There is a point where one can go from being a conspiracy theorist to becoming an actual conspirator. It seems that Jerome Corsi, who is reportedly negotiating a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, may have reached that point during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is zeroing in on the ties between Corsi, Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and, of course, Mother Russia.
Corsi has been at the center of right-wing conspiracy thinking for some years. He has been part of numerous campaigns to vilify leading Democrats, a veteran, so to speak, of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s mission to take down John Kerry in 2004 and the birther contretemps about Barack Obama, which Donald Trump, among others, helped to push.
Now, as Martin Longman of the Washington Monthly observes, it may be Corsi’s time in the barrel, one of the many evocative phrases that the Trump candidacy has bequeathed to us. Corsi says that being questioned for some 40 hours by the Mueller team was tantamount to being interrogated by the Gestapo and that it turned his brain to ‘mush’, but there is scant evidence that this was not its original state.
Whether any of this impinges upon Trump directly remains an open question. The most suggestive evidence that it does derived from Trump’s own frantic efforts to impede the Mueller inquiry. Trump was surely thinking of Corsi’s plight when he tweeted on November 15 that Mueller and his team ‘have gone absolutely nuts’—a case of projection if there ever was one.
The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018
….care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018
His best line of defense would probably be that Corsi’s kookiness precluded him from helping to execute a grand plot to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But even if Corsi isn’t all that swift in the end, his compatriot Stone, a master of the political dark arts, may find that Mueller’s determination to leave no stone unturned forces him to plead for a deal as well. Maybe he can ask his old Russian friend Guccifer 2.0 for help, if he can find him.
