The Daily Beast reports the Senate Intelligence Committee would like to interview Roger Stone and has reached out for materials relevant to its investigation of Russian election interference.
Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith, told The Daily Beast that the committee last week sent them an email with a list of search terms for communications to use to determine which electronic communications to turn over to the Senate Intelligence Committee. At the same time, according to Smith, the committee said its members would like to question Stone after receiving the documents. Smith said the process has been amicable and that the interview date has not yet been set.
Stone told The Daily Beast he hopes the interview with the committee will be public, and said he has “already begun to think about what to wear.”
When Stone testified before the House Intelligence Committee last September, he told lawmakers he never asked WikiLeaks for dirt on Hillary Clinton. The Wall Street Journal revealed last week Stone did, in fact, seek to find damaging information from Julian Assange via an intermediary.
In March, Stone told CNN that the Senate committee asked him to preserve any documents that could be related to its probe. And former Trump aide Sam Nunberg told CNN in May that the committee asked him to turn over communications with Stone about Wikileaks and other topics.
Stone has started to say he expects Special Counsel Robert Mueller may indict him.
“I am prepared, should that be the case,” he said. “But I think it just demonstrates, again, this was supposed to be about Russian collusion, and it appears to be an effort to silence or punish the president’s supporters and his advocates.”
At the same time, Stone also says he never will give up the president, an inadvertent admission there could be something worth telling investigators.
“John Dean I am not,” Stone declares. Dean, a former counselor to President Nixon, eventually confessed to having been party to serious crimes by the president and his associates. Stone, who is such a Nixon buff he has the disgraced former president’s face tattooed on his back, surely knows that the analogy does not imply Trump is innocent.
Indeed, Stone has a long trail of contacts with Russian hacking cutout Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, requested access to hacked Clinton emails from Julian Assange, and displayed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks emails during the campaign (he has attempted, implausibly, to explain these comments away).
Of course, rolling on Trump would not be a choice he had to disavow if Trump and Stone had not committed any crimes.
Senate Intelligence Committee Now Wants to Grill Roger Stone (Daily Beast)
‘I Will Never Roll on Donald Trump,’ Promises Definitely Innocent Adviser Roger Stone (NYMag.com)