President Donald Trump’s adviser Roger Stone on Tuesday denied any involvement in what U.S. officials have called a Russian campaign of interference and disinformation during the 2016 presidential election, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Stone said that “a substantial amount” of the questioning by the House Intelligence Committee focused on his interactions with entities and organizations that helped disseminate stolen emails aimed at embarrassing the Democratic Party, including the website WikiLeaks and a hacker entity called Guccifer 2.0. Before taking the stand in front of the House Intel Committee, Stone disclosed his communication with Guccifer 2.0 and detailed his interactions with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
During the 2016 election campaign, both Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks published stolen emails from Democratic Party organizations, in what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as a Russian effort to tip the presidential race toward Trump. Stone, a veteran Republican operative who worked for Trump briefly as a consultant and continues to serve as an informal adviser and confidant, said that he resented “any allegation that I would collude with the oppressive Russian state to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
After his testimony, Stone called the House investigation into Russian activity during the 2016 election an “entirely political exercise.”, however noting that “the entire exchange was completely professional,” and that “everybody was courteous.”
The Journal adds that Guccifer 2.0’s interactions with U.S. political operatives have long been of interest to congressional investigators. A Republican political operative in Florida received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Party documents from Guccifer 2.0 and posted some of those on a blog called HelloFLA.com, The Wall Street Journal reported in May. Concerning WikiLeaks, Stone said his contact with Assange came through an “intermediary” he described as a journalist, whom he refused to name. He noted that he reached out to the unnamed journalist after Assange announced publicly that he was in possession of some Democratic emails and was preparing to publish them.
As in other interviews conducted by the committee, Stone’s testimony took place behind closed doors, but he has repeatedly asked to be allowed to testify publicly, The Journal writes.
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