Prosecutor: Stone lied to protect Trump
A federal prosecutor Wednesday charged that Roger Stone lied repeatedly to a congressional committee about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election because “the truth looked bad for the Trump campaign, and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”
In his opening statement in Stone’s trial in the federal courthouse in Washington, the prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, promised jurors that reams of documentary evidence, buttressed by testimony of witnesses, including former White House strategist Steve Bannon, would prove Stone’s guilt.
In a riveting outline of the government’s case, Zelinsky painted a portrait of Stone, a self-described “dirty trickster,” trying to aid Trump’s campaign through underhanded dealings and subterfuge and later concealing his work. The prosecution is one of the few cases still outstanding from the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.
Zelinsky said that Stone repeatedly threatened a fragile witness struggling with alcoholism in an attempt to cover up his own efforts to determine whether WikiLeaks had information that would damage Trump’s election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Stone also concealed hundreds of text messages and email exchanges that would have exposed his efforts to contact the founder of WikiLeaks and to relay information to senior Trump officials.
In August 2016, Stone wrote to Paul Manafort, then the chairman of Trump’s campaign, that he had an idea “to save” Trump, but “it ain’t pretty.” Zelinsky also said that in the summer of 2016, as Stone was trying to contact WikiLeaks, he had two phone calls with Trump himself, although he said the government does not know what they discussed.
Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser who has been friends with the president for 40 years, is charged with seven felonies, including obstructing justice, false statements and tampering with a witness. The case revolves mainly around his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017, when it was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
That same committee is now leading the impeachment inquiry into whether Trump pressured the president of Ukraine this year to begin investigations that would help him politically as his reelection campaign gained momentum.
Congressional investigators were focused on WikiLeaks because it was the repository for thousands of emails and other documents that Russian operatives stole from Democratic computer networks in a covert effort to increase Trump’s chances of victory. Prosecutors say that Stone, 67, falsely testified that he possessed no emails or text messages about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he never asked an intermediary to seek information from or pass messages to Assange.