Cato’s Julain Sanchez proffers a curious theory, that the now-adored Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s takedown of cartoon character Roger Stone was less to prosecute Stone than to get his hands on Stone’s apps.

For many, Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the veteran political trickster and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was a sign that the special counsel investigation into Russian electoral interference is entering its final phase. Yet there were also several indications that the probe may not be as near its conclusion as many observers assume — and that the true target of Friday’s F.B.I. actions was not Mr. Stone himself, but his electronic devices.

There are two aspects of this theory that will give rise to resistance. The first is that Stone is the perfect foil for anyone who wants to see Trump crash and burn.

Stone is perfectly suited for the age of clickbait. He’s got a flamboyant wardrobe, a Nixon tattoo, and a flair for getting people to laugh at him. He has a brand: truculent and unjustified self-confidence, meandering trash-talking, and a penchant for lashing out at perceived enemies. These things make him a reliable eye-catcher. Nobody ever changed the channel when Stone was trying to talk himself out of trouble.

How can you not hate a guy with a Nixon tat on his back? The second is that the efficacy of Mueller’s investigation is contingent on his coming up with something that topples the Evil Empire before the Apocalypse. Nobody needs Mueller’s report a month after Trump is out of office. Let’s be real, this is about ending the Trump regime, not finding out what really happened, as far as the Resistance is concerned. But if @Normative, as Julian’s twitter handle says, is right, then we may still be ways off.

Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone’s communications by other means — but one seeming exception jumps out. In a text exchange between Mr. Stone and a “supporter involved with the Trump Campaign,” Mr. Mueller pointedly quotes Mr. Stone’s request to “talk on a secure line — got WhatsApp?” There the direct quotes abruptly end, and the indictment instead paraphrases what Mr. Stone “subsequently told the supporter.” Though it’s not directly relevant to his alleged false statements, the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp — meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider.

As absurd a character as Stone may be, he apparently wasn’t so clueless as to not appreciate confidential means of communications. That’s not to say he was great at keeping his outrageous language private, but then, given what he’s alleged to have said on open communications, the imagination runs rampant as to his confidential utterances.

Mr. Stone’s early-morning arrest at his Florida home unsurprisingly dominated coverage, but reports also noted that federal agents were “seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.” The F.B.I., in other words, was executing search warrants, not just arrest warrants. Even the timing and manner of Mr. Stone’s arrest — at the absolute earliest moment allowed under federal rules of criminal procedure without persuading a judge to authorize an exceptional nighttime raid — suggests a concern with preventing destruction of evidence: Otherwise it would make little sense to send a dozen agents to arrest a man in his 60s before sunrise.

While the takedown raised many questions, not relevant here, was this based on an arrest warrant or a search warrant? If the latter, some of the looser ends get tied up, and make a little more sense than they would otherwise, despite the efforts of many to justify a tactical takedown of an old man for white collar offenses. It’s not entirely clear, however, that’s what happened.

F.B.I. agents were also seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.

Based on this vague description, there may have been a search warrant for the Harlem apartment, but no hard drives were taken from his Florida home. The language is too fuzzy to be sure. But Julian posits that this was the real purpose of the Roger Stone Show on CNN.

The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form — and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone’s own phones and laptops. And while Mr. Stone likely has limited value as a cooperating witness — it’s hard to put someone on the stand after charging them with lying to obstruct justice — the charges against him provide leverage in the event his cooperation is needed to unlock those devices by supplying a cryptographic passphrase.

This hardly seems a stretch. If you’re going to chat up Guccifer 2.0 on behalf of Darth Cheeto’s campaign, a little encryption seems like the way to go. But if so, and if Julian is right that the underlying purpose of this melodrama wasn’t to put Stone in prison but to get his apps, then what?

Yet if Mr. Mueller is indeed less interested in Mr. Stone than the potential evidence on his phones and computers, the conventional wisdom that the special counsel probe is wrapping up — and could issue a final report as soon as next month — seems awfully implausible. Digital forensics takes time, and a single device could easily hold many thousands of messages to sift through. And if this really is the first time Mr. Mueller’s office is seeing the most sensitive communications from a key figure like Mr. Stone, it’s likely they’ll come away with new leads to follow and new questions to pose to other witnesses.

If the most Mueller can find is “process crimes” based on lying after the fact, with no wrongdoing by Trump to weasel his way into office, it will prove highly unfulfilling and likely inadequate to take down a presidency. But if Stone’s encrypted communications yield evidence of wrongdoing to gain the presidency, maybe there’s fire behind the smoke.

As Julian notes, that won’t happen in a month, and maybe not in time for the next election. Or maybe not at all, if the communications don’t bear out the supposition. It can be argued that there was no reason for Stone to lie if there was no underlying crime, which begs the question of whether Stone lied. Then again, never underestimate the capacity of people to be at their worst, particularly when they have a tattoo of Nixon on their back.