On Friday Roger Stone, a political consultant who in 2016 publicly supported the Trump campaign, was arrested on criminal charges filed by special counsel Robert Mueller. He has since been released on bail. Stone is indicted (pdf) in five cases for making false statements, one attempt of influencing a witness and an obstruction of a proceeding.

Since May 2017 the former FBI chief Mueller investigates an alleged collusion between Trump, his campaign and something Russian with regards to the 2016 election. No evidence has been produced so far that substantiate any such collusion. The people who fanatically claim that there must have been such a connection are now disappointed. The long awaited Stone indictment was one of their last straws. But there is absolutely nothing in it that hints at any collusion.

All these alleged crimes were committed in relation to an appearance of Stone before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation.

During the 2016 election Stone publicly claimed that he was in direct communication with Wikileaks and its editor Julian Assange. Steve Bannon, then part of the Trump campaign, asked Stone to ask Wikileaks at what time it would release new batches of emails that had been obtained from the Democratic National Committee. The Trump campaign was naturally interested in using these releases to attack the competing candidate Hillary Clinton.

Wikileaks and Assange denied that they had any relations or communications with Roger Stone. It later turned out that Stone had two contact persons, the New Yorker comedian Randy Credico and the conservative writer Jerome Corsi, who he MIGHT have had some contact or insight into Wikileaks. The indictment says nothing about their relations to Wikileaks.

During his appearance in front of the HPSCI Stone misremembered, contradicted or lied about several details related to his earlier false claim. He also asked Randy Credico to lie to the committee. Those are the only issues the indictment is about. It is about the lies of a notorious liar which became process crimes when he repeated them during an investigation. Stone himself denies emphatically that he committed any crime and promises to defend himself in court.

Nowhere does the indictment say that this has anything to do with the Trump campaign, Russia, Wikileaks or the not existing relations between them.

But some media will not tell you that. The New York Times falsely headlines:

Indicting Roger Stone, Mueller Shows Link Between Trump Campaign and WikiLeaks.

The first graph:

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, revealed on Friday the most direct link yet between parallel efforts by the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election using Democratic Party material stolen by Russians.

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There follow 28 paragraphs about the arrest and others issues, five pictures and the above graphic, but no explanation of the supposed link which, according to the indictment, Stone claimed to have but which never existed.