Corsi talking to Mueller about possible plea deal
Trump associate says developments could come soon
WASHINGTON — Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert Mueller, according to Corsi and another person with knowledge of the talks.
The talks with Corsi — an associate of President Donald Trump and GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller’s team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisers were linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails in 2016, a key part of his long-running inquiry.
Corsi provided research on Democratic figures during the campaign to Stone, a longtime Trump adviser.
For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone’s activities in an effort to determine whether he coordinated with WikiLeaks. Stone and WikiLeaks have repeatedly denied any such coordination.
Stone has said that Corsi also has a relationship with Trump, built on their shared interest in the falsehood that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Corsi confirmed the plea negotiations after they were first reported by The Washington Post on Friday.
“It’s true. Your story is accurate,” he said, declining to comment further except to say there may be developments next week.
Stone said in a statement that he was not aware of any plea discussions involving Corsi, describing him as an investigative journalist “whose activities I would think would largely be covered under the First Amendment.”
Last week, Corsi said his efforts to cooperate with prosecutors had broken down and that he expected to be indicted on a charge of allegedly lying.
He described feeling under enormous pressure from Mueller and assured his supporters that he remains supportive of the president.
In a webcast and a series of interviews, Corsi said he had spoken to prosecutors for 40 hours and feared that he could spend much of the remainder of his life in prison.
At that time, he gave no indication that he intended to plead guilty, instead casting himself as an unfairly targeted victim of a Mueller campaign against Trump.
Then, Corsi abruptly fell silent, canceling a scheduled Nov. 13 interview with NBC. David Gray, his attorney, told NBC that he had just spoken to the special counsel’s office and had advised Corsi to cancel.
Corsi has resumed talks with Mueller’s team about a possible deal that could result in him agreeing to plead guilty in exchange for leniency, according to the person familiar with the situation.
It is not clear what information Corsi could leverage to get a deal with prosecutors. He told the Daily Caller last week that prosecutors are focused on whether he had developed a source with inside information about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans.
Corsi said he did not have a direct source to the group. Instead, he said he developed a theory that Assange had access to hacked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton Jerome Corsi confirmed the plea negotiations after they were first reported by The Washington Post on Friday. campaign chairman John Podesta and that WikiLeaks would release them in October 2016.
He told the Daily Caller that he shared his prediction with many people, including Stone.
If Mueller could prove that Corsi learned about Podesta’s emails from Assange or another person in contact with him, he could try to link WikiLeaks’ releases to Stone or others in Trump’s world.
Stone told the publication that Corsi never relayed such information.
“He never told me that he had figured out or believed that John Podesta’s emails had been stolen,” Stone said.
On Aug. 21, 2016, Stone tweeted “it will soon (be) the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” He has insisted his tweet had nothing to do with any plan by WikiLeaks and that it was based on research Corsi had provided to him about work Podesta and his lobbyist brother Tony had done involving Russia.
“He simply told me of their Russian business deals in banking gas and uranium,” Stone said in a text message this week to The Washington Post. “There was NO WikiLeaks context.”
Stone told the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017 that his Podesta tweet was “based on a comprehensive, early August opposition research briefing provided to me by investigative journalist, Dr. Jerome Corsi, which I then asked him to memorialize in a memo that he sent me on August 31st, all of which was culled from public records. There was no need to have John Podesta’s email to learn that he and his presidential candidate were in bed with the clique around Putin.”
Stone has since said that the information in the Aug. 31 memo — which he received 10 days after his now-infamous tweet — was similar to information that Corsi had relayed to him verbally before the tweet.
The prediction that Corsi said he made that Assange would publish Podesta’s emails was correct: on Oct. 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began publishing 50,000 emails stolen from Podesta’s account, releasing them in batches of a few thousand at a time each day leading up to the November election.
Corsi told the Daily Caller that he based his prediction onpublic sources of information, including the fact that Podesta was not among the Democrats whose emails had been published by WikiLeaks when the group released Democratic National Committee correspondence in July.
He said he concluded WikiLeaks must be holding back Podesta’s correspondence to make a bigger splash later in the campaign.
Podesta did not work for the DNC and the emails were stolen from his private Gmail account.