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The Roger Stone Indictment Proves Barr’s Memo Understates Trump Flunkies’ Complicity

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I’ve made this point implicitly a few times, but it bears making explicitly. We have proof that Bill Barr’s memo spins the known contents of the Mueller Report to minimize the complicity of Trump’s flunkies. That’s because we can compare what we know about Roger Stone’s efforts to optimize the release of the emails Russia stole with the language used in the memo.

As alleged in sworn statements and his indictment, Stone’s actions include at least the following:

  • Around July 19, 2016: Fresh off dining with some Brexiteers, Stone calls Trump and tells him, “within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” to which Trump responds, “wouldn’t that be great.”
  • After July 22: A senior Trump campaign official “was directed” (the indictment doesn’t say by whom) to figure out from Stone what else would be coming
  • July 25: Stone emails Jerome Corsi and asks him to “get the pending WikiLeaks emails”
  • August 2: Corsi writes back and reflects knowledge that the emails would include Podesta ones and there would be two email drops, one shortly after he returned and one in October
  • October 4: After Assange has a press conference but doesn’t release any emails, Steve Bannon emails Stone and asks what happened, and Stone replies that WikiLeaks will release “a load every week going forward”
  • October 7: As the Podesta emails start to come out right after the Access Hollywood video — timing that Jerome Corsi has claimed Stone helped ensure — a Bannon associate texts Stone and says, “well done”

Now, none of that was itself charged as a crime. Stone was not charged with conspiring with WikiLeaks. But then, short of making an argument that WikiLeaks is a known agent of Russia — which the US government has never done — optimizing the WikiLeaks release is not a crime. But assuming that Corsi is correct that Stone got WikiLeaks to hold the Podesta release to dampen the impact of the Access Hollywood video, it is absolutely coordination. And even according to Stone — who believed Trump needed to avoid alienating women to win — dampening the release of the video influenced the election.

Now consider how this behavior falls into Barr’s supposed exoneration of Trump campaign involvement in the hack-and-leak.

First, there’s Barr’s truncated citation of a Mueller Report sentence. [my emphasis throughout]

As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Then a footnote defining what the word “coordinated” means in that sentence.

In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign “coordinated” with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined “coordinated” as an “agreement–tacit or express–between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Finally, there’s Barr’s own version.

The second element involved the Russian government’s efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election. But as noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.

The exoneration for coordination in Mueller’s language, at least, extends only to the Trump campaign, not to rat-fuckers working on the side (one of the things Mueller reportedly asked a lot of witnesses was precisely when and why Stone left the campaign). And at least according to this language, Mueller’s assessment of coordination extended only to coordination with the Russian government. So even if Mueller and the US government are getting close to labeling WikiLeaks a Russian entity, it still wouldn’t count for this assessment. Unsurprisingly, Barr relies on that language to give the Trump campaign a clean bill of health on the hack-and-leak side.

Most cynically, though, even after Barr acknowledges that the Russians used WikiLeaks to disseminate the stolen emails, the very next sentence doesn’t mention the charges Mueller brought against Stone for hiding his own (and through him, the campaign’s, including Donald Trump’s) coordination of the releases “for purposes of influencing the election.”

But we know Stone’s indictment has to be in the report. That’s because the report, by regulation, must list all Mueller’s prosecutorial decisions. So not only would Mueller describe that he indicted Stone, but he probably also explains why he didn’t include a conspiracy charge in Stone’s indictment (which probably relates primarily to First Amendment concerns, and not any illusions about WikiLeaks’ willing service for Russia on this operation). So it must be in the report. But Barr doesn’t mention that, indeed, the Trump campaign, through their associated rat-fucker, did actually coordinate on the hack-and-leak and did actually influence the election by doing so, they just didn’t coordinate directly with the Russian government.

On this matter, it’s crystal clear that Barr cynically limited his discussion of the report to obscure that Mueller had, indeed, found that the campaign “coordinated” on the hack-and-leak for purposes of influencing the election.

Barr has already demonstrated bad faith in his representation of Mueller’s findings. Which is why it is so alarming that — according to an uncharacteristically alarmed Peter Baker — DOJ plans to write a summary of Mueller’s report for Congress, not send over a redacted version of it.

Mueller’s full report has yet to be released, and it remained unclear if it ever would be. House Democrats have demanded that it be sent to them by next Tuesday, but the Justice Department outlined a longer schedule, saying that it will have its own summary ready to send to lawmakers within weeks, though not months.

Barr has already failed the test of whether he can summarize Mueller’s results in good faith.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

“I Can’t Be Seen Taking Credit for HIS Victory:” The Purpose of Roger Stone’s Paperback

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Towards the end of the day on January 14, amid a three day stint writing the 3,000 word introduction that would justify reissuing his 2016 book, Making of the President, Roger Stone rejected the title suggested by his publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, “The Myth of Collusion; The Inside Story of How I REALLY Helped Trump Win.” He suggests instead, “The Myth of Collusion; The Inside Story of How Donald Trump really won,” noting, “I really can’t be seen taking credit for HIS victory.”

That’s the title the book now bears.

That exchange — and a number of other ones revealed in the correspondence Stone’s lawyers submitted in an attempt to persuade Judge Amy Berman Jackson they weren’t just trying to get publicity for the book when asking for a “clarification” regarding the book on March 1 — raises interesting questions about why he reissued the book how and when he did.

