“We Have A Mutual Friend,” — Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and Russian Military Intelligence
This article covers Roger Stone’s communications with Russian military intelligence and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, his potential intermediaries with Wikileaks, and how he may have learned that Wikileaks possessed John Podesta’s emails. It is the ninth article in a series about Stone. While reading the previous entries is not necessary, it is recommended.
The first article covers Stone’s involvement in Watergate through to the Reagan campaign, which brought him into contact with Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.
The second article covers Stone’s work on the controversial 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign and his lobbying for Trump in Atlantic City.
The third article covers Stone’s involvement in the 2000 election, his coordinating of Trump’s flirtation with running for President, and the “Brooks Brothers Riot.”
The fourth article covers Stone’s involvement in New York State gubernatorial politics from the years 2000–2010.
The fifth article covers Stone’s involvement in the local politics of Broward County, Florida, and his relationship with Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.
The sixth article covers the life of Stone’s friend and associate Michael Caputo, chronicling his lifelong proximity to global intelligence agencies.
The seventh article covers Stone’s connection to InfoWars host Alex Jones, his introduction of Jones to Trump, and the origins of “Stop the Steal.”
The eighth article covers Roger Stone’s complex interactions with a number of individuals with links to Wikileaks during the 2016 election.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Several lines of inquiry lay the heart of the investigations into the Trump campaign’s potential foreknowledge of, and complicity with, the Russian military intelligence hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 election. This article examines one of them: what did Roger Stone, who was in communication with both Russian military intelligence and the Trump campaign, know about the emails the Russians passed to the anti-secrecy organization Wikileaks prior to their public release?
On August 21st, Stone published a tweet that suggested he may have had information that Wikileaks possessed emails linked to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Wikileaks began releasing Podesta’s emails in batches over a month later on October 7th, 2016.
Neither the Special Counsel’s Office, nor Congressional investigators, were ever able to determine if, or how, Stone knew that Wikileaks possessed and planned to release John Podesta’s emails.
This article lays out the available evidence and examines several potential scenarios that could explain Stone’s apparent foreknowledge.
Roger Stone, Russian Military Intelligence, and the Trump Campaign
On August 5th, 2016, Stone wrote an opinion piece for Breitbart entitled “Dear Hillary: DNC Hack Solved, So Now Stop Blaming Russia.”
In it, he embraced the GRU fabrication that Guccifer 2.0 was a lone hacker unaffiliated with the Russian government.
The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, had hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign and provided the stolen emails to Wikileaks. It then created the online avatar Guccifer 2.0 in an attempt to muddy the waters and cover their tracks.
Stone was familiar with Guccifer’s activities prior to Wikileaks’ release of the DNC emails, providing links to Guccifer 2.0’s WordPress and various tweets sent from Guccifer 2.0’s account. By publishing his denial that Guccifer 2.0 was not related to the Russian government in the right wing press, Stone drew further attention to Guccifer 2.0.
The FBI later uncovered evidence that Stone may have had advance knowledge of the GRU plan to use the Guccifer 2.0 online persona.
Between May 17th and June 15th, before the GRU launched Guccifer 2.0, Google records show that searches for the terms “dcleaks,” “guccifer” and “guccifer june” were conducted from from IP addresses within one of two ranges: 172.56.26.0/24 and 107.77.216.0/24.
The searches were conducted from Florida, where Stone resides. Stone had used multiple IP addresses within the ranges in question to log onto his Twitter account. On June 13th, two days before Guccifer 2.0 went public, Stone used an IP address within the range 172.56.26.0/24 to purchase a Facebook ad.
While not definitive evidence that Roger Stone conducted these searches, or that the searches weren’t related to the original Guccifer, it raises interesting possibilities.
On August 8th, Stone spoke before the Southwest Broward Republican Organization. Responding to a question during the Q&A, Stone said, “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
It was the first time Stone publicly claimed to have communicated with Assange.
The next day, August 9th, Wikileaks tweeted: “We are not aware of having communicated with Roger Stone. We do however take, and verify, anonymous tips”
On August 10th, right wing conspiracist and Stone-associate Jerome Corsi received an email from Joseph Farah, the founder of the right-wing, conspiratorial website WorldNetDaily (WND), with the subject “Julian Assange Interview.” According to Corsi, Farah was upset that no one at WND had established contact with Assange.
Following the election, investigators looked into whether Corsi, a right-wing propagandist behind the “swiftboating” of John Kerry who promoted of the birther lie that Obama was born in Kenya, served as Stone’s intermediary to Wikileaks.
“I’m back in the United States on Friday,” Corsi, who was in Italy with his wife, responded to Farah. “We can reach Assange, but someone may have to go to London. I’m sure if we went to the embassy, he would talk to us.”
Corsi understood that it would not be a crime, in his capacity as a journalist, to get into contact with Assange.
