further involving that aspect of it down the road,” William Jeffress, a Washington defense attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me at the time.

Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, made a similar point to my colleague Chris Smith earlier this year. “By indicting the 13 Russians first,” he observed, “Mueller laid the groundwork to show that there is this malignant force out there that was interfering with the American elections. Once everybody can appreciate that, then he moves forward and says, ‘O.K., these are the Americans that were helping these bad people.’” Whether Roger Stone was one of those Americans—an insinuation he strenuously denies—remains to be seen. “The big question,” said Castro, “is whether the Russians had any help in distributing the hacked material,” and “really any guidance or direction or information sharing or data sharing with any Americans.”

Indeed, the fact that Stone has not yet met with Mueller’s team has been a point of speculation. Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump campaign and a protégé of Stone’s, said that he was asked about Stone’s involvement with WikiLeaks when he appeared before a grand jury in March. “Roger is certainly a subject,” Nunberg said. “The fact that Roger hasn’t been called in and the special counsel continues to ask questions about Roger’s possible activities during the election shows that at the very least he’s a subject.”

While Stone has denied any prior knowledge of the release of the hacked Democratic e-mails, his August 2016 tweet in which he seemingly predicted the October 2016 leak of Podesta’s e-mails has long been of interest. “It will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel,” Stone wrote on Twitter.