Trump confidant’s threat to ‘bring down house of cards’
Weeks after Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in the Russia investigation, Roger Stone, a confidant of President Donald Trump, reassured WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that if prosecutors came after him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards”, according to FBI documents made public yesterday.
The records reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic emails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass opponent Hillary Clinton.
The documents — FBI affidavits submitted to obtain search warrants in the criminal investigation into Stone — were released following a court case brought by the Associated
Press and other media organisations.
They were made public as Stone, convicted last year in Mueller’s investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, awaits a date to surrender to a federal prison system that has grappled with coronavirus outbreaks.
In a June 2017 Twitter direct message cited in the records, Stone reassured Assange the issue was “still nonsense” and said “as a journalist it doesn’t matter where you get information only that it is accurate and authentic”.
“If the US Government moves on you I will bring down the entire house of cards,” Stone wrote, according to a transcript of the message cited in the search warrant affidavit.
“With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.” Stone was probably referring to a sexual assault investigation dropped weeks earlier by Swedish authorities. Assange, who at the time was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was charged last year with a series of crimes by the US Justice Department, including Espionage Act violations for directing former Army private Chelsea Manning in one of the largest compromises of classified information in US history.
The records make clear the Trump campaign’s curiosity about what information WikiLeaks was going to make public. Former White House adviser Steve Bannon told Mueller’s team under questioning that he had asked Stone about WikiLeaks because he had heard Stone had a channel to Assange, and he was hoping for more releases of damaging information.
In a statement, Stone acknowledged that the search warrant affidavits contain private communication, but insisted that they “prove no crimes”.
“I have no trepidation about their release as they confirm there was no illegal activity and certainly no Russian collusion by me during the 2016 election,” Stone said.
“There is, to this day, no evidence that I had or knew about the source or content of the WikiLeaks disclosures prior to their public release.”
Stone was among six associates of Trump charged in Mueller’s investigation.
He was convicted last year of lying to House lawmakers, tampering with a witness and obstructing Congress’ own Russia probe.
A judge in February sentenced Stone to 40 months in prison in a case that exposed fissures inside the Justice Department — the entire trial team quit the prosecution amid a dispute over the recommended punishment — and between Trump and Attorney General William Barr, who said the President’s tweets about ongoing cases made his job “impossible”.