Trump’s Stone tied to Assange
One of the enduring mysteries left unsolved by the Mueller inquiry was whether Roger Stone, U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime friend and political adviser, ever communicated during the 2016 presidential campaign with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Federal investigators chased the question for months to figure out who, if anyone, in Trump’s world knew that WikiLeaks was going to release a trove of damaging Democratic emails in an effort to bolster his chances of winning.
Now hundreds of pages of court documents from the federal investigation of Stone, released last week, show that at least after the election, the two men had maintained a personal relationship. Stone had repeatedly denied that fact after federal and congressional inquiries got underway.
Records show he exchanged messages with Assange in June 2017, seven months after Trump’s election victory. The men discussed a different federal inquiry into the release by WikiLeaks in 2010 of classified American documents, a decade-long saga that resulted in criminal charges against Assange.
“If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards,” Stone wrote in a private Twitter message to Assange. In another message, Stone said that he was trying to intercede “at the highest level of government” on Assange’s behalf. “Fed treatment of you and WikiLeaks is an outrage,” he wrote.
Assange is now in a London prison, fighting extradition to the United States.
The records shed no new light on whether Stone, 67, directly communicated with Assange before the election. Investigators for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, failed to resolve that question at least in part because both Stone and Assange refused to co-operate. The team found insufficient evidence to charge anyone associated with the Trump campaign of conspiring with Russia to influence the results of the election.
The hundreds of pages of search warrants and affidavits were released in response to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other news media organizations.
Prosecutors said that Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks before the 2016 election because the truth would have embarrassed Trump and his campaign.
Last month, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who oversaw Stone’s case, rejected his request for a new trial. Federal authorities are expected to order him to begin serving his sentence soon.