Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
GOP operative Stone denies Russia collusion
WASHINGTON — Republican political consultant Roger Stone testified Tuesday to a House committee investigating whether President Donald Trump’s aides had improper contacts with Moscow during last year’s campaign.
Stone later denied to reporters that he had cooperated with Russian agents or operatives during the race, and said he knew of no one else who did so either.
“I am aware of no evidence whatsoever of collusion by the Russian state or anyone in the Trump campaign,” Stone said after he had appeared for nearly three hours in a closed-door session of the House intelligence committee.
But Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., ranking committee member, told reporters that Stone, a combative Republican operative who began his career under President Richard Nixon, had declined to answer some of the panel’s questions, raising the possibility that Stone might be called back under subpoena.
“We hope that he will cooperate in the future,” Schiff said. “If not it will be necessary to subpoena him to bring him back and answer those important questions.”
Stone, of Fort Lauderdale, left the Trump campaign soon after it was launched in mid-2015 but continued to maintain contact with Trump.
He landed in the Democrats’ crosshairs partly due to his own boasts and tweets.
Congressional investigators are especially interested in learning how Stone was able to predict last year that WikiLeaks would soon disclose digital documents related to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign — a prediction that proved accurate.
WikiLeaks released thousands of private emails pilfered from computer networks used by the Democratic National Committee days later, including some blamed for undermining Clinton’s campaign.
Stone said after his testimony Tuesday that he had refused to identify his source. He said an “opinion journalist,” who he said was in touch with fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, had told him that the anti-secrecy website was planning to publish the stolen emails.
In another incident last year, Stone appeared to also foreshadow the release of emails allegedly stolen by Russian hackers from the Gmail account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, by tweeting that “it will soon (be) Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
Podesta’s pilfered emails appeared online soon after.
Though Stone volunteered in March to appear before the panel, he called the closed-door hearing “a political proceeding” and accused the committee of cowardice for not letting him testify in public.
Stone said he had not heard from special counsel Robert Mueller, who is overseeing a separate criminal probe into Russian contacts with Trump’s aides and into the White House response to the scandal.