On one level, the explanation is easy: his publishers expected the original book, Making of the President, would be a big seller. They made 100,000 copies when it first came out in January 2017. The book flopped.

So in November 2018, Stone’s rising notoriety — and more importantly, the increased polarization surrounding the Mueller probe — provided an opportunity to recoup some of the losses on the hardcover. At that level, the reissue needs no explanation other than the obvious formula publishers use to make money: Exacerbate and profit off of controversy.

But that doesn’t explain why the project started on November 15, 2018 rather than any time in the year and a half earlier, when Skyhorse would have all those same goals. Nor does it explain how Stone went from expressing no interest in the project to rushing it through quickly in mid-December.

Given the timeline of events and a few stray comments in the correspondence (as I laid out here, Stone has probably withheld at least eight exchanges with his publisher from the court submission, after letting the publisher review what correspondence was there), I think he’s got several other purposes.

As noted below, Skyhorse first approached Stone on November 15, in the wake of the Democrats winning the House in midterm elections. On January 14, Skyhorse president Tony Lyons suggests that “We can send copies [of the book] to all U.S. Senators.” Those two details suggest that Skyhorse intended the book, on top of the obvious financial incentives, to capitalize on the general right wing campaign to discredit the Mueller investigation in an effort to stave off impeachment.

The delay between the time — on November 15 — when Skyhorse first pitched the reissue and the time — mid-December — when Stone and his lawyer, Grant Smith, start engaging in earnest suggests two other factors may be in play.

First, while Stone had been saying that Mueller would indict him for months, the aftermath of the Corsi “cooperation” starting on November 26 made Stone’s jeopardy more immediate. Yes, Corsi’s attempt to make his own cooperation useless may have delayed Stone’s indictment, but the details Corsi described to be in his own forthcoming Mueller-smearing book made it clear the Special Counsel believed Stone had successfully affected the timing of the release of the John Podesta emails on October 7, 2016, in a successful attempt to dampen some of the impact of the Access Hollywood video.

That’s why the specific content of the new introduction Stone finished on January 13, 2019, which he notes is more substantive than Skyhorse initially planned, is of interest. In the introduction, Stone:

  • Describes learning he was under investigation on January 20, 2017
  • Discounts his May 2016 interactions with “Henry Greenberg” — a Russian offering dirt on Hillary Clinton — by claiming Greenberg was acting as an FBI informant
  • Attributes any foreknowledge of WikiLeaks’ release to Randy Credico and not Jerome Corsi or their yet unidentified far more damning source while disclaiming any real foreknowledge
  • Gives Manafort pollster, Tony Fabrizio, credit for the decision to focus on Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in the last days of the election
  • Mentions Alex Jones’ foreboding mood on election night
  • Accuses Trump of selling out to mainstream party interests, choosing Reince Preebus over Steve Bannon
  • Blames Jeff Sessions for recusing from the Russian investigation
  • Harps on the Steele dossier
  • Dubiously claims that in January 2017, he didn’t know how central Mueller’s focus would be on him
  • Suggests any charges would be illegitimate
  • Complains about his financial plight
  • Falsely claims the many stories about his associates’ testimony comes from Mueller and not he himself
  • Repeats his Randy Credico cover story and discounts his lies to HPSCI by claiming his lawyers only found his texts to Credico after the fact
  • Suggests Hillary had ties to Russia
  • Notes that Trump became a subject of the investigation after he fired Jim Comey

Some of this is fairly breathtaking, given that Corsi’s theatrics had long ago proven Stone’s Credico cover story to be false. But of course, by the time Stone wrote this, he knew that he was at risk at a minimum for false statements charges, so he was stuck repeating the long-discredited HPSCI cover story. Which may be why his attorney, Grant Smith, provided some edits of the introduction on January 15 (something Smith should have but did not disclose in the filing to Amy Berman Jackson). Stone will now be stuck with this cover story, just as Corsi is stuck with the equally implausible cover story in his book.

But to some degree, that’s clearly one purpose this introduction serves: to “retake the narrative” (as Skyhorse’s editor Mike Campbell described it when pitching Stone on the project) and try to sell at least frothy right wingers on his cover story.

Another is to make money. Stone’s first response — over three weeks after Skyhorse first floated the paperback project — was to complain that because the publisher printed way too many copies of the hard cover, which was done as part of a joint venture, he made no money off the deal (a claim that Skyhorse corrects, slightly, in the follow-up). That’s why Skyhorse ended the joint venture: to mitigate the risk to Stone and by doing so to convince him to participate in the project.

More interesting — given the January stories suggesting that Jerome Corsi may have gotten a six month severance deal as part of a bid to have him sustain Stone’s cover story — is that Stone seemingly reversed his opinion about doing the project between December 9, when he said he was uninterested, and Monday, December 17, when Smith said they were ready to move forward, because Stone urgently needed money by the next day to pay off his collaborators in the book project.

From the public record, I’m actually fairly confused about who these collaborators are. A number of them would be the witnesses interviewed by Mueller’s grand jury.

But the book itself — because it retains the Acknowledgements section from the original — thanks Corsi third, after only Richard Nixon and Juanita Broaddrick, and lauds what Stone calls Corsi’s “investigative report[ing].”

