Associate of Trump confidant: No deal

WASHINGTON — An associate of Trump confidant Roger Stone said Monday that he is rejecting a plea offer in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

In an email to the Associated Press, Jerome Corsi, a conservative author who has pushed conspiracy theories, said he planned to reject a potential plea deal with prosecutors.

He did not elaborate, but in earlier interviews with other news organizations, he said he had been offered a chance to plead guilty to a single count of lying to investigators. He said he planned to reject that offer because it would force him to admit to willfully lying, which he insisted he did not do.

“They can put me in prison the rest of my life,” Corsi told CNN. “I am not going to sign a lie.”

Mueller’s team has questioned Corsi, a former Washington bureau chief of InfoWars, as prosecutors scrutinize Stone’s possible connections to WikiLeaks. American intelligence agencies have said Russia was the source of the hacked material released by the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential election. Those emails included messages from John Podesta, the chairman of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Mueller is trying to determine whether Stone and other associates of President Donald Trump had advance knowledge ofWikiLeaks’ plans.