Meanwhile, that same day, Ted Malloch, a conservative activist whom investigators later looked into as having potential links to Wikileaks via the British populist Nigel Farage, emailed Corsi articles about Assange and alleged Russian interference in the election.
Two days later, August 12th, Corsi returned to the United States from his trip to Italy.
That same day, Guccifer 2.0 leaked information the GRU had stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The information included the email addresses and cell phone numbers of nearly every Democratic member of the House of Representatives.
Following the information dump, Guccifer 2.0 publicly tweeted at Stone, “thanks that u believe in the real #Guccifer2.”
Also on the 12th, Breitbart writer Lee Stranahan reached out to Guccifer 2.0 via Twitter DM.
Stranahan, who was later hired by the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik where he was a prominent denier of Russian electoral interference, had initially reached out to Guccifer 2.0 on August 2nd.
Ten days later, after seeing Guccifer 2.0’s tweet thanking Stone for believing in him, Stranahan wrote to Guccifer 2.0 again, referring to Stone’s recently published piece in Breitbart denying Russian involvement in the DNC hack. “I worked with Roger [Stone] on that piece and was actually the one who pointed out what was going on with him in the first place.”
Stranahan later claimed he had ghostwritten Stone’s Breitbart op-ed.
The next day, Stranahan’s boss at Breitbart Steve Bannon was made the Trump campaign’s CEO.
Bannon later testified that prior to being hired on as CEO, “Stone told him that he had a connection to Assange” and “implied that he had inside information about WikiLeaks.”
And again, after Bannon got the job on August 13th, Stone explained to him that he “had a relationship with Assange and said that WikiLeaks was going to dump additional materials that would be bad for the Clinton Campaign.”
The day Bannon was hired, Twitter suspended Guccifer 2.0’s account following it’s leaking of the DCCC information.
Wikileaks responded by tweeting, “@Guccifer_2 has account completely censored by Twitter after publishing some files from Democratic campaign #DCCC.”
Stone followed suit, tweeting that the suspension was “outrageous” and that Guccifer 2.0 was a “HERO.”
The next day, after Twitter reinstated Guccifer 2.0’s account, Stone sent a DM to Guccifer 2.0 saying that he was “delighted” by the reinstatement.
“wow,” Guccifer2.0’s GRU-controller replied to Stone on August 15th. “thank u for writing back, and thank u for an article about me!!! do you find anyting [sic] interesting in the docs i posted?”
“Give me a call today if you can,” Corsi wrote to Stone on the same day Stone received Guccifer 2.0’s DM. “Despite MSM [Mainstream Media] drumroll that HRC is already elected, it’s not over yet. More to come than anyone realizes. Won’t really get started until after Labor Day.”
Later that day, Stone had a 24-minute phone call with Corsi, who had just returned to the US from Italy. Corsi later claimed that they discussed the information he had gathered regarding Wikileaks’s plans for the Podesta emails, and described Stone as “happy to hear” what he had to say and that the two “discussed how the emails would be very damaging” to Clinton.
As part of his many changing stories, Corsi at one point told investigators that he had led Stone to believe that he had a “source” with Wikileaks as he thought that cover story would be more believable than saying that he had deduced that Wikileaks was in possession of Podesta’s emails. The actual content of Stone and Corsi’s August 15th phone call is not known.
Later that day, Stone tweeted, “@JohnPodesta makes @PaulManafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas.”
A day earlier, The New York Times had published an article on Paul Manafort’s illicit activities in Ukraine, which ultimately led to his resignation from the Trump campaign.
On August 16th, Stone sent a DM to Guccifer 2.0 requesting that they retweet a column he had written predicting that the election could be “rigged against Donald Trump.”
The GRU-controller of Guccifer 2.0 replied, “done.”
Also on the 16th, Ted Malloch sent Corsi an email with the subject “Vladimir Putin Has Already Won Our Election.” The body of the email contained two words: “VENONA” and “Observer.”
VENONA appears to be a reference to the Venona Project, a top-secret effort by US intelligence in the 1940s to gather and decrypt messages sent by the NKVD, KGB and GRU.
Three days earlier, John R. Schindler of The Observer had published an article with the same title as the subject of Malloch’s email to Corsi, “Vladimir Putin Has Already Won Our Election.”
The subtitle of Schindler’s article stated, “It’s time to face facts: Kremlin spies and hackers are undermining American politics.” The article went on to say “WikiLeaks, nowadays a transparent Kremlin front, disseminated some 20,000 purloined DNC emails that were stolen by Russian intelligence.”
Schindler noted that the “Kremlin is weaponizing stolen information for political effect.”
Corsi sent Malloch an email requesting that he search out and find Bernie Sanders’ brother, who was living in the UK at the time. “He is on the record saying he plans to vote for Trump. Roger Stone suggested that you track down Sanders brother.”
