Right wing conspiracy theorist and Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi claims Special Counsel Robert Mueller offered him a plea deal on one count of perjury, but he plans to turn it down.
"They want me to say I willfully lied. I did not intentionally lie to (the) special counsel," Corsi told NBC News.
Corsi said he initially told Mueller's team in early September that he had no recollection of being in communication with Assange in the lead-up to WikiLeaks releasing thousands of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. But Corsi said he amended his testimony in a November interview after Mueller's investigators presented him with a binder of his emails from 2016.
Corsi insisted that he had forgotten "almost everything about emails in 2016" when he first spoke to Mueller’s investigators.
Mueller has been interviewing Stone’s associates and senior Trump campaign officials in recent months—including Corsi, campaign CEO Steve Bannon and the former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort—to determine whether Stone knew in advance of their release that WikiLeaks had obtained hacked emails from a senior Clinton-campaign official, John Podesta, and coordinated the release to distract from the damaging Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. (The emails were dumped on October 7, 2016, just minutes after the tape was released by The Washington Post.)
Corsi was subpoenaed by Mueller’s team in September and has been predicting since last month that he might be indicted for lying. He has said that he told Stone in August 2016 that Podesta would be WikiLeaks’ next victim, but insists it was just a theory that he developed while traveling in Italy with his wife in the summer of 2016—a trip that Mueller has been very interested in, Corsi said. “They wanted me to connect Roger Stone with [Julian] Assange,” Corsi told me, referring to the WikiLeaks founder who released the hacked Podesta emails in October. “They couldn’t believe how I knew in August that Assange had Podesta's emails.”
All of the information about Corsi's alleged deal is coming from Corsi himself as Mueller's team continues to work quietly and refuse public comment. Stone has released a statement defending Corsi.
"I continue to see that my friend Dr. Jerry Corsi is being harassed by the Special Counsel, not for lying, but for refusing to lie," Stone said. "It is inconceivable that in America someone would be prosecuted for refusing to swear to a false narrative pushed on him by the Muller investigators."
Stone said it wasn't until after WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails that he had his "first ever communication of any kind" with Corsi about those emails. "Prior to that, our discussions had been limited to the research he had been doing on the money and business ties that the Podesta brothers had with Russian interests," Stone said.
While Stone has long denied that he discussed WikiLeaks’s plans with Bannon or any other campaign official in 2016, for example, emails from Stone made public last month belie that claim ...
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Stone has also had to amend his House Intelligence Committee testimony three times since last November, as new reports have emerged about his contacts with Russian nationals, the extent of his interactions with WikiLeaks (he exchanged private Twitter messages with WikiLeaks in mid-October 2016) and his conversations with Trump-campaign officials. Despite those changes, the question of whether he perjured himself before the committee still stands—and is reportedly being examined by Mueller.
“Roger Stone had a chance, under oath, to tell the House Intel Committee about his contacts with Russians and WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who sits on the panel, told me last month. “He misled us and has repeatedly—three times now—amended his testimony to fit new press reporting.” Swalwell noted that the committee’s Democrats voted to send transcripts related to its Russia investigation to Mueller, but Republicans resisted. That’s likely to change when Democrats regain control over the panel in January. “The special counsel should see Stone’s transcripts and the accounts of all witnesses,” Swalwell said.
A New Indictment Looms in the Mueller Probe (The Atlantic)
Roger Stone pal Jerome Corsi says he plans to reject Mueller plea deal on perjury count (NBC News)