Remember: A key product of that “investigative reporting” was the report Stone asked Corsi to write on August 30, 2016, to invent a cover for why he was discussing John Podesta and Joule Holdings in mid-August 2016. Things had already gone to hell by the time this book was released in e-book form on February 18 and they (appear to) have continued to disintegrate since then.

But I am very interested in who Stone paid off with that urgently wired payment in December. And because it happened before Stone was raided on January 25, Mueller likely knows the answer, if he didn’t already.

Which brings me to the last likely purpose of this paperback, one that goes to the core of whether Stone was trying to publicize its release with his little stunt about “clarifying” whether or not it would violate his gag.

Stone’s decision to do this paperback came not long after Stone repeated a formula other Trump associates bidding for a pardon have engaged in: promise publicly you won’t testify against Trump, then deny you’re asking for a pardon.

[T]here’s no circumstance under which I would testify against the president because I’d have to bear false witness against him. I’d have to make things up and I’m not going to do that. I’ve had no discussion regarding a pardon.

The next day, Trump let Stone and all the world know he had gotten the message.

Every person who is bidding for a Trump pardon is doing whatever they can — from reinforcing the conspiracy theories about the genesis of the investigation, to declaring ABJ found “no collusion” minutes after she warned lawyers not to make such claims, to sustaining embarrassingly thin cover stories explaining away evidence of a conspiracy — to hew to Trump’s strategy for beating this rap. Indeed, the Michael Cohen lawsuit claiming Trump stopped paying promised legal fees as soon as Cohen decided to cooperate with prosecutors suggests Trump’s co-conspirators may be doing this not just in hopes of a pardon, but also to get their legal fees reimbursed.

Which brings me back to Stone’s concern that the title, “The Myth of Collusion; The Inside Story of How I REALLY Helped Trump Win” would suggest he was taking credit for Trump’s win.

There are two reasons why such an appearance might undermine Stone’s goals for the book.

Stone has loudly claimed credit for his role in Trump’s victory, particularly as compared Steve Bannon. And evidence that will come out in his eventual trial will show him claiming credit, specifically, for successfully working with WikiLeaks.

Of course, Trump is a narcissist. And the surest way to piss him off — and in doing so, ruin any chance for a pardon — is to do anything to suggest he doesn’t get full credit for all the success he has in life.

But there may, in fact, be another reason Stone was quick to object to getting credit for all the things he did to get Trump elected.

At least according to Jerome Corsi, Stone, on indirect orders from Trump, took the lead in trying to learn about and with that knowledge, optimize the release of the materials Russia stole from Hillary’s campaign. If non-public details about what Stone did — or even the public claim that Stone managed the timing of the Podesta email release — had a bigger impact on the election outcome than we currently know, then Stone would have all the more reason to want to downplay his contribution.

That is, if Stone’s efforts to maximize the value of Russia’s active measures campaign really were key, then the last thing he’d want to do is release a paperback crowing about that.

Of course, because of the boneheaded efforts of his lawyers, his concerns about doing so are now public.

Update: I’ve corrected my characterization of Skyhorse. They’re not ideological. But they do feed off of controversy.

October 30, 2018: ABC reports that Stone hired Bruce Rogow in September, a First Amendment specialist who has done extensive work with Trump Organization.

October 31, 2018: Date Corsi stops making any pretense of cooperating with Mueller inquiry.

November 6, 2018: Democrats win the House in mid-term elections.

November 7, 2018: Trump fires Jeff Sessions, appoints Big Dick Toilet Salesman Matt Whitaker Acting Attorney General.

November 8, 2018: Prosecutors first tell Manafort they’ll find he breached plea deal.

November 12, 2018: Date Corsi starts blowing up his “cooperation” publicly.

November 14, 2018: Date of plea deal offered by Mueller to Corsi.

November 15, 2018: Mike Campbell pitches Stone on a paperback — in part to ‘retake the narrative — including a draft of the new introduction.

November 18, 2018: Jerome Corsi writes up his cover story for how he figured out John Podesta’s emails would be released.

November 20, 2018: After much equivocation, Trump finally turns in his written responses to Mueller.

November 21, 2018: Dean Notte reaches out to Grant Smith suggesting a resolution to all the back and forth on their joint venture, settling the past relationship in conjunction with a new paperback.

November 22, 2018: Corsi writes up collapse of his claim to cooperate.

November 23, 2018: Date Mueller offers Corsi a plea deal.

November 26, 2018: Jerome Corsi publicly rejects plea deal from Mueller and leaks the draft statement of offense providing new details on his communications with Stone.

November 26, 2019: Mueller deems Paul Manafort to be in breach of his plea agreement because he lied to the FBI and prosecutors while ostensibly cooperating.

November 27, 2018: Initial reports on contents of Jerome Corsi’s book, including allegations that Stone delayed release of John Podesta emails to blunt the impact of the Access Hollywood video.

November 29, 2018: Michael Cohen pleads guilty in Mueller related cooperation deal.

December 2, 2018: Roger Stone claims in ABC appearance he’d never testify against Trump and that he has not asked for a pardon.

December 3, 2018: Trump hails Stone’s promise not to cooperate against him.