Corsi then emailed Stone linking to a WND piece he had written entitled “Trump advisor: Wikileaks plotting email dump to derail Hillary.”
Corsi’s article stated that Stone had “told WND in an interview that he has communicated directly with Assange.”
Later that day, Stone told Alex Jones on InfoWars that he had “backchannel communications” with Assange, who possessed “political dynamite” about the Clinton’s which he was planning to release.
The next day, August 17th, Guccifer 2.0 publicly tweeted at Stone, writing, “@RogerJStoneJR paying him back.”
The GRU then sent Stone a Twitter DM from the Guccifer 2.0 account. “i’m pleased to say u r great man,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote. “please tell me if I can help u anyhow. it would be a great pleasure to me.”
There is no publicly available evidence that Stone replied via Twitter.
FBI Search Warrants executed against Stone and later released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that on August 18th, the day after the GRU’s offer to “help” Stone, he downloaded the end-to-end encryption app Signal and the encrypted email service ProtonMail.
Signal uses standard cell phone numbers for secure, encrypted communications which can include one-to-one and group messages, voice notes, images, videos, as well as voice and video calls.
ProtonMail uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data. The content of any communications over these services is, to the best of our knowledge, unavailable to investigators.
The timing of Stone’s downloading of these encryption services, coming one day after the GRU offered him “help” via Guccifer 2.0, is highly suggestive of the possibility that Stone could have learned that Wikileaks possessed John Podesta’s emails from Russian military intelligence.
“Trump can still win — but time is running out,” Stone wrote to Steve Bannon in an email on August 18th, the same day he downloaded Signal and ProtonMail. “Early voting begins in six weeks. I do know how to win this but it ain’t pretty. Campaign has never been good at playing the new media. Lots to do — let me know when you can talk.”
“Let’s talk ASAP,” Bannon replied.
When later asked under oath about what he thought Roger meant by the statement that he knew how to win but it “ain’t pretty,” Bannon stated, “Roger is an agent provocateur, he’s an expert in opposition research. He’s an expert in the tougher side of politics. And when you’re this far behind, you have to use every tool in the toolbox.”
When asked to elaborate about what kind of “tools”, Bannon said, “opposition research, dirty tricks, the types of things that campaigns use when they have got to make up some ground.”
When asked if Stone’s stated relationship with Assange was included in this, Bannon replied, “I don’t know if I thought it at the time, but he could — you know, I was led to believe that he had a relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange.”
On the morning of August 19th, Bannon texted Stone asking if he was available to speak.
Stone also had a lengthy phone call with Paul Manafort, who resigned from the Trump campaign that day.
A day earlier, POLITICO published an article by Kenneth P. Vogel which contained the first known mention in the press of Konstantin Kilimnik’s suspected affiliation with Russian military intelligence.
After his conversation with Manafort, Stone went on InfoWars and told Alex Jones, “Manafort is being a professional and recognizing that the mainstream media is not going to be objective about this, and also recognizing that this controversy feeds the false theme of Trump-Putin-Russia-Manafort.”
“[W]hen can you talk???” Stone replied to Bannon’s text the next day, August 20th. It is unclear whether they ended up connecting with one another.
At 9:24am on August 21st, Stone published what later became one of the most scrutinized tweets of the 2016 election cycle: “Trust me, it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.”
The tweet provided the clearest indication yet that Stone had obtained inside information that Wikileaks possessed and was planning to release emails related to John Podesta. However, at the time it was published Stone’s tweet was paid little attention.
Stone held a lengthy phone conversation with Manafort that day as well.
Approximately twelve hours after Stone published his tweet about Podesta, Guccifer 2.0 replied to Breitbart reporter Lee Stranaham’s Twitter DM sent nine days earlier explaining that he had worked with Stone on his Breitbart piece denying Russian government involvement in the DNC hack.
“[H]i man,” the GRU-controller of the Guccifer 2.0 account wrote to Stranahan, “how’s life?”
The GRU then sent Stranahan memos stolen from the DCCC providing a description of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and “Tactics” on how to deal with local BLM activists, which included: 1.) “Listen to their concerns,” 2.) “Don’t offer support for concrete policy decisions,” and 3.) “Frontline district staff should meet with activists.”
Guccifer 2.0 published the documents on August 31st on WordPress.
The Cover-Up Begins: Stone and Corsi Coordinate Their Podesta Story
On August 30th, Stone realized that his Podesta tweet from nine days earlier was going to be a problem and contacted Jerome Corsi to attempt to concoct a cover story. According to Corsi, Stone told him that he was getting “heat” for his tweet and required a cover story.
Corsi later testified before the Grand Jury that he and Stone conspired to falsely make it look as though Stone learned from Corsi’s own research and writing on Podesta that Wikileaks was in possession of Podesta’s emails.
