Stone confidant in plea deal talks with Mueller team
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A conservative writer and associate of Trump confidant Roger Stone said Friday that he is in plea talks with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
Jerome Corsi told The Associated Press he has been negotiating a potential plea but declined to comment further. He said on a Youtube show this month that he expected to be charged with lying to federal investigators, though he said at the time that he was innocent of wrongdoing.
Mueller’s team questioned Corsi as part of an investigation into Stone’s connections with Wikileaks.
The confirmation of plea talks — first reported by The Washington Post — comes as Mueller’s team has received fresh information from Trump personally and as federal prosecutors in Virginia recently inadvertently disclosed the existence of sealed charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
It’s unclear if the charges against Assange are related to Mueller’s investigation, but Wikileaks was singled out in an indictment last summer against a group of Russian intelligence officers accused of carrying out the wide-ranging hack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other Democratic organizations in 2016.
In a brief phone call with the AP, Corsi declined to elaborate on the details of any plea deal or say if a court hearing had been set.