Finally. America is safe. Young children can go outside and play again. No longer is liberty and justice threatened by the scourge of the Donald Trump presidency. Or militant Russian collusion.
Roger Stone has been indicted!
In a predawn raid, heavily armed FBI SWAT team commandos wearing body armor and carrying loaded assault rifles stormed the home where Roger Stone, 66, lives in Florida with his wife.
In a rare departure from their regular diet of Fake News, CNN was tipped off and captured dramatic footage of the daring raid in which Mr. Stone and his wife were rousted from bed in their pajamas. One can never be too careful! Mr. Stone barely had time to cover his giant back tattoo of President Richard Nixon with a T-shirt.
The nefarious Mr. Stone has been charged with lying to Congress. Stop laughing. This is serious! Because only Congress is allowed to lie — and only when talking to the American public.
For example, even Congress is not allowed to lie to Congress. Only to the stupid nitwits who pay all the bills around here. Because if Congress were to lie to Congress then that would be lying to itself, which is a psychological disorder and could lead to actual dysfunction of Congress.
And if Congress were to fall into a rut of dysfunction, no telling what could happen. Such dangerousness could, for example, lead to Congress shutting down the government so that they don’t have to carry out their absolutely most basic and fundamental function: securing our borders.
One of the most shocking revelations in the indictment of Roger Stone is the discovery that a political operative involved in political campaigns and other political affairs stands accused of being dishonest. We had no idea.
But what I cannot figure is what this all has to do with President Trump? After all, Mr. Trump is the Great White Whale in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Nothing about that here in this indictment of Roger Stone.
And the funny thing about Roger Stone is that he has been around for ages, hence the Richard Nixon tattoo plastered between his shoulder blades.
The self-described “dirty trickster” has been an entertaining and fabulist sideshow of American politics going back decades.
It was more than 10 years ago that Matt Labash wrote a brilliant and hilarious profile of Mr. Stone and all his shady, con man ways.
“Being a skilled confidence man is both a blessing and a curse,” Mr. Labash wrote in the 2007 profile in the former Weekly Standard.
“If you truly excel at the long con, raising it to a form of art, marks will never know they’ve been taken. But if you become renowned for such artistry, when it is synonymous with your very name, people never believe you’re off the grift, even when you’re playing straight.”
Where was the FBI then? Clearly, Mr. Stone was exposed as a less than always straight-dealing political hack. Yet this did not concern the FBI back then.
Everybody in Washington read that profile. Even CNN legal “analyst” Jeffrey Toobin, who subsequently ripped off Mr. Labash’s profile of Mr. Stone and wrote a copycat profile of Roger Stone for The New Yorker.
Again, where was the FBI raid of Mr. Stone’s home? Where was the dramatic CNN footage?
Yet, suddenly Mr. Mueller and the FBI are shocked — shocked! — to find lying going on in Washington by this self-styled dirty trickster political operative.
It is just like the widely heralded trials of longtime Washington political hand Paul Manafort, who was convicted of all sorts of bad things such as tax evasion years ago.
Truth is, the FBI and Robert Mueller still have not proved a shred of evidence to support the whole purpose of this investigation.
And these indictments really have nothing to do with Mr. Stone’s unreliability as a truthful witness. He has been that for a long, long time around Washington and nobody cared.
It is fine to be a liar in Washington. Or a tax cheat. You just can’t be a liar or a tax cheat AND be a supporter of President Trump.
If you are, you can expect to be rousted from your bed in the middle of the night by dozens of commandos in riot gear carrying loaded assault rifles with CNN filming the whole thing.
• Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.