While the FBI still has much to answer in its choice of a heavily armed, riot-gear raid for its arrest of political fixer Roger Stone, it now appears to me less likely that it, or special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, leaked news of the arrest in advance to CNN.
Last Thursday, I wrote that Stone’s lawyer Grant J. Smith had produced “compelling evidence” that CNN’s presence at Stone’s house resulted from a law enforcement leak. The evidence was that, as the raid was still occurring, CNN sent Smith a draft indictment, one not yet filed with the court, which had been created a full day before. This indeed looked odd: Usually, one would expect the actual, court-approved indictment, not a draft one, to be released to the media. And for CNN to have any version of the indictment at all, as the raid was still taking place, would indicate that CNN had a law enforcement source.
A representative from CNN reached out to me today to dispel those assumptions.
CNN already had reported that it was there outside Stone’s house because it put a few clues together, including a rare Thursday meeting of the relevant grand jury, plus the fact that prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky showed up at the D.C. courthouse with a suitcase, indicating he had a flight to catch. CNN said that since it expected Stone, who lives in South Florida, to be indicted soon, they guessed the flight might be to Miami.
None of which explained the draft indictment.
But the CNN representative, who asked not to be named, because it was not his story and he was calling out of professional courtesy, directed me to the Internet’s Wayback Machine. It shows that as late as eight hours after the raid, the special counsel’s own website still had posted not the filed indictment, but the draft one. Because CNN’s cameras were on scene, a CNN reporter had been checking the counsel’s site for updates — and the posting, I am told, occurred just as the raid began.
Why the counsel’s office posted the draft indictment, rather than the filed one, isn’t clear, but the Wayback Machine doesn’t lie. But for most of the day of the arrest, it was the draft indictment, not the filed one, that all reporters, not just CNN’s, had access to if they went to the special counsel’s web site.
My friend at CNN insists that the network’s video scoop was the result of educated guesswork, not some sort of covert coordination with Mueller’s team. Many observers can still consider the FBI’s arrest tactics in this case appalling and dangerous. But, the evidence that Mueller’s team or the FBI was improperly tipping off the press is not so compelling after all.
