In an op-ed he wrote for the right-wing Daily Caller, Roger Stone revealed Thursday that during the 2016 presidential race he discussed upcoming WikiLeaks disclosures with at least one senior Trump campaign official.
In the piece, Stone offers an exchange he had with then-chief executive of the Trump campaign Steve Bannon, emails which special counsel Robert Mueller has as part of his investigation into Russian election interference.
As part of the probe, Mueller is looking into whether the lobbyist had any inside information obtained from WikiLeaks and whether he shared any of it with Donald Trump, who was then a presidential candidate, or with Trump’s inner circle.
“What was that this morning???” Bannon wrote to Stone in October 2016. The email referred to an announcement made earlier that day by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who said he would provide additional Clinton-related leaks. The promise of the leaks later turned out to be nothing more than a publicity stunt.
Stone then said in his reply to Bannon that although the documents were not released, there would be “a load every week going forward.” Such a prediction, Stone claims in his opinion piece, was based on publicly available information.
“More importantly my prediction of ‘a load every week going forward’ is based on Assange’s own public announcement hours before-that there would be weekly releases going through and beyond the election and not any communication with Wikileaks or Assange,” he wrote.
However, only a few days later, WikiLeaks unveiled the hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Stone further said he has not yet been contacted by the special counsel’s office, but a number of his associates have. Last week, Mueller’s investigators interviewed Bannon, who along with several other former senior Trump campaign staffers, has told them Stone presented himself as a direct link through which the campaign can obtain information from Wikileaks. Since then, Stone has changed his story, saying he had no ties to Assange of WikiLeaks, but rather relied only on information that was publicly available.
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