On August 31st, Corsi drafted a nine-page memo regarding Podesta and made it seem as though it was written on behalf of Stone to counter a CNN story of two weeks earlier about Manafort’s activities in Ukraine.
Later, in March of 2017, when the Trump-Russia storyline was reaching a fevered pitch in the American media, Stone requested that Corsi write an article fabricating a story about how he, Stone, came to know that Wikileaks possessed Podesta’s emails, which Corsi dutifully did and published on InfoWars.
Stone later suggested that his strangely worded tweet (“Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel”) was not referring to the impending Wikileaks release of John Podesta’s emails, but rather was in reference to John and his brother Tony Podesta’s lobbying activities. His conspiring with Corsi to create a cover story for the tweet undermines this explanation.
In addition to fabricating a cover story for his August 21st Podesta tweet, Stone was also later convicted of lying to Congress about his intermediary to Wikileaks, which constituted a felony.
Fremenies: Roger Stone, Randy Credico, and the Fake Wikileaks Intermediary
In his September 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Stone falsely claimed that he gained information on the materials in Wikileaks possession and Assange’s plans on what to do with them from a longtime acquaintance named Randy Credico.
Based out of New York City, Credico is a left-wing comedian, impressionist and radio host who suffered for years with substance abuse problems. He and Stone first met through the failed 2002 New York Governor’s campaign of independent candidate Tom Golisano. Stone had Credico record misleading robocalls doing impressions of famous politicians offering fabricated endorsements.
They interacted again two years later when Credico became involved in Al Sharpton’s 2004 bid for president. According to Credico, Stone saw supporting the controversial preacher’s bid for president as a means to “rat-fuck” the Democrats.
While Credico wasn’t Stone’s intermediary to Wikileaks, he did have a connection to the organization. Credico had served as the director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice and was friends with its late founder William Kunstler.
Working alongside Credico at the Fund was Kunstler’s widow Margaret Ratner Kunstler, an attorney who throughout 2015 and 2016 assisted Julian Assange with his legal strategy and media appearances. Kunstler later stated that while she assisted Credico in getting Assange on his radio show, she never passed information between the two.
“Kunstler’s wife is [Assange’s] lawyer or one of them,” Credico texted Stone on August 19th, 2016, marking the beginning of their interactions regarding Assange and Wikileaks.
Credico was contacting Stone to inform him that he was about to host Assange on his radio program on August 25th. Two days before the Assange interview, Stone himself appeared on the program.
“What about the October surprise?” Credico asked Stone during the interview. “I mean, you’ve been in touch indirectly with Julian Assange. What-can you give us any kind of insight? Is there an October surprise happening?”
“Well, first of all, I don’t want to intimate in any way that I control or have influence with Assange, because I do not,” Stone replied. “We have a mutual friend, somebody we both trust, and therefore I am a recipient of good information.”
Two days later, when Assange appeared on Credico’s radio show, Credico asked him about Stone’s claim. “Roger Stone is a rather canny spinmaster,” Assange replied, “and we have not had any communications with him whatsoever.”
“Julian Assange talk[ed] about you last night,” Credico texted Stone the next day, August 26th. “He didn’t say anything bad we were talking about how the Press is trying to make it look like you and he are in cahoots.”
A day later, Credico texted Stone again, “Julian Assange has kryptonite on Hillary.”
Credico later testified that this statement was not based on any inside information but rather on public statements Assange had made.
Stone and Credico stayed in contact throughout September and Credico later claimed that throughout this period he was uncertain whether Stone actually had an intermediary with Wikileaks.
“I remember saying, ‘Roger, I thought you had a back channel,’” Credico later testified. “He said something to the effect of, ‘Yes, but I can’t use him all the time.’”
Despite these statements from Stone, Credico appears to have been dubious of the claim.
“I can tell you, Roger has no connection at all with [Wikileaks], other than the fact that he may say it off the top of his head,” Credico told a local New York radio station in September of 2016. “But you know him, he’s a lot of braggadocio and this is an outrage that this guy would you — because he could use it against me. I’m in London. I’ve had him on my radio show, am I an agent now?”
Roger Stone’s Ongoing Communications With Guccifer 2.0 and The Trump Campaign
Throughout September, Stone continued to communicate with current and former members of the Trump campaign.
On September 4th, Stone texted Steve Bannon, explaining that he was in New York for a few days and asking if he had time to talk.
The next day, Stone conducted three phone calls with Paul Manafort, speaking for a total of 26 minutes.
A day later, September 6th, Stone tweeted a link to a Financial Times article with the accompanying message “the only interference in the US election is from Hillary’s friends in Ukraine.” Thus Stone played an early role in promoting the canard, promoted by Manafort and Kilimnik, that Ukraine rather than Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
Published nine days earlier on August 28th, the article Stone linked to was entitled “Ukraine’s leaders campaign against pro-Putin Trump,” and was written by Roman Olearchyk.