December 9, 2018: Stone replies to Campbell saying that because he never made money on Making of the President, he has no interest.

December 13, 2018: Tony Lyons and Grant Smith negotiate a deal under which Sky Horse would buy Stone out of his hardcover deal with short turnaround, then expect to finalize a paperbook by mid January. This is how Stone gets removed from the joint venture — in an effort to minimize his risk.

December 14, 2018: Mueller formally requests Roger Stone’s transcript from House Intelligence Committee.

December 17, 2018: Smith, saying he and Stone have discussed the deal at length, sends back a proposal for how it could work. This is where he asks for payment the next day, to pay someone off for work on the original book.

For some reason, in the ensuing back-and-forth, Smith presses to delay decision on the title until January.

December 19, 2018: It takes two days to get an agreement signed and Stone’s payment wired.

December 20, 2018: HPSCI votes to release Stone’s transcript to Mueller.

January 8, 2019: Paul Manafort’s redaction fail alerts co-conspirators that Mueller knows he shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik.

January 13, 2019: Stone drafts new introduction, which he notes is “substantially longer and better than the draft sent to me by your folks.” He asks about the title again.

January 14, 2019: Stone sends the draft to Smith and Lyons. It is 3386 words long. Lyons responds, suggesting as title, “The Myth of Collusion; The Inside Story of How I REALLY Helped Trump Win.” Lyons also notes Stone can share the book with Senators.

Stone responds suggesting that he could live with, “The Myth of Collusion; The Inside Story of How Donald Trump really won,” noting, “I really can’t be seen taking credit for HIS victory.”

By end of day, Skyhorse’s Mike Campbell responds with his edits.

January 15, 2019: The next morning, Smith responds with his edits, reminding that Stone has to give final approval. Stone does so before lunch. Skyhorse moves to working on the cover. Late that day Campbell sends book jacket copy emphasizing Mueller’s “witch hunt.”

January 15, 2019: Mueller filing makes clear that not all Manafort’s interviews and grand jury appearances involve him lying.

January 16, 2019: Tony Lyons starts planning for the promotional tour, asking Stone whether he can be in NYC for a March 5 release. They email back and forth about which cover to use.

January 18, 2019: By end of day Friday, Skyhorse is wiring Stone payment for the new introduction.

January 24, 2019: Mike Campbell tells Stone the paperback “is printing soon,” and asks what address he should send Stone’s copies to. WaPo reports that Mueller is investigating whether Jerome Corsi’s “severance payments” from InfoWars were an effort to have him sustain Stone’s story. It also reports that Corsi’s stepson, Andrew Stettner, appeared before the grand jury. That same day, the grand jury indicts Stone, but not Corsi.

January 25, 2019, 6:00 AM: Arrest of Roger Stone.

January 25, 2019, 2:10 PM: Starting the afternoon after Stone got arrested, Tony Lyons starts working with Smith on some limited post-arrest publicity. He says Hannity is interested in having Stone Monday, January 28 “Will he do it?” Smith replies hours later on the same day his client was arrested warning, “I need to talk to them before.”

January 26, 2019: Lyons asks Smith if Stone is willing to do a CNN appearance Monday morning, teasing, “I guess he could put them on the spot about how they really go to this house with the FBI.”

January 27, 2019: Smith responds to the CNN invitation, “Roger is fully booked.” When Lyons asks for a list of those “fully booked” bookings, Smith only refers to the Hannity appearance on the 28th, and notes that Kristin Davis is handling the schedule. Davis notes he’s also doing Laura Ingraham.

January 28, 2019: The plans for Hannity continue on Monday, with Smith again asking for the Hannity folks to speak to him “to confirm the details.” In that thread, Davis and Lyons talk about how amazing it would be to support “another New York Times Bestseller” for Stone.

February 15, 2019: After two weeks — during which Stone was indicted, made several appearances before judges, and had his attorneys submit their first argument against a gag — Stone responded to Campbell’s January 24 email providing his address, and then asking “what is the plan for launch?” (a topic which had already been broached with Lyons on January 16). Campbell describes the 300-400 media outlets who got a review copy, then describes the 8 journalists who expressed an interest in it. Stone warns Campbell, “recognize that the judge may issue a gag order any day now” and admits “I also have to be wary of media outlets I want to interview me but don’t really want to talk about the book.”

February 18, 2019: Release of ebook version of Stone’s reissued book.

February 21, 2019: After Stone released an Instagram post implicitly threatening her, Amy Berman Jackson imposes a gag on Stone based on public safety considerations.

March 1, 2019: Ostensible official release date of paperback of Stone’s book. Stone submits “clarification” claiming that the book publication does not violate the gag.

March 12, 2019: Official release date of Corsi hard cover, which Mueller may need for indictment.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Roger Stone Does the RICO Defense

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Most of the Russian investigation beat journalists are analyzing Amy Berman Jackson’s latest smackdown of Roger Stone, in which she requires him to comply with her gag order even though (he claims) the book forward that conflicts with it was planned in advance of her gag. I’ll leave that to other journalists for now (though I will note that in the order, she relies on all the traps she set in the hearing on the gag, including Stone’s admission he doesn’t need the book for his livelihood and Stone’s lawyer’s concession that Stone shouldn’t speak about his case). Effectively, she’s still letting their stunt in that hearing make her ruling for her.

