The Washington Post details the ongoing communication between Donald Trump and Roger Stone during the 2016 campaign even though Stone left his official role with the Trump team in August 2015.
The two men have known each other for decades.
Caller ID labeled them “unknown,” but Roger Stone said he knew to pick up quickly during those harried months of the 2016 presidential campaign. There would be a good chance that the voice on the other end of the line would belong to his decades-long friend — the restless, insomniac candidate Donald Trump — dialing from a blocked phone number.
Those nocturnal chats and other contacts between the man who now occupies the Oval Office and an infamous political trickster have come under intensifying scrutiny as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation bores into whether Stone served as a bridge between Trump and WikiLeaks as the group was publishing hacked Democratic emails.
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In recent months, the Trump Organization turned over to Mueller’s team phone and contact logs that show multiple calls between the then-candidate and Stone in 2016, according to people familiar with the material.
The records are not a complete log of their contacts — Stone told The Washington Post on Wednesday that Trump at times called him from other people’s phones.
Stone said he never discussed WikiLeaks with Trump and diminished the importance of any phone records, saying “unless Mueller has tape recordings of the phone calls, what would that prove?”
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Trump has told his lawyers — and last week said in written answers to Mueller — that Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks’ upcoming release and that he had no prior knowledge of it, according to people familiar with his responses.
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New details about Stone’s interest in WikiLeaks’ plans emerged this week after one of his associates, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, announced that he had rejected a plea deal offered by Mueller’s team. He provided The Post and other news organizations with a draft filing by prosecutors describing his interactions with Stone — including an Aug. 2, 2016, email in which the right-wing author alerted Stone that he heard WikiLeaks was planning a major release of “very damaging” material.
The next day, Stone had one of his private talks with Trump, Stone said on a 2016 Infowars broadcast first reported by CNN.
In an interview, Stone insisted that the topic of hacked emails was never broached in the Aug. 3 phone call — or in any other communication with Trump.
“It just didn’t come up,” Stone said. “I am able to say we never discussed WikiLeaks. I’m not sure what I would have said to him anyway because it’s all speculation . . . I just didn’t know if it’s true or not.”
Stone, however, sounded much more certain in his public pronouncements at the time, stating confidently that [Julian] Assange would reveal material that would hurt Clinton’s campaign.
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From January through March 2016, Stone said he had a cellphone number for Trump. But he said the phone number got into too many hands, and Trump’s staff changed it. After that, a pattern developed for their calls, Stone said: Trump would call Stone from a blocked number or from the phones of associates or campaign aides.
“He would initiate the calls,” Stone said. “I didn’t call him.”
Once, Stone said, he answered his iPhone because the caller ID said he was getting a call from Christopher Ruddy, a Trump friend who is the CEO of Newsmax, a conservative television network. But the voice on the line was Trump’s.
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A review of the phone contacts that Trump’s team turned over to Mueller showed a series of calls between Stone and Trump over the length of the campaign, according to people familiar with the records.
They spoke from “time to time” during 2016, the people said, but there was no “flurry” of calls at any particular period. A handful of calls were lengthy. The vast majority involved short calls by Stone to Trump’s assistant Rhona Graff that lasted roughly 30 seconds.
Stone said he was usually calling to alert Graff that he was sending her a strategy memo for Trump, which she would print out for him to read since he didn’t use email.
Trump has told some advisers that he no longer talks to Stone, according to people familiar with his statements. But people close to Trump say he has occasionally talked to him in the White House.
Trump’s night-owl calls to Roger Stone in 2016 draw scrutiny in Mueller probe (WaPo)