On August 23rd, Konstantin Kilimnik had exchanged emails with Olearchyk and the article contains quotes from “a former Yanukovich loyalist now playing a lead role in the Regions party’s successor, called Opposition Bloc,” almost certainly Kilimnik, who, “let loose a string of expletives’ and “accused western media of ‘working in the interests of Hillary Clinton by trying to bring down Trump.’”
A day after it was published, Kilimnik forwarded it to Rick Gates in an email. “[T]hese idiots actually admit that [Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s] government was deliberately trying to destabilize Trump’s campaign,” Kilimnik explained to Gates. He further stated that “this article is actually helpful to us” and that he “hope[s] [Donald Trump] sees it.”
Stone’s tweet highlighting Olearchyk’s article, coming the day after his three phone calls with Manafort, could indicate that he was aware of Kilimnik’s activities, or at least that Manafort had informed him of the existence of the article, which had been published nine days earlier.
The day after Stone sent the tweet, September 7th, he received a text from Steve Bannon asking if he could “come by trump tower now???” They exchanged further texts the next day attempting to arrange a meeting in New York. It is unclear when and where Stone and Bannon met or what they discussed.
On September 9th, the GRU controller of Guccifer 2.0 sent Stone another Twitter DM, sharing a link to a post by the conservative Florida blogger Aaron Nevins that contained an “exclusive report” about the Democratic Party voter turnout model that the GRU had stolen and provided to Nevins, who published a story on the stolen materials.
The GRU wrote to Stone, “what do u think of the info on the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign?”
“Pretty standard,” Stone replied.
This was the last message exchanged between Stone and the GRU via the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account.
The Road to October 7th: Access Hollywood and Wikileaks’ Podesta Release
Around the time of first Presidential Debate on September 26th, Stone provided Paul Manafort a private briefing regarding Wikileaks.
“John Podesta was going to be in the barrel” Stone explained to Manafort, further telling him that “there were going to be leaks of John Podesta’s emails.”
The next day, news broke that Julian Assange planned to make a big announcement from the Ecuadorian Embassy on September 30th.
A day before the planned announcement, Rick Gates was riding in a limo with Trump on their way to LaGuardia airport when he overheard a phone call between Trump and Stone. Trump had tried calling Stone three times before 10am that morning, but hadn’t been able to connect until the car ride with Gates.
Trump used his bodyguard Keith Schiller’s phone for the conversation with Stone. After he hung up, he told Gates that “more releases of damaging information would be coming.”
The next day, Assange’s much anticipated announcement was cancelled due to “security concerns.”
That same day, Credico texted Stone a picture of him in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy. He had gone to London to visit a friend and had agreed to deliver a letter to the Embassy on behalf of Berthold Reimers, the manager of the WBAI radio station.
Credico later testified that he never got past the door of the Embassy and never saw or spoke to Assange, but rather passed the letter over to someone in the doorway.
On the evening of October 1st, Credico texted Stone that there would be “big news Wednesday,” October 5th, and that “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.” He finished by writing, “now pretend u don’t know me.”
“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replied.
The next day, October 2nd, Stone tweeted: “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.”
Andrew Surabian, who was in charge of the Trump campaign war room, emailed Stone’s Twitter prediction to Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and the Trump campaign press office. However, later in the day there was confusion as to if, when and where the expected Assange announcement would be made.
Stone texted Credico later that day, “WTF?” and linked to an article suggesting had cancelled the announcement again due to security concerns.
“[H]ead fake,” Credico replied.
Later that day it was clarified that the Assange announcement would still be taking place, but that they would be changing venues from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to a press conference in Berlin.
That evening, Stone appeared on The Alex Jones Show and told viewers that he had been “assured” by his intermediary with Assange that “the mother lode is coming Wednesday.”
Despite his outward confidence, the next morning on October 3rd Stone wrote to Credico, “Did Assange back off?”
“I can’t tal[k] about it,” Credico replied. “I think it[‘]s on for tomorrow.”
Stone then tweeted: “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”
“Why can’t you get Trump to come out and say that he would give Julian Assange Asylum[?]” Credico texted Stone. “Off the Record Hillary and her people are doing a full-court press they [sic] keep Assange from making the next dump … That’s all I can tell you on this line … Please leave my name out of it.”
“So nothing will happen tonight?” Stone replied.
“[T]uesday,” Credico responded. “There is so much stuff out there… There will be an announcement but not on the balcony.”
Shortly thereafter, Wikileaks tweeted: “WikiLeaks press conference Tuesday [October 4th] 10:00 am Berlin time on the past, present & future of WikiLeaks.”
Dan Scavino, the Trump Campaign’s director of social media, emailed Bannon about the Wikileaks tweet. Scavino, who was close to Trump, had previously served as his golf caddie.
Bannon contacted Breitbart editors Wynton Han and Peter Schweitzer to see if they could be available “to get what he [Assange] has live.”
