Writer Corsi reported to be in plea talks with Mueller
Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to a person with knowledge of the talks.
The talks with Corsi — an associate of President Trump and GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller’s team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisors 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 advisor. 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 Corsi has a relationship with Trump built on their shared interest in the falsehood that President Obama was not born in the U.S.
David Gray, an attorney for Corsi, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Mueller. Stone would not comment on Corsi’s plea negotiations, and a lawyer for Trump also declined.
The deal could still be derailed.
Last week, Corsi said that his efforts to cooperate had broken down and that he expected to be indicted on allegations of lying. He said he felt enormous pressure from Mueller and still supported Trump.
In a webcast and a series of interviews, Corsi said he had spoken to prosecutors for 40 hours and feared he could spend much of the remainder of his life in prison.
After two months of interviews, Corsi, 72, said he felt his brain was “mush.”
“Trying to explain yourself to these people is impossible,” he added. “I guess I couldn’t tell the special prosecutor what he wanted to hear.”
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. Gray, his attorney, told NBC he had just spoken to the special counsel’s office and had advised Corsi to cancel.
Corsi has since resumed talks with Mueller’s team about a possible deal that could result in him pleading guilty in exchange for leniency, according to the source familiar with the situation.
It is not clear what information Corsi could leverage to get such a deal. However, he told the Daily Caller last week that prosecutors were focused on whether he had a source with inside information about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans.
Corsi said he did not have a direct source. He said he developed a theory that Assange had access to hacked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and that WikiLeaks would release them in October 2016.
He told the Daily Caller he shared his prediction with Stone and many others.
If Mueller could prove Corsi learned about Podesta’s emails from Assange or someone in contact with him, he could try to link WikiLeaks’ releases to Stone or others in Trump’s world.
Stone told the publication Corsi never relayed such information, saying, “He never told me that he had figured out or believed that John Podesta’s emails had been stolen.”
On Aug. 21, 2016, Stone tweeted: “It will soon [be] the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” He has said that his tweet had nothing to do with any WikiLeaks plan and that it was based on research Corsi gave him about work Podesta and his lobbyist brother, Tony, had done involving Russia.
Corsi “simply told me of their Russian business deals in banking gas and uranium,” Stone said in a text this week to the Washington Post. “There was NO WikiLeaks context.”
Stone told the House Intelligence Committee in 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.”
The prediction 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 a few thousand each day before the November election.
Corsi told the Daily Caller that he based his prediction on public information, including the fact Podesta was not among the Democrats whose emails were published by WikiLeaks with 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; the emails were stolen from his private Gmail account.