I’ve been engaged in the far more mundane analysis of how Stone’s defense against the DNC lawsuit has evolved, possibly in conjunction with his indictment and the prospect of further information coming out.

Yesterday, all the defendants who have accepted service in the DNC lawsuit against Trump’s campaign, WikiLeaks, the Agalarovs, and GRU submitted their motions to dismiss a second amended complaint (SAC). Because of the timing of all this, I wanted to compare Roger Stone’s last response (Second Motion) with the one submitted yesterday (Third Motion).

The last motions to dismiss were submitted December 7. The SAC, filed January 18, added allegations tied to Jerome Corsi’s draft plea agreement and related revelations, but not Stone’s indictment (which was filed a week after the SAC). But Stone’s response, submitted March 4, reflects the indictment, and presumably may reflect what his lawyers are seeing in discovery.

So comparing the two motions provides a sense of what Stone’s lawyers are seeing and how they imagine they’ll defend him against his indictment.

The SAC mentions Stone around 112 times; his actions (described starting at ¶161) form a key part of the Democratic narrative, and is key to tying the Trump associates named in the suit to the Russian and WikiLeaks efforts to exploit the stolen documents.

There are three key differences in Stone’s Third Motion and the Second.

Stone stops quoting the accusations against him

The Second Motion takes on the specific accusations against him, quoting some of the key paragraphs.

The specific facts alleged as to Roger Stone make him a unique defendant. While analyzing these allegations, it is critical for the Court to note when Stone is alleged, by Plaintiff to have joined the conspiracy (post-July 22, 2016, first DNC dissemination), what acts he allegedly committed to in fact join the conspiracy, and do those acts allege a conspiracy to which the DNC can seek a remedy in this Court. As to Roger Stone, the amended complaint alleges:

19. Throughout the summer and fall of 2016, during the height of the Presidential campaign, Trump’s associates continued to communicate secretly with Russian agents and WikiLeaks, who strategically disseminated information stolen from Democratic targets. For example, in August 2016, Stone began communicating secretly with GRU operatives and bragged about his contacts with Assange. Similarly, Gates, who served as the Trump Campaign’s deputy chairman and then liaison to the Republican National Committee, maintained secret communications with an individual he knew to be connected to the GRU. (emphasis added).

Other than the private messages (communication on the social network platform, twitter), between Guccifer 2.0 and Stone there are no additional allegations about what they communicated about. The communications are attached as exhibits to this motion.

20. In the summer and fall of 2016, Stone revealed information that he could not have had unless he were communicating with WikiLeaks, Russian operatives, or both about their hacking operations in the United States. For instance, in August of 2016, nobody in the public sphere knew that Russia had stolen emails from John Podesta, the chairman of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Nevertheless, on August 21, 2016, Stone predicted that damaging information about Podesta would be released, tweeting “it will soon [be] the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” Weeks later, WikiLeaks began releasing batches of Podesta’s emails on a near-daily basis until Election Day—as Stone had predicted. Similarly, in mid-September 2016, Stone said that he expected “Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary [Clinton] on a weekly basis fairly soon.” And, beginning on October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing stolen emails at least once a week—as Stone had predicted. (emphasis added).

WikiLeaks merely telling Stone that it has specific information is not a tort. Additionally, since the DNC alleged that Stone’s prediction about “the Podesta’s” proves Stone joined the relevant conspiracy is belied by the fact John Podesta’s emails were not on the DNC server. The DNC cannot properly allege Stone joined the conspiracy and committed torts based upon this allegation in which the DNC cannot claim a concrete injury fairly traceable to Stone. An analysis of the DNC’s standing and misuse of inferences to attempt to sufficiently plead this conspiracy will be discussed below.

That same passage in yesterday’s motion to dismiss is far more abbreviated and — in the passage that most directly addresses the charges against him — doesn’t cite the DNC’s full accusations against him directly.

In the summer and fall of 2016, Stone revealed information that he could not have had unless he were communicating with WikiLeaks, Russian operatives, or both about their hacking operations in the United States. For instance, in August of 2016, nobody in the public sphere knew that Russia had stolen emails from John Podesta, the chairman of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Nevertheless, on August 21, 2016, Stone predicted that damaging information about Podesta would be released, tweeting “it will soon [be] the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” Weeks later, WikiLeaks began releasing batches of Podesta’s emails on a near-daily basis until Election Day—as Stone had predicted. Similarly, in mid-September 2016, Stone said that he expected “Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary [Clinton] on a weekly basis fairly soon.” And, beginning on October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing stolen emails at least once a week—as Stone had predicted.

Next, the DNC alleges Roger Stone was prophetic because he “revealed information he could not have had unless he were communicating with WikiLeaks, Russian operatives or both. (SAC ¶ 22). An example cited is: In August of 2016, nobody in the public sphere knew that Russia had stolen emails from John Podesta, Stone predicted that damaging information about Podesta would be released, tweeting: “it will soon [be] the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” Weeks later, WikiLeaks began releasing batches of Podesta’s emails on a near-daily basis until Election Day—as Stone had predicted. (SAC ¶91).

