Steve Bannon will be surprise witness at Roger Stone trial

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, will be a star witness at the trial in Washington of Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and ally of Donald Trump, a court heard on Wednesday.

The surprise announcement was made during opening statements on Wednesday by prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, who told the court that Stone had “straight-up lied” to the US Congress about aspects of the 2016 election campaign “because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump”.

A self-described “dirty trickster”, Stone is accused of lying to the House of Representatives intelligence committee about the Trump campaign’s efforts to obtain emails hacked by Russia that were published by the WikiLeaks website with the effect of harming Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

On day two of Stone’s trial at a federal court in Washington, Zelinsky told the jury they would hear from Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign and went on to work at the White House. This sets the stage for the most high-profile and bruising scrutiny yet of the inner workings of the 2016 Trump campaign, months after the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller wound up.

Zelinsky said the court will also hear from the former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, who testified for the government last year in a trial that led to the conviction of the former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Unlike previous court cases related to senior figures in the president’s orbit, Trump’s name was cited frequently in Zelinsky’s opening statement before US district court Judge Amy Berman Jackson – including an allegation that he was in direct contact with Stone as the latter pursued hacked emails to hurt

Clinton.

“Now you’ll ask, why didn’t Roger Stone just tell the truth?” Zelinsky told jurors as the 67-year-old defendant, sitting at a desk behind him, looked on. “The evidence in this case will show that Roger Stone lied to the House intelligence committee because the truth looked bad. The truth looked bad for the Trump campaign, and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”

Stone, who has a tattoo of former president Richard Nixon on his back, has been a confidant of the current US president for 40 years.

Zelinsky said that in July 2016, Stone spoke by phone with Trump for about 10 minutes. About an hour later, he alleged, Stone told his associate Jerome Corsi in an email “that a friend of theirs living in London should see Julian Assange”. Two days later, Corsi wrote back and said their friend planned two more disclosures of hacked emails.

Zelinsky continued: “Stone regularly updated people on the Trump campaign at the senior levels about whatever information he thought he had about WikiLeaks. [He] was going to the very top of the Trump campaign – the CEO of the Trump campaign – a