Yet another Breitbart editor, Matthew Boyle, forwarded Bannon an email thread between himself and Stone from earlier that day.
“Assange-what’s he got?” Boyle asked Stone. “Hope it’s good.”
“It is,” Stone replied. “I’d tell Bannon but he doesn’t call me back.”
Boyle suggested to Bannon that he call Stone, to which Bannon replied that he had important things to worry about. “Well clearly he knows what Assange has,” Boyle responded. “I’d say that’s important.”
Stone was also in contact with Erik Prince on October 3rd via email. Prince was a billionaire founder of the infamous military private contractor company (i.e. mercenary) Blackwater, a conservative activist, and major Trump supporter.
“Spoke to my friend in London tonight. Payload still coming.” Stone told Prince, “[y]ou are a great American.”
On Tuesday, October 4th, Wikileaks 10th anniversary, Julian Assange issued a public statement announcing that, starting that week, Wikileaks would be releasing materials “affecting three powerful organizations in three different states as well as, of course, information previously referred to about the U.S. election process,” which he described as “significant,” and that from that point on they would be releasing materials on a weekly basis for the next ten weeks.
He further promised that “all the US-election related documents” would be released before November 8th.
“Assange made a fool of himself,” Corsi wrote to Stone after the announcement. “Has nothing or he would have released it. Total BS hype.”
“When is the other stuff coming out?” Trump complained to Rick Gates, having expected actual Clinton-related documents to be released. His expectations were almost certainly stoked by his conversations with Stone.
“What was that this morning???” Bannon emailed Stone.
“Fear,” Stone replied. “Serious security concern. He thinks they are going to kill him and the London police are standing [down].”
Erik Prince emailed Stone that day as well, asking if Assange had “chicken[ed] out.”
Stone replied that he was “not sure” and was “checking.”
Prince texted Stone again later that day asking whether he had “hear[d] any more from London?”
Stone replied, “Yes — want to talk on a secure line — got Whatsapp?” Stone further suggested that the Wikileaks materials were “good.”
FBI search warrants show that Stone downloaded a copy of WhatsApp, which offers end-end-encryption, on his iPhone the next day. When asked about his conversation with Stone, Prince told investigators that Stone had told him that Wikileaks would be imminently releasing materials damaging to Clinton and that Stone had the equivalent of “insider stock trading” information on Assange.
There were no Wikileaks releases on Wednesday, October 5th, as Stone and Credico had expected. However, Stone maintained outward confidence, tweeting “Libs thinking Assange will stand down are wishful thinking. Payload coming #Lockthemup.”
On October 6th, Wikileaks again failed to leak any election related documents, but Stone remained undeterred, tweeting “Julian Assange will deliver a devastating expose on Hillary at a time of his choosing. I stand by my prediction. #handcuffs4hillary.”
Later that afternoon, he received a call from Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller’s phone. Stone and almost certainly Trump spoke for six minutes, likely discussing the impending Wikileaks release.
Despite his public denials to the contrary, at some point on October 7th Stone may have gained foreknowledge that The Washington Post was going to release the explosive Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump was recorded bragging about sexually assaulting women.
While one unnamed witness would later tell the Special Counsel’s Office that Wikileaks release of the Podesta emails on October 7th “may have come at the behest of, or in coordination with, Roger Stone,” they were never able to establish whether or not that was actually the case.
At 11:27am that day, Jerome Corsi attempted to call Stone and call logs show that the call lasted for only one minute. According to an affidavit attached to an FBI search warrant application, Stone didn’t pick up the phone. However, Corsi later told the Special Counsel’s Office that in fact Stone did answer the phone and they discussed the “status of the Wikileaks publication of the Podesta emails and Roger’s concern that Assange should start publishing immediately the Podesta emails.”
Shortly thereafter, Stone received a call from The Washington Post 11:53am, which may have been where he learned of the upcoming story. However, the Special Counsel’s Report notes that phone records alone do not indicate that Stone spoke with any of the Post reporters who broke the story and that investigators were unable to uncover the exact content of the conversation. Stone’s conversation with the Post lasted for approximately 20 minutes.
Stone then had two phone calls with Corsi, one at 1:42pm that lasted for 18-minutes, and another at 2:18pm that lasted for 21-minutes.
During these conversations, Corsi recalled Stone informing him about the explosive nature of the Access Hollywood tape soon to be released. He claimed that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.”
Stone also told Corsi that he wanted him to have Wikileaks “drop the Podesta emails immediately.”
As mentioned, Corsi repeatedly provided the Special Counsel’s Office with conflicting accounts of his and Stone’s activities on that day.
Corsi first falsely claimed he who told Stone to get in contact with Wikileaks and have them release information to blunt the impact of the Access Hollywood tape, which he claimed Stone agreed to do.
