A Pre-Dawn Raid for Roger Stone-Really?

This article first appeared in New English Review.

On Friday, we learned that special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team had obtained an indictment against Roger Stone, a former advisor to President Trump, for lying about issues relating to information obtained by Wikileaks that related to the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton, and the Democrat National Committee. Pursuant to that indictment, FBI agents conducted a pre-dawn raid Friday and dragged Stone out of his residence in Ft Lauderdale, Florida.

As a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent who participated in more pre-dawn raids than I can recall, my reaction to this is simply: Are you kidding me?

You can talk all you want about how everybody should be treated equally under the law, which is true. However, to carry out an operation such as was conducted to arrest Stone is limited to situations where arresting agents expect to confront dangerous resistance and/or destruction of evidence. Normally, people like Stone are arrested by a knock on the door by two or three agents or by notifying their attorney of the warrant and arranging for the person to turn himself or herself in.

This was the same tactic Mueller's team used to arrest Paul Manafort. Again, it was unnecessary and designed to draw publicity.

And how was it that CNN happened to be on the scene to report the arrest? Who tipped off CNN?

This is not only unprofessional but despicable. Here we have somebody within the law enforcement apparatus feeding information to a news outlet dedicated to bringing down the Trump presidency.

In the late 1980s, while I was a DEA agent stationed in Pittsburgh, our office was involved in an investigation into the manufacture and sale of fentanyl, a synthetic heroin that had led to the overdose deaths of some 15 heroin addicts in the Pittsburgh area. When the moment came that we carried out a pre-dawn raid into multiple locations to arrest the principle suspects, we found to our dismay that the news media had been tipped off and were present at the locations to report the arrests. This led to our having to carry out the arrests before we had intended to. In this case, we were not dealing with people like Roger Stone, but people whose actions were totally unpredictable. We had a good idea who had tipped off the media, but I couldn't prove it. However, in a subsequent telephone conversation I had with a supervisory prosecutor in the US Attorney's office in Pittsburgh, I told that person that whoever tipped off the media had committed a despicable act. He himself was not the person we suspected, but the reader may draw the appropriate conclusions.

I don't know a lot about Roger Stone, and don't know anything about whether he lied to Congress, which I would not condone. I do feel, however, that Mueller, who was the director of the FBI, is abusing his power. It is interesting that in his quest to bring down Trump, he has now ventured into the Wikileaks matter-without any attention directed to Hillary Clinton or the DNC, which basically fixed the primary in her favor. Mueller now has another scalp, but it does nothing to advance the case against Trump and whether he colluded with the Russians to sway the election in his favor. Mueller is no longer the director of the FBI, but he is dragging that agency back down to the level of when J. Edgar Hoover was director.