Maddow breaks down importance of Mueller having Roger Stone’s communications with Wikileaks and the Russians

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Friday explained the significance of evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller revealed in court filings against Roger Stone.

"President Trump's long-time advisor, he was arrested at his home in Florida three weeks ago today. Mr. Stone has pled not guilty to seven felony charges," Maddow noted. "He says he wants to go to trial, he says he is innocent of everything he has been charged with."

"But one of the interesting things about Roger Stone's indictment, right from get-go, is on the front-page of the indictment, prosecutors notified the court they considered his case to have a sibling," Maddow explained. "That case is the Mueller indictment of a dozen Russian military intelligence officers. That case is the GRU indictment, one of the core indictments of Mueller's investigation."

Stone sought to have the cases formally separated in an effort to get a different judge.

Maddow read from the government's response, which laid out exactly why the cases were related.

“In the course of investigating that activity, the government obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release,” prosecutors noted. “Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1.”

"So the same search warrant turned up the evidence that led to the charges against these Russian military intelligence officers that they hacked and stole documents for release during the campaign and used Wikileaks as part of the distribution channel for doing that," Maddow explained. "The same search warrant also turned up the information that led to Stone being charged for lying to congress about their investigation of among other things Wikileaks."

"So that's Mueller's prosecutors today telling a federal judge in Washington D.C. they have the communications between Stone and Russian military intelligence," she noted.

"They've also got the communication between Roger Stone and Wikileaks concerning the stolen Democratic documents that the Russian hacked and staged for distribution during the campaign in a way that was designed to cause maximum damage to Hillary Clinton and maximum benefit to Donald Trump," she added.

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