Roger Stone Indicted In Russia Probe
Roger Stone, who worked with the Trump campaign in an official and unofficial capacity throughout the campaign, has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Roger Stone, who worked with President Trump’s in a formal and informal capacity from its beginning, has been indicted on charges including witness tampering and other charges as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia:
WASHINGTON — Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump who has spent decades plying the dark arts of scandal-mongering and dirty tricks to help influence American political campaigns, was arrested early Friday after an indictment was unsealed in the special counsel investigation.
Mr. Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering, according to the special counsel’s office.
The indictment is the first public move in months by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with Trump associates.
Mr. Stone and his lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Stone, a self-described dirty trickster who has spent decades plying the dark arts of scandal-mongering and dirty tricks to help influence American political campaigns, has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian meddling campaign.
According to the indictment, Trump campaign officials contacted Mr. Stone during the summer of 2016 about future releases from WikiLeaks, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s campaign knew about the stolen emails before they were released.
His brash behavior made him less of a subject of news media scrutiny than other current and former aides to President Trump — like the character in a whodunit whom readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime.
But the special counsel’s investigators spent months encircling Mr. Stone, renewing scrutiny about his role during the 2016 presidential race. Investigators interviewed former Trump campaign advisers and several of his associates about Mr. Stone’s fund-raising during the campaign and his contacts with WikiLeaks.
More from The Washington Post:
Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was arrested by the FBI on Friday on charges he lied and tried to tamper with a witness to hide the details of his efforts to learn about releases of Democrats’ hacked emails during the 2016 campaign.
Stone was charged with seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering.
With Stone’s indictment, Mueller has struck deep inside Trump’s inner circle, charging a long-standing friend of the president. The court filing charges Stone sought to gather information about hacked emails at the direction of a senior Trump campaign official.
The indictment centers on Stone’s efforts to find out when potentially damaging releases of internal Hillary Clinton campaign emails would be released by Julian Assange, the leader of the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks. U.S. officials say Russian intelligence agents hacked Democrats and their email accounts and then shared them with WikiLeaks, which publicized them during the final months of the 2016 election.
People familiar with the case said Organization 1 is WikiLeaks. The indictment does not identify the senior Trump campaign official, nor does it say who directed the senior campaign official to contact Stone. The indictment also does not accuse Stone of conspiring with Assange or Russian officials.
After the election, according to the indictment, Stone tried to cover up what he’d done by lying about it to Congress and attempting to convince another witness, identified only as “Person 2,” to refuse to talk to the House Intelligence Committee. People close to the case said Person 2 is New York comedian Randy Credico.
As Credico prepared for possible testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Stone repeatedly pressured him not to reveal anything that would suggest Stone had misled the committee in his earlier denials, according to the indictment. In December 2017, authorities charge, Stone used a reference to one of the “Godfather” movies to try to keep Credico quiet.
“Stone told Person 2 that Person 2 should do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’ before (the committee) in order to avoid contradicting Stone’s testimony,” the indictment charges, adding: “Frank Pentangeli is a character in the film The Godfather: Part II, which both Stone and Person 2 had discussed, who testifies before a congressional committee and in that testimony claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know.”
In the film, the Pentangeli character publicly declares “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” when asked at a congressional hearing about his career in the Mafia.
Stone, 66, who has been friends with Trump for three decades, served briefly as a formal adviser to his presidential campaign in 2015 and then remained in contact with him and top advisers through the election.
The GOP operative has been a key focus of the special counsel for months as Mueller has investigated whether anyone in Trump’s orbit conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Stone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(…)
During the White House race, Stone publicly cheered on the group WikiLeaks as it released hacked emails that embarrassed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Stone also claimed before the election that he was in contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange whom he called “my hero.”
In July, a grand jury indicted 12 Russian military officers on charges that they orchestrated the hacks and distributed pilfered documents to WikiLeaks and other sites.
