Roger Stone communicated with Steve Bannon and his Breitbart protégé during the 2016 campaign, often pitching himself as the guy with the inside information on WikiLeaks.
Mr. Bannon and two other former senior campaign officials have detailed to prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, how Mr. Stone created that impression, according to people familiar with their accounts. One of them told investigators that Mr. Stone not only seemed to predict WikiLeaks’s actions, but that he also took credit afterward for the timing of its disclosures that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
Because of Stone's longstanding reputation as being less than honest, Special Counsel Robert Mueller needs to figure out whether Stone was telling the truth then or if he is being forthcoming now when he says he did not know or communicate anything that wasn't already in the public domain.
To tease out the truth, prosecutors have summoned Mr. Stone’s former employees and longtime political allies to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington or be interviewed at the special counsel’s office. Investigators asked them about a range of issues, including Mr. Stone’s relationship with WikiLeaks, his attempts during the presidential race to raise money for his political causes and whether he tried to persuade one associate not to cooperate with the inquiry.
(...)
Besides the confusion caused by Mr. Stone’s penchant for innuendo and outright lies, investigators are hampered by the fact that [WikiLeaks founder] Mr. [Julian] Assange remains out of reach, holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for six years in fear of extradition to face possible criminal charges.
Still, Mr. Bannon’s October 2016 email correspondence shows that the perception that Mr. Stone knew what WikiLeaks had in store for Mrs. Clinton spread to the highest levels of the Trump campaign. No evidence has emerged that Mr. Trump or his advisers alerted the authorities.
His newly revealed exchange with Bannon undercuts Stone’s insistence this week that he never communicated with Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks.
“There are no such communications, and if Bannon says there are he would be dissembling,” Stone told The Washington Post, which reported Tuesday that Bannon had been asked about Stone’s interactions with the campaign in a recent interview with the Mueller team.
On Thursday, Stone told The Post that he “was unaware of this email exchange until it was leaked.”
“We had not turned it up in our search,” he added. “We can find no others to campaign officials.”
The kind of case prosecutors might be trying to build against Mr. Stone is difficult to determine. According to people familiar with the inquiry, they are focused in part on whether Mr. Stone testified truthfully when he told the House Intelligence Committee a year ago that he had no “advance knowledge of the source or actual content of the WikiLeaks disclosures.”
Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Stone engaged in witness tampering or obstruction of justice stemming from his dealings with Mr. [Randy] Credico, the people said.
Stone says Credico was his backchannel to Assange. Credico says Stone is lying.
Mr. Credico testified before the grand jury in September and has been interviewed in recent weeks by federal investigators. They are reviewing his communications with Mr. Stone, including emails and text messages, in which Mr. Stone told Mr. Credico not to talk to the F.B.I. and to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself before the grand jury, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
Investigators have also questioned Bill Samuels, a wealthy progressive activist in New York and a friend of Mr. Credico’s, in what appears to be an attempt to corroborate portions of Mr. Credico’s account, people familiar with the investigation said. Mr. Samuels once accompanied Mr. Credico to a media interview in which Mr. Credico asserted that he was not Mr. Stone’s link to Julian Assange.
(...)
At various points, Mr. Stone has also suggested that he gleaned information about WikiLeaks from Jerome Corsi, a conservative journalist who trades in conspiracy theories. A lawyer for Mr. Corsi, who was also subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, did not respond to a message seeking comment. Andrew Miller, another former aide to Mr. Stone, was also ordered to testify and is fighting the subpoena.
Mr. Mueller’s investigators have also delved into the operations of Mr. Stone’s political organizations. Mr. Stone has said investigators are examining a nonprofit educational fund called the Committee for American Sovereignty Education Fund, which he said produced a film alleging that former President Bill Clinton fathered an illegitimate child, a favorite theme of Mr. Stone’s.
The organization bills itself as a nonprofit social welfare organization that has been designated by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(4) group. But there is no indication in I.R.S. records that it has that status.
Mr. Stone’s Oct. 4, 2016, email to Mr. Bannon suggested another reason prosecutors might be interested in the fund. Asking the campaign to promote his theory of an illegitimate son of Mr. Clinton, he wrote: “I’ve raised $150K for the targeted black digital campaign through a C-4,” he wrote.
“Tell Rebecca to send us some $$$,” Mr. Stone added, apparently referring to Rebekah Mercer, a wealthy Republican donor close to Mr. Bannon.
Read the Emails: The Trump Campaign and Roger Stone (NYT)
Roger Stone Sold Himself to Trump’s Campaign as a WikiLeaks Pipeline. Was He? (New York Times)
In email to Trump’s campaign strategist, Roger Stone implied he knew of WikiLeaks’s plans (WaPo)