Later in the same interview, Corsi reversed the story and said that it was Stone who asked him to get in contact with Wikileaks and push them to release the Podesta emails.
At approximately 3pm, Trump was with his debate prep team when he learned that the release of the Access Hollywood tape was imminent.
At 3:32pm, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement attributing the recent hacks of the DNC and election interference efforts to the Russian government.
Less than thirty minutes later at 4pm, The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape.
32 minutes after that, Wikileaks tweeted out its first link to the John Podesta emails purloined by the GRU, the first in a staggered set of releases that would last the election.
Roger Stone, the GRU and Wikileaks: The Final Analysis
Did Roger Stone have advanced information regarding Wikileaks’ releases of John Podesta’s emails? And if so, how? Was it through an intermediary with Assange?
Ultimately, neither the Special Counsel’s Office, nor the Senate Intelligence Intelligence Committee were able to answer these questions.
In November of 2019, a jury convicted Stone on five counts of false statements, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of a Congressional proceeding. Donald Trump commuted his longtime friend’s sentence and, in his last days in office, offered him a full pardon.
Trump’s corrupt pardon of Stone is critically important in understanding the investigators inability to get to the bottom of Stone’s activities. Throughout that investigation, Stone understood perfectly well that the man he had helped elect to the highest office in the land would use the power of that office to pardon him as long as he didn’t cooperate.
Then-President Trump’s dangling of the pardon power over Stone wasn’t the only challenge facing investigators and prosecutors. After providing false testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Stone exercised his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Stone also utilized encrypted applications and email services that made his communications with key individuals unavailable to subsequent investigators. However, Stone’s lies and usage of encryption offer certain clues and circumstantial evidence of interest.
Stone’s attempt to cover-up the fact that he learned Wikileaks possessed John Podesta’s emails began on August 30th, 2016.
On that day, nine days after Stone’s August 21st tweet about “Podesta’s time in the barrel,” Stone and Corsi fabricated the story that Stone’s tweet was based upon a public article and a subsequent memorandum Corsi had prepared for Stone.
Corsi later told investigators that this story was “bullshit” and that he had been Stone’s source of information.
Corsi provided conflicting explanations on how he came across this information, first claiming that he learned it from a “man” while in Italy, and later, even more dubiously, that he had come into the knowledge through his own powers of deduction. The matter was never resolved.
In a second cover-up, one that occurred after Trump’s election and during the many investigations into the 2016 election and that ultimately ended up in exposing him to felony charges, Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee by telling them that his intermediary with Assange was Randy Credico. He also used Credico in an apparent attempt to cover-up his relationship with Jerome Corsi.
During his trial, Stone’s defense attorney made the interesting two part argument that, despite his lies to Congress:
- Stone’s outreach to Wikileaks hadn’t been successful.
- Even if it had been, it would not have been illegal.
This raises the obvious question, if Stone learning from Jerome Corsi details about Wikileaks upcoming plans was not illegal, why did Stone bother to lie about this and expose himself to a potential felony?
One potential answer is that Roger Stone did not learn that Wikileaks was in possession of John Podesta’s emails from Jerome Corsi, which wouldn’t have been a crime, but rather from Russian Military Intelligence itself, which almost certainly would have been.
There are several details in the timeline of events in August 2016 that lend credence to this interpretation of events.
In Corsi’s August 2nd email to Stone in which he predicts that their “friend” in the Ecuadorian embassy was planning on two more Clinton related leaks, Corsi doesn’t actually clearly state that they will be related to Podesta’s emails.
In fact, all he says regarding Podesta is: “Time to let more than Podesta to be [sic] exposed as in bed w[ith] the enemy…”
Corsi could be referring to the Bannon-sponsored Government Accountability Institute report From Russia With Money: Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset, and Cronyism published a day earlier on August 1st that accused Podesta of being the recipient of payoffs from the Russians.
Three days after receiving Corsi’s email, August 5th, Stone published an article in Breitbart linking to Guccifer 2.0’s Twitter and WordPress sites and advancing the cover story devised by Russian military intelligence that Guccifer 2.0 was a lone hacker responsible for the hack of the Democratic National Committee.
Eight days after that, on August 13th, Stone protested on Guccifer 2.0’s behalf after they were banned from Twitter, calling “him” a “HERO.”
One day later, August 14th, Stone established direct contact with Russian military intelligence by sending a private Twitter Direct Message to the Guccifer 2.0 account.
By this time it had been widely reported that the US intelligence community believed the account was a Russian intelligence cut-out.
Rick Gates testified that as far back as June 2016, Stone had told him over the phone that the Wikileaks information could have come from the Russians.
Stone and the GRU controllers of Guccifer 2.0 exchanged messages via Twitter between August 14th and August 17th, culminating in the GRU’s offer of “help” to Stone on the 17th.
The very next day, August 18th, Stone downloaded the encrypted communications application Signal and the end-to-end encrypted Swiss email service ProtonMail.
