ROLLING STONE:

Robert Mueller continues to zero in on Roger Stone as speculation builds that the special counsel could take a major overt step in his Russia investigation following the midterm elections next week.

Stone, a longtime adviser to President Trump who briefly worked on his campaign, is viewed as central to the question of what, if anything, members of the Trump campaign knew in advance about Democratic emails hacked by Russian operatives and then released by WikiLeaks.

Legal analysts say Mueller is likely interested in determining whether the campaign helped coordinate the document dump, and views Stone as key to making that judgment.

Stone, who both publicly and privately referenced contacts with WikiLeaks during the campaign, has drawn the interest of Mueller in recent weeks and months.

Stone, at the age of 19, was the youngest person to testify to the Watergate grand jury, as an employee of the Committee to Re-elect the President. He was, he says, behind the Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 election. And, in perhaps the most influential act of his career, he persuaded Donald Trump to get into politics. "[Stone] always likes to take on somebody that at least has a good chance of winning," the president says in an on-camera interview, showcasing his characteristic flair for self-aggrandizing compliments.

But the film, which follows Stone through his fluctuating role on the Trump campaign, is also an incisive portrait of how Stone's brand of dirty tricks--in which the only motivating factor in politics is to win--came to dominate the current state of disarray. Stone, as he's wont to do, cheerfully takes credit for all manner of shifts in the last four decades of U.S. elections, from the birth of PACs and superPACs to the rising influence of lobbyists to the dominance of anger and fear in the media. You may find yourself wondering, as the Fox host Tucker Carlson does at one point, whether all of these developments can actually be traced back to Stone, or whether he's just the most dastardly self-promoter in history. But Get Me Roger Stone is a thorough and entertaining primer into how American politics got so ugly, not to mention a crucial window into the mentality of the unorthodox 45th president.

Now in his 60s, sporting bow-ties, suspenders, and an overbearing air of insouciance, Stone resembles no one so much as a senior Pee-wee Herman. He stokes the caricature of the mustache-twirling plutocrat, being interviewed in an opulent dining room next to a three-olive martini, where he expounds on "Stone's Rules," one-sentence aphorisms like, "It's better to be infamous than never to be famous at all," and "One man's dirty trick is another man's civil political action." Extremely charismatic and unabashedly outspoken, he's a documentarian's dream. And this before the film even gets to unpacking Stone's involvement in the rise of Trump, or his embrace of the alt-right.

The Stone mystique is carefully curated. Stone recalls early on how, at a mock election at his elementary school, he took a liking to John F. Kennedy because he had "better hair" than Nixon, and he persuaded his classmates to vote for JFK by assuring them Nixon planned to introduce school on Saturdays. "For the first time ever, I understood the value of misinformation," Stone says, with a glint in his eye. [...]

This indomitable spirit pushed Stone toward his lobbying years with the firm Black, Manafort, and Stone (yes, that Manafort, and he's also interviewed in the film), which became known as "the torturer's lobby" for its list of highly unsavory clients. Stone, Toobin explains, "sees morality as a synonym for weakness." Then, in 1988, the lawyer Roy Cohn introduced Stone to Trump, and Stone was immediately taken with the brash businessman's potential. Again, the two seemed like twin souls, with their penchant for attention and their dyed blonde combovers. "I was like a jockey looking for a horse," Stone recalls. "And [Trump's] a prime piece of political horse flesh in my view."

The key to Stone's success, Paul Manafort explains, is that he sees things that others don't. Where other, more ethically minded strategists might choose optimism when it comes to the will of the American people, Stone's dogged lack of morality gives him a keen instinct for tactics that might reverberate across swing states. Hence his stoking of the flames of the birther movement, which echoed Nixon's "southern strategy." And his recent alignment with InfoWars' Alex Jones, seen hollering in one clip about "chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay." The "Lock Her Up" chant is Roger Stone. So were the guests Trump brought to a presidential debate to claim the Clintons were victimizers of women, at least one of whom was paid to appear by Stone's superPAC.

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