After the election, Stone acknowledged exchanging what he characterized as benign messages with Guccifer 2.0, a Twitter persona that U.S. intelligence officials say was a front operated by the Russian military officers.
But Stone has repeatedly denied any contact with Russia or WikiLeaks. He has said he had no advance knowledge of what material WikiLeaks held, adding that predictions he made about the group’s plans were based on Assange’s public comments and tips from associates.
The investigation “has devolved into gotcha word games, perjury traps and trumped-up process crimes,” Stone told The Washington Post late last year. “I think people can see through the political motivations behind this.”
He added: “Where is the evidence of Russian collusion or WikiLeaks collaboration?”
In sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee last year, Stone also denied any contact with WikiLeaks or knowledge of its plans, saying he did not intend to imply that he had communicated with Assange directly.
In a closed-door meeting late last year, the committee voted to turn over a copy of Stone’s testimony to Mueller, who requested the document.
WikiLeaks and Assange have also said they never communicated with Stone, who the group said “was trolling to attract attention to himself,” according to a tweet late last year by WikiLeaks’s legal campaign.
During the campaign, Stone privately told associates that he was in contact with Assange and that WikiLeaks had material that would be damaging to Clinton. In an October 2016 email to Trump’s then-chief campaign strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Stone implied he had information about the group’s plans.
In recent months, the longtime GOP operative has offered conflicting accounts of who provided him with tips about WikiLeaks’s plans — first identifying Credico as his source and then acknowledging he also received information from conservative writer Jerome Corsi and through an email forwarded to him from then-Fox News correspondent James Rosen.
Stone was arrested in a pre-dawn raid on his home, which is significantly different from how previous defendants have been treated and an indication that the investigators may have feared that Stone would seek to destroy evidence if he knew an indictment was coming:
"FBI. Open the door.”
Watch exclusive CNN footage of the FBI arresting longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Stone has been indicted by a grand jury on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. https://t.co/ZQCuuxLHAG pic.twitter.com/moQwNndB91
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 25, 2019
Stone is the fifth person close to Trump who has been charged in the ongoing investigation or investigations related to it. The other three, of course, include George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, who worked on the Trump campaign during that part of the campaign falling before, during, and after the 2016 Republican National Convention, and longtime Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen. In each of these cases, the indictments came in connection with matters not related to the campaign or the Russia investigation, and in Cohen’s case the indictment was handed down in connection with a separate investigation in the Southern District of New York that includes an investigation of Cohen’s involvement in an effort to pay off women who had been involved in affairs with Trump in an effort to stave off embarrassing and potentially explosive revelations about Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. At one point or another, all three of these men eventually ended up cooperating with the Mueller campaign, although Mueller is now seeking to revoke Manafort’s plea agreement due to the fact that he was repeatedly lying to Mueller’s investigators even after entering into the plea agreement.
The Stone indictment, most notably, does not focus on activities that occurred during the campaign. Instead, it alleges that Stone lied in numerous instances, including in connection with testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and that he engaged in witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with the testimony of other before the committee and other forums. Despite the fact that the charges are not directly related to what happened during the campaign, the indictment goes into significant detail regarding Stone’s contacts with the Trump campaign and with an entity described as “Organization 1,” which is quite obviously Wikileaks. Stone has previously denied any connection between himself and Wikileaks or the leaks of documents from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign adviser John Podesta. Based on the Mueller allegations in the indictment, it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to show that Stone was working as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and persons associated with Wikileaks. There also seems to be significant evidence that the source who provided Wikileaks with information pertaining to the campaign had at least some sort of connection to Russian officials or to persons who were running the cyberwarfare angle of the Russian interference campaign, This is perhaps the most direct evidence yet of a connection between the Trump campaign and outside groups that may or may not have ties to Russia. While it doesn’t directly prove the existence of such links, it certainly goes a long way toward establishing such a link.
