Roger Stone Made His Name as a Dirty Trickster, but the Trump-Russia Coverup
May Finally Bring Him Down
By James Risen, The Intercept
28 January 19
The government was shut down, but Robert Mueller kept working.
That became clear early Friday morning, when FBI agents arrested Roger Stone
at his Florida home in connection with Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation.
Stone later appeared in federal court to face charges that include witness
tampering and making false statements to Congress.
Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, a frenetic character with a
reputation as a Republican dirty trickster, and one of the most colorful
figures in the Trump-Russia story, has finally been brought to heel. With
this latest indictment, the special counsel is drawing ever closer to
Trump's inner circle.
The indictment sheds new light on the alleged efforts by Stone and others
around Trump to glean information about the trove of Democratic emails
obtained by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. It also raises
new questions about whether Stone sought to influence and direct WikiLeaks
releases that were damaging to the Clinton campaign.
Since his name first surfaced in connection with the Trump-Russia inquiry,
Stone has behaved in public like a clown, reveling in his cheap celebrity
while also taunting Mueller and the press. He acted in the same manner after
his court appearance on Friday, meeting the crowd outside the Florida
courthouse with both arms raised in a Nixon-like victory salute, while
vowing not to testify falsely against Trump to save himself and predicting
his ultimate vindication.
But the indictment shows that Stone has some serious legal problems, and
that his role as a possible link between the Trump circle and the
cyberassault on the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign can't be
laughed off or easily dismissed.
The indictment alleges that Stone engaged in a concerted effort to find out
what documents WikiLeaks had obtained that could harm Clinton's campaign,
and what WikiLeaks (identified in the indictment only as "Organization 1")
was going to do with them. He was scrambling to find out in advance when the
documents would be released and tried to get messages to WikiLeaks to look
for specific documents in its trove that he thought would be most harmful to
Clinton, according to the indictment.
The indictment says that in June and July 2016, Stone told Trump campaign
officials that he had information that WikiLeaks had documents that would be
damaging to the Clinton campaign. The indictment notes that Stone did so
after the Democratic National Committee had already made public the fact
that it had been hacked by the Russian government, strongly implying that
Stone should have known that the material obtained by WikiLeaks had come
from the Russians. (The U.S. intelligence community has now concluded that
Russian intelligence hacked the Democrats and turned over a massive archive
of emails to WikiLeaks, which later released them.)
The Trump campaign evidently began to realize that Stone knew what he was
talking about when WikiLeaks released some documents on July 22, 2016. It
was then, according to the indictment, that the Trump campaign began to try
to use Stone's apparent inside knowledge as a weapon.
After that, a senior Trump campaign official was "directed to contact Stone"
to determine what he knew about further document releases and what WikiLeaks
had about the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment, which does not
identify the senior Trump campaign official or say who ordered the official
to contact Stone.
Subsequently, Stone told Trump campaign officials about upcoming WikiLeaks
releases, according to the indictment. Stone used intermediaries to
communicate with WikiLeaks, including in his efforts to influence the
release of specific information that he believed would be particularly
damaging to the Clinton campaign.
In September 2016, Stone asked an intermediary to contact WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange (identified in the indictment as "the head of Organization
1") to get him to find emails from August 2011 that would help prove
specific allegations raised in the press against Clinton about her time as
secretary of state, according to the indictment. The indictment says that on
September 18, 2016, Stone sent an email to "Person 2" (widely identified in
the press Friday as New York comedian Randy Credico), who Stone was then
using as a go-between with Assange. The email included an article that
contained allegations against Clinton related to her time as secretary of
state in the Obama administration. The indictment does not say what those
allegations were. "Please ask [Assange] for any State or HRC email from
August 10 to August 30 - particularly on August 20, 2011, that mention [the
subject of the article] or confirm this narrative."
If the indictment is borne out, Stone's actions come very close to making
him the key missing link in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. He
allegedly worked hard to acquire advance knowledge of WikiLeaks document
releases and, at the Trump campaign's request, gave that information to
Trump campaign officials. He seemingly tried to direct WikiLeaks to release
certain documents in order to increase the damage to Clinton. And he did it
all at a time when he should have realized that the Russians were behind the
Democratic hack.
Still, the indictment does not charge Stone with a crime for his efforts to
act as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. Instead, he
is charged in connection with his efforts to cover up his role in the face
of congressional inquiries that began after the election, and more broadly,
to block investigators from answering underlying questions about Russian
intervention in the 2016 election. "After the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation opened or announced their respective
investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, which included investigating STONE's claims of contact with
[WikiLeaks]," the indictment states. "In response, STONE took steps to
obstruct these investigations."
The indictment shows that Stone used mob-like tactics to try to stop Credico
from honestly telling Congress what he knew. In December 2017, Stone told
Credico that he should be like "Frank Pentangeli" in his congressional
testimony, the indictment says. Pentangeli is a fictional character in "The
Godfather Part II," who told Congress that he didn't know information that
he actually knew. In April 2018, Stone sent Credico an angry email. "You are
a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth." Stone also
threatened Credico's dog. In May, Credico wrote an email back to Stone
saying, "you've opened yourself up to perjury charges like an idiot."
While the charges against Stone don't deal with the underlying question of
collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Stone indictment still
brings Mueller's probe closer than ever to the heart of the matter.
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