WikiLeaks merely telling Stone that it has non-specific information is not a tort. But the DNC emphasizes that “Stone discussed highly confidential and strategic information stolen from another Democratic party institution and disseminated to the public.” (SAC ¶ 23). This admission in and of itself proves that the Podesta emails were not part of the DNC records. Since the DNC alleged that Stone’s prediction about “the Podesta’s” proves Stone joined the relevant conspiracy and enterprise it is absolutely defeated by the fact John Podesta’s emails were not on the DNC server or that of the other “Democratic party institution.” Similarly, in midSeptember 2016, Stone said that he expected “Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary [Clinton] on a weekly basis fairly soon.” Id. And, beginning on October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing stolen emails at least once a week—as Stone had predicted. Id.

Then the DNC alleges Stone and other defendants misled various government agencies. Stone did not lie to the Special Counsel or the FBI; he only appeared or testified to one congressional committee. 3 He is alleged to have intimidated a witness who “threatened to contradict his narrative about his communications with WikiLeaks.” (SAC ¶ 30). But neither the testimony to Congress, nor the “intimidation” occurred prior to the 2016 presidential election.

3 Roger Stone has been indicted in the District of the District of Columbia. (Case No. 1:19-cr-18-ABJ). The indictment charges Stone with lying to Congress and intimidating a witness, Randy Credico in relation to Credico asserting his Fifth Amendment right to a House Committee. The indictment is not for conspiracy, RICO, theft, or trespass. The DNC alleges an open-ended RICO, something the Special Counsel has not been willing to allege against any American.

By telling this instead as a narrative rather than quoting the actual paragraphs, Stone minimizes the accusations against him, which the DNC could now fill out with more from his indictment.

Ultimately, Stone’s defense remains, as it has been from the start, that any foreknowledge of the John Podesta emails is useless to the Democrats’ lawsuit because Podesta’s emails were not stolen from a DNC server, and that he had no foreknowledge of the DNC release to WikiLeaks (he also leans heavily on WikiLeaks not having engaged in a tort, which may get him in trouble if WikiLeaks does get charged with something).

The possibility that Stone saw the Podesta emails in advance may explain this strategy. After all, if it comes out that he did receive the Podesta emails in advance, then his defense here (that the emails don’t amount to economic espionage) still might fly given that Podesta was not part of the DNC.

But now that Cohen has described Stone warning Trump of the July 22 release, that strategy may begin to crumble.

Stone drops his claim not to be part of the campaign

In the Second Motion, in an effort to distance himself from the network of conspirators, Stone denied that he was part of the campaign.

Conspiracy between Stone and the Campaign.

Plaintiffs do not state a proper theory of conspiracy to support any claim. An agent of a corporation cannot conspire with the corporation itself. Executive Sandwich Shoppe, Inc. v. Carr Realty Corp., 749 A.2d 724, 739 (D.C. 2000) (referred to as the “intracorporate conspiracy doctrine”); Little Professor Book Co. v. Reston N. Pt. Vill., 41 Va. Cir. 73 (1996) (circuit court opinion); Reich v. Lopez, 38 F. Supp. 3d 436, 464 (S.D.N.Y. 2014), aff’d, 858 F.3d 55 (2d Cir. 2017); Tabb v. D.C., 477 F. Supp. 2d 185, 190 (D.D.C. 2007) (citing Dickerson v. Alachua County Comm., 200 F.3d 761, 767 (11th Cir. 2000)). Stone worked as an independent contractor for the Campaign for a few months in 2015. In short, the amended complaint alleges Stone was always acting as an agent of the Trump Campaign for President. In the only footnote in the amended complaint, the term “Trump Associate” is defined as an agent of the Campaign. (Am. Compl. at 16 *). The D.C.-law and Virginia law, therefore, does not support a claim of conspiracy between Stone and the Campaign.

That footnote in the SAC has been rewritten to define Trump associate this way:

“Trump Associates” refers to the Trump advisors and confidants named as Defendants herein: Trump, Jr., Manafort, Kushner, Stone, and Papadopoulos.

In the section disclaiming a role in managing the RICO enterprise, Stone also drops an argument that the complaint doesn’t allege “that he was even communicating with the other ‘Trump associates’,” leaving this argument denying that he played a key role in the conspiracy.

The lawsuit does not allege Roger Stone had a management or operational position in the Campaign at all. He was merely an informal adviser. In short, Stone did not have any part in directing the enterprise’s affairs as required by the law in this Circuit. See id. At best, Stone is talking to an alleged Russian hacker on twitter about a hack and theft after the DNC’s data was stolen.

In the wake of his indictment — which gets closer to suggesting Stone got the October release timed to drown out the Access Hollywood release (a claim Jerome Corsi has sometimes backed), not to mention Michael Cohen’s claim that Stone told the President about the initial July 22 email dump several days in advance — this claim may get harder to sustain.

Indeed, as it is, if Stone goes to trial multiple communications with the campaign about WikiLeaks’ releases will become public. But Cohen’s allusion to corroboration about the July 18 or 19 Stone call to Trump suggests that information could become public even sooner.

Stone continues to ignore potential CFAA exposure

As in the Second Motion, there’s a key part of the Democratic narrative that Stone ignores in the Third Motion: the hack of the Dem’s analytics on AWS, which post-dates Guccifer 2.0’s offer to help Stone and offer of the DCCC analytics in early September, which starts this way (I discuss and quote this in more depth in this post).