As noted, Stone will be brought before Judge in Fort Lauderdale, where he was arrested, later this morning. This will be a brief procedural hearing during which Stone will be asked if he understands the charges against him and whether he has counsel. The issue of bail may also come up, but it’s likely that, at least for now, he will be released on his own recognizance. This hearing will also begin the process of transferring Stone’s case from the Fort Lauderdale to the District of Columbia, where the charges are pending. This will begin the process against Stone and, during this time, it’s worth remembering that Stone is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. At the same time, though this is certainly a major development in the Russia investigation and brings the case yet close to the President, who ought to be fairly concerned this morning.
Here’s the indictment:
U.S. v. Roger Stone Indictment by on Scribd
Sarah Huckster says this has nothing to do with the President or his Campaign.
Muwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
If I’m a Republican Senator this morning I’m wondering why the fvck I’m backing this criminal in a shutdown that is destroying the party.
The derps on Fox and Friends literally babbled “where is the collusion???”
If I were in the White House press corps, I’d ask Sanders, “how much longer are you guys going to keep up this sham of a presidency?”, And I would be escorted out of the building and off the grounds, and it would be worth it 😛
Consider my freude to be thoroughly schadened this morning.
“I’d be lying if I said my men weren’t committing crimes.”
Couldn’t have happened to a better rat-f_cker…
In the tsunami of coverage I have not caught one important factoid: Was a search warrant served? If not, that SWAT team business was just a huge gesture. But if so, they really wanted to get in there before stuff was destroyed. Or so it looks to me.
Yeah, all that is kind of overkill if they’re only there to arrest him. Were they after evidence too, and were his other properties also raided?
@rachel: I have heard his NY place was. Haven’t seen anything in print yet.
If I’m Donnie Jr., I’m starting to wonder a few things:
1. How far away is Mueller from me?
2. How vindictive is my soon-to-be-ex-wife and did I inadvertently leave any incriminating papers lying around the house?
3. How great a dad was Don Sr. over the years that I should refuse to flip on him?
I’m seriously thinking we need a thread on the over/under on Junior selling the old man down the river.
While this is definitely a major development, I’m also assuming that these charges are going to be pretty much it for Stone.
@Not the IT Dept.:
I think it’s low. I mean, what does Dennison have on Dennison Jr and his other spawn?
@JohnMcC:
Yes, they are busy carrying out a search warrant right now.
@Not the IT Dept.: @Kathy:
Junior refused to speak to Trump for a year after he dumped Ivana for Marla. There may be some lingering resentment.
In the Trump crime syndicate, All Are Punished.
https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1088829374596558849
Trump needs to appoint his own special counsel.
Eric Holder, John O. Brennan, James Comey, Michael Hayden and James Clapper all lied to Congress with no consequence.
the President has no such authority, dumbass.
@Teve:
Not to mention if all these Democrats were suspected of having committed crimes, it would beggar belief that a partisan Republican like Sessions wouldn’t have opened investigations on them.
BTW, I lack experience in criminal enterprises, large scale fraud, and related fields, so maybe this is a naive question: why do criminals keep evidence of their crimes?
I suppose it could come in handy when the crime is uncovered, and the authorities come chasing after you. Then you might want to trade such evidence, if it can be used against others, for leniency. But, then, why not hide the evidence where it will be at least hard to find? I mean things like a safety deposit box two states over, obtained by someone with no connection to you, or even a lock box buried in a vacant lot.
You could always get it, or direct the authorities to get it, easily enough.
@Kathy: an elderly friend of mine who watched the Watergate proceedings every day on TV as a young man, messaged me this morning and said “you know compared to these idiots, Nixon’s boys were members of Mensa.”
@Kathy:
The ‘hero’ of my adult mysteries (dribbling out into the world slowly) is a reformed thief who occasionally gives helpful advice to young criminals just starting out. Rule 1: Don’t create evidence, and 2: if you have to create evidence, for God’s sake make it impossible to find, and 3) If you can’t help but create evidence and aren’t sure you can hide it, then obfuscate to create reasonable doubt for some future jury.
