"[Roger] Stone, a self-described dirty trickster who began his career as a campaign aide for Richard M. Nixon and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back..."

"... has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian meddling campaign. His brash behavior made him less of a subject of news media scrutiny than other current and former aides to President Trump — like the character in a whodunit who readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime. But the special counsel’s investigators spent months encircling Mr. Stone...."

From "Roger Stone, Adviser to Trump, Is Indicted in Mueller Investigation" (NYT).

I looked back in my archive to see if I'd ever written about Roger Stone. I see I wrote about Donald Trump firing him, which happened all the way back in August of 2015. The Trump campaign's statement about the firing was:

"We have a tremendously successful campaign and Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity. He has had a number of articles about him recently and Mr. Trump wants to keep the focus of the campaign on how to Make America Great Again."

At the time, I wrote:

So "Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity," that's the kick in the ass the campaign wants to give to a man who sought a somewhat graceful exit? Well, then, give it to us Roger. Use your moment in the sun and dish the dirt on Donald.

Or... perhaps one of the better candidates is reaching out for Stone.  There are so many candidates, and perhaps Stone is good enough to feel the demand. I don't remember his name, but I see he's been around a while. Here's a Politico article from just before the debate: "Donald Trump’s debate ‘dirty trickster’/Roger Stone is just one of many behind-the-scenes figures to influence the GOP debate." That does have a whiff of Roger-is-using-the-campaign-for-his-own-personal-publicity about it.

Whether game-changing moments emerge on camera and how they play online will depend on a cast of lesser-known characters who have shaped the rules of the forum, worked to influence what the moderators and debaters say on stage, prepped the candidates and have their finger on the button of the social media conversation.

Stone is perhaps the most important of them. He got his start in big-time politics as a college student on Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President, and he publicly embraces his image as a dirty trickster, including cooperating with a 2008 New Yorker profile by Jeffrey Toobin titled, “the Dirty Trickster.”

In the profile, Trump calls his once and future adviser a “stone-cold loser” and suggests Eliot Spitzer should have sued Stone for a stunt in which the operative allegedly called Spitzer’s aged father, claimed the elder Spitzer was being investigated for loans made to his son’s political campaigns, and threatened him with arrest if he refused to cooperate with an imaginary subpoena. He has a tattoo of Nixon’s face on his back.

Is Stone taking my 3-year-old advice and finding a new moment in the sun where he can dish the dirt on Donald?

ADDED: I see that a few days before the 2016 election, in a post titled "Did Donald Trump become a candidate for President because his friend Bill Clinton urged him to do it?", I quoted this from Maureen Dowd:

Roger Stone, author of “The Clintons’ War on Women” and a longtime confidant of Trump’s, claims that Bill urged Trump to get in the race and told him he thought he could get the nomination. “That’s why the people with the tinfoil hats are convinced the whole thing is a setup,” Stone says. “Bill can’t help himself from giving advice. He loves the game. He’s the great kibitzer.”