N. The GRU Reaches Out To Stone About Democratic Party Turnout Models

177. On August 22, 2016, GRU operatives transmitted several gigabytes of data stolen from another Democratic party target to a Republican party strategist in Florida. The data included voter turnout analyses for Florida and other states.160

178. Between September 7 and September 8, 2016, the GOP strategist exchanged private messages with GRU operatives posing as Guccifer 2.0 in which he explained the substantial value of the stolen data he had received from them.161

179. On September 9, 2016, GRU operatives posing as Guccifer 2.0 contacted Stone, writing him “please tell me if I can help u anyhow[,]” and adding “it would be a great pleasure to me.” The operatives then asked Stone for his reaction to the “turnout model for the Democrats’ entire presidential campaign.” Stone replied, “[p]retty standard.” 162

O. Russia Launches Another Attack On DNC Servers Housing Sensitive And Valuable Trade Secrets

180. On September 20, 2016, CrowdStrike’s monitoring service discovered that unauthorized users—later discovered to be GRU officers—had accessed the DNC’s cloud-computing service. The cloud-computing service housed test applications related to the DNC’s analytics. The DNC’s analytics are its most important, valuable, and highly confidential tools. While the DNC did not detect unauthorized access to its voter file, access to these test applications could have provided the GRU with the ability to see how the DNC was evaluating and processing data critical to its principal goal of winning elections. Forensic analysis showed that the unauthorized users had stolen the contents of these virtual servers by making exact duplicates (“snapshots”) of them and moving those snapshots to other accounts they owned on the same service. The GRU stole multiple snapshots of these virtual servers between September 5, 2016 and September 22, 2016. The U.S. government later concluded that this cyberattack had been executed by the GRU as part of its broader campaign to damage to the Democratic party.

DNC’s allegation that Stone informed Guccifer 2.0 he was unimpressed with the DCCC oppo research released in early September, followed shortly by GRU’s hack of the crown jewels, would seem to undermine Stone’s entire defense, given that his claims that his conversations with Guccifer 2.0 preceded all hacks (it doesn’t — indeed, it happens as the hacks are occurring) and his claims that the Podesta release is unrelated because is not DNC does not apply to the analytics.

But thus far, he’s just ignoring those allegations.

None of the new details about Stone’s conduct will really get the DNC to The RICO. But it may put Stone at more risk of other exposure.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Conspiracy Theorist Jerome Corsi Finally Meets a Conspiracy Theory He’s Not Willing to Face Legal Jeopardy Over

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Today, Jerome Corsi retracted a piece published in (and still available on) InfoWars last year accusing Seth Rich of leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

On March 5, 2018, Infowars published an article by Dr. Jerome Corsi titled Anti-Trump Left Tries to Revive Dying ‘Russia’ Narrative by Blaming Roger Stone. In that article, Dr. Corsi alleged that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron Rich, were involved in downloading and leaking emails from the DNC to WikiLeaks.

Dr. Corsi acknowledges that his allegations were not based upon any independent factual knowledge regarding Seth or Aaron Rich. Instead, Dr. Corsi relied primarily on, and quoted from, a column by Adm. James Lyons (Ret.) that was published in the Washington Times on March 2, 2018, but was retracted on September 30, 2018. (The Washington Times’ retraction is available here.)

It was not Dr. Corsi’s intent to rely upon inaccurate information, or to cause any suffering to Mr. Rich’s family. To that end, Dr. Corsi retracts the article and apologizes to the Rich family.

Given the coverage, it seems like the apology may everything to do with Aaron Rich’s lawsuit and nothing to do with a real change of heart. Of particular interest, Corsi did not retract the insinuations he made about Rich in his book, which is due to be released in hardcover form next Tuesday.

The last piece of the puzzle fell in place for me when Seth Rich, an IT worker in the DNC was murdered on July 10, 2016, at approximately 4:30 a.m. EST, as he walked home along the streets of Washington, D.C. The Washington Police Department has kept the investigation of Seth Rich’s murder secret, refusing to release basic information such as an autopsy, or conclusions from police investigative reports. The murder was initially reported as a “robbery gone bad,” until it was realized that Seth Rich still had his wallet, a $2,000 gold necklace, and his wrist watch on him when he was shot. Police rushed to the scene as neighbors heard two gunshots being fired. The assailant(s) fled the scene before police arrived. No assailant has ever been charged with the murder.

The strongest indication that Seth Rich leaked the DNC and Podesta emails to WikiLeaks comes from Julian Assange himself.

In an interview broadcast on the Dutch television program Nieuswsuur on August 9, 2016, the host Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal asked Assange, “The stuff that your sitting on, is an October Surprise in there?”

Assange insisted, “WikiLeaks never sits on material,” even though Assange had previously said WikiLeaks yet has more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign that had yet to be published.

Then, on his own initiative, without being specifically asked, Assange began talking about Seth Rich.

“Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very significant risks,” Assange volunteered.

“There’s a twenty-seven year-old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons, as he was walking down the streets in Washington,” Assange continued.

Van Rosenthal objected that the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was a robbery.

“No, there’s no findings,” Assange answered.