Criminals aren’t geniuses, and worse are criminals like Trump and his crime family who don’t understand that they are criminals.
This is why my long-time advice for Trump has been 1) Pardon, 2) Resign and 3) Flee the country. There is a mountain of evidence building against Trump, his kids, his son-in-law, and just about everyone who has ever worked for him. It’s pretty much too late now, though. At this point Trump needs to be ‘deal making’ on immunity in exchange for resignation. He won’t though, because he’s a fcking idiot.
@Kathy:
I imagine that computers are the big prize. Files you think are deleted are still there. Traces of other websites abound and lead investigators in new directions.
Friend of mine just posted a screenshot of what was on Fox news 22 minutes ago. A story about a Price is Right contestant being in the bathroom when their name was called.
@Kiy:
It’s easy to delete a file so it cannot be reconstructed. Just follow these simple steps:
1) delete the file
2) format the hard drive
3) remove the hard drive from the computer and smash it into bits
4) burn the smashed hard drive into ash
5) launch the ashes into the Sun
In these days of cloud storage, though, that might not be enough.
That’s a tad more complicated 😉
@Kathy:
accelerating the ashes to 67,000 mph might be the tricky part. 😛
@Michael Reynolds:
Did you see Gattaca? We’re not that far from being able to find out someone’s identity based on that little biological evidence.
@Kathy:
If you haven’t tried this recently, it’s a bit more difficult than you might remember!
Here is a little something from the comments over at Balloon Juice:
28
Cheryl Rofer says: (Balloon Juice https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/01/25/friday-indictments-open-thread-roger-stone-has-been-arrested/#comments ..)
January 25, 2019 at 7:36 am
@Kathy: I’d run a program that did a 7-pass erase of the hard drive before smashing it, just to be safe.
Not keeping 12 or so burner phones around, as Cohen did, is another good idea.
@Michael Reynolds:
Because his “informal adviser” was arrested on some lying to congress charges? Put that in one of your adult mysteries and your readers will cry out for more believable plots.
I’m adding a question #4 to the above:
4. Should I flip on Dad before he flips on me?
This pleases me.
Digging into the details makes me wonder. For instance, there’s the detail that the House Intelligence committee voted to hand over Stone’s testimony to them late last year. This snaps everything into place, I think. They look over that document, conclude that it gives them solid evidence that Stone lied to that committee, and seek an indictment on that basis.
But wait, it’s not possible that they didn’t bring Stone before their own grand jury, is it? What did he say to them? Did he take the Fifth? And what about Randy Credico? Did they talk to him? Or did they even know that Stone pointed the finger to him?
Also, that vote that took place late last year. One can imagine that with the flipover from R controlled to D controlled House was a factor. How big a factor? Where was Devin Nunes on this? In fact, his name has been MIA for several months. How many lame ducks were on the House Intel committee? This is fascinating stuff.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be enough for you if they found a murder weapon with Trump’s fingerprints and DNA all over it…perhaps that 5th Ave. comment was meant for you too…
@James Pearce: You…
You’re pretty thick-headed, aren’t you? I mean, I don’t get the whole picture when I look at a case like this, but even I can see that
means that Mueller is using Stone to get further in and further up the Trump campaign.
@An Interested Party: Don’t get me wrong. The Stone indictment is “not good” for Trump, but nothing has been “good” for Trump his entire presidency and he’s not just going to slink away because one of his toadies is getting prosecuted. This isn’t the first toadie to be prosecuted, nor is it the first time Michael has planned the funeral over some flesh wound.
@rachel: I’m a Colorado bighorn so no, not a thick skull. Just horns. Big ones.
And while I have no doubt that Trump was up to no good with the Russians, either coordinating with them behind closed doors (or “not-coordinating” in the open) I also recognize that removing Trump from office is a political act and it won’t be accomplished by folks who think Mueller is going to do it for them.