Three days after that, Stone tweeted: “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s [sic] time in the barrel.”
It is a distinct possibility that Stone downloaded the encrypted communications apps to privately communicate with Guccifer 2.0, the GRU, whom he had recently gone to great lengths to publicly defend. Given the efforts Stone took to establish a connection to Wikileaks, it would be odd if he hadn’t at least tried.
If Stone had learned that Wikileaks was in possession of John Podesta’s emails from the very Russians who stole them, his subsequent activities and lies can be made sense of in a different light.
For example, why did he and Corsi attempt to fabricate a cover story for Stone’s Podesta tweet on August 30th, only nine days after he had sent it?
In his book Silent No More, Corsi claims that Stone told him that he was “getting heat for his tweet and needed some cover.” However, between August 21st and August 30th, there doesn’t appear to have been a single mention of Stone’s tweet in the media.
In fact, Stone’s tweet doesn’t appear to have been thought of as having any significance until after it became known that Wikileaks possessed John Podesta’s emails on October 7th, 2016, with their first release. However, just because there were no public mentions of Stone’s Podesta tweet, doesn’t mean that nobody was paying attention to Stone’s potential relationship with Guccifer 2.0.
Throughout August of 2016, the GRU-controllers of the Guccifer 2.0 account were in contact with more people than Stone.
One of the individuals communicating with Guccifer 2.0 was a reporter named William Bastone, founder of The Smoking Gun. On August 23rd, two days after Stone sent the Podesta tweet, Bastone messaged Guccifer 2.0 asking about his communications with Roger Stone.
“why are u asking?” Guccifer 2.0 asked. “the fbi’s tracing me, reading my [direct messages] and giving you hints[,] no?”
Bastone inquired about Stone further, but Guccifer 2.0 stayed mum. “i won’t comment on my conversations with other ppl,” they replied, adding, “why r u so interested in stone? he’s just a person who wrote a story about me. or don’t i know some important stuff?”
If Stone was in contact with the GRU through encrypted means, he could have learned from them that only two days after his Podesta tweet reporters such as Bastone were already privately inquiring about his communications with Guccifer 2.0.
Bastone’s interaction with Guccifer 2.0 further establishes that the GRU was well aware that its Twitter DM’s could be monitored by the FBI.
This may have influenced Stone’s decision to fabricate a cover story with Corsi regarding the Podesta tweet on August 30th, one week after William Bastone inquired with Guccifer 2.0 about their communications with Stone, despite that fact that the Tweet doesn’t appear to have attracted any media attention after it was sent.
As far back as April 2016, Stone represented to the Trump campaign that he had an intermediary linking him to Assange. Manafort, Gates, Bannon and Trump himself came to believe this was true after Stone’s predictions came to pass. Stone’s supposed Wikileaks intermediary was central to his status and relevance on the campaign.
It could be the case that Stone was initially lying to the campaign about his Wikileaks intermediary in order to improve his status, and only later learned not from an intermediary but from Russian military intelligence itself that Wikileaks possessed John Podesta’s emails.
Even this sequence of events wouldn’t preclude Stone gaining insights into Wikileaks plans with the emails once they had received them from any number of a group of individuals a variety of connections to Wikileaks.
Stone’s evolving, often false and conflicting cover stories make more sense when seen in this light.
Stone started his coverup on August 30th, 2016 with Corsi because he was afraid it would look as if he came into the Podesta knowledge within days of establishing contact with Russian military intelligence.
Following William Bastone’s August 23rd query to Guccifer 2.0, Stone could have plausibly assumed that his communications with Guccifer 2.0 would eventually become public knowledge.
In September of 2017, he then lied to the House Intelligence Committee and told them that his intermediary to Wikileaks was Randy Credico. This was in keeping with his statements, both publicly in the media and privately to members of the Trump campaign, that he had an intermediary. It also was an attempt to draw attention away from Jerome Corsi, who had been involved in the first coverup on August 30th.
When investigators discovered Stone had lied about Credico being his intermediary to Congress, a felony, they naturally began looking into Corsi. Corsi’s lies, evasions, false memories, constantly changing stories and reconstructions of events eventually led them down a rabbit hole from which they could never extricate themselves.
What’s more, the underlying events Corsi was lying about likely weren’t even crimes in the first place, so he could have played the part of a poison pill attempting to lead investigators down the wrong path.
Meanwhile, Stone understood that regardless of what happened he would be pardoned.
Ultimately, the truth resides with Russian military intelligence. And, of course, with Roger Stone.
The next and last article of the series will cover Stone’s communications with an unnamed Israeli government official during the 2016 election.
You can find my collected writings here.
EDIT (10/26/22): This article has been amended by the removal of section describing how Roger Stone had at one point mistakenly believed that Charles Ortel had been in contact with Julian Assange.