[snip]

Why was the criminal investigation into Seth Rich’s murder stopped? Simple, because solving that murder would expose that Seth Rich stole the DNC emails, not the Russians. Comey blocked giving immunity to Assange because the Deep State knew Assange could prove Seth Rich stole the DNC emails and got them to WikiLeaks. The basic premise of “Russian Collusion” was a lie—concocted by Hillary and John Podesta, backed up by the CIA and entire corrupt U.S. intelligence apparatus—all designed to frame Donald Trump with a phony Fusion GPS dossier. It stunk. And here I was rapidly becoming a victim of Mueller’s criminal activity.

These are substantially the same allegations made in the InfoWars column. As I noted, Corsi’s book largely serves to hang a bunch of conspiracy theories on a specious claim to have figured out on his own that John Podesta’s emails were being released, which in turn appears to be an attempt to talk his way out of obstruction charges in the Mueller investigation.

That said, the retraction comes long after Washington Times retracted the column on which both the InfoWars column — written at the same time as Corsi first publicly released his cover story for Roger Stone — and his book is seemingly based. And it comes at a time when DOJ appears to be investigating whether Corsi’s job at InfoWars was part of a cover-up.

So it will be interesting to see just how far this retraction goes.

Update: InfoWars has not retracted the story.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Fun with Dr. Corsi’s “Forensics”!

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By far the most ridiculous part of Jerome Corsi’s book is where he spends an entire chapter pretending that he figured out on his own that WikiLeaks had John Podesta’s emails rather than being told that by someone whose identity he’s trying to avoid sharing with Mueller’s team.

The chapter is one of three in the book that he presents as having been written in real time, effectively as diary entries. Corsi presents it as the fevered narrative he writes on November 18, 2018, at a time when Mueller’s team was cracking down on him for his continued lies but before he refused the plea deal, after a night of nightmares.

Last night, I was plagued by nightmares that caused me to sleep very poorly.

His change in voice is followed with an even more direct address to readers, which he returns to as an interjection in the middle of his crazed explanation.

I am going to write this chapter to explain to you, the reader, how I used my basic intuitive skills as a reporter to figure out in August 2016 that Assange had Podesta’s emails, that Assange planned to start making the Podesta file public in October 2016, and that Assange would release the emails in a serial, day-by-day fashion, right up to election day.

[snip]

Now, I know this is tedious and will tax many readers, so I’ve decided here to take a break. You have to understand what I am going through is a roller-coaster. Sometimes I feel like everything is normal and that the federal government will understand that I am a reporter and should be protected by the First Amendment. Then, I realize that the next ring of the doorbell could be the FBI seeking to handcuff me and arrest me in full view of my family.

Resuming after a much-needed break, we need only a few more dates to complete the analysis.

The chapter consists of three things, none of which even remotely presents a case for how he could have concluded WikiLeaks was sitting on John Podesta’s emails:

  • An argument that claims he simply reasoned it all out, without proof
  • A chronology that makes no sense given the July and August 2016 emails he’s trying to explain away
  • Other crap theories designed to undermine Mueller’s argument about Russian involvement, most of which post-date the date when Corsi claims to have figured out the Podesta emails were coming

Corsi’s “argument”

Corsi’s main argument is this:

Clearly, I reasoned there had to have been Podesta emails on that server that would have discussed the Clinton/DNC plot to deny Bernie Sanders the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016. Where were these Podesta emails, I wondered?

[snip]

I felt certain that if Assange had Podesta’s emails he would wait to drop them in October 2016, capturing the chance to stage the 2016 “October Surprise,” a term that had been in vogue in U.S. presidential politics since 1980 when Jimmy Carter lost re-election to Ronald Reagan, largely because the Reagan camp finessed Ayatollah Khomeini to postpone the release of the hostages from the American embassy in Tehran until after that year’s November election. I also figured that Assange would release the Podesta emails in drip-drip fashion, serially, over a number of days, stretching right up to the Election Day. In presidential politics, the news cycle speeds up, such that what might take a month or a week to play out in a normal news cycle might take only a day or two in the heightened intensity of a presidential news cycle—especially a presidential news cycle in October, right at Election Day is nearing.

In spite of his claims, elsewhere, to have done forensic analysis that told him John Podesta’s emails were coming, ultimately his argument boils down to this: he figured out that Podesta’s emails (which he purportedly hadn’t read) would be the most damning possible thing and therefore WikiLeaks must have and intend to release them in a serial release because it made sense.

Corsi’s chronology

From there, Corsi proceeds to spin out the following bullshit about how he came to that conclusion:

  • Starting in February 2016, a woman named LH whose ex-husband was a former top NSA figure told him [why?] incorrect things about how the Democrats organize their servers. This information seems to be inflected by the flap over VAN space the previous December, but Corsi doesn’t mention that. This information is wrong in many of the ways later skeptics of the Russian hack would be wrong, but Corsi claims he had that wrong understanding well in advance of the crowd.
  • When Assange announced on June 12 that he had upcoming Hillary leaks, Corsi was “alerted to the possibility Assange had obtained emails from the DNC email server,” which he took to mean VAN.
  • When the WaPo reported on the DNC hack on June 14, 2016, Corsi took Democrats’ (false) reassurances about financial data to be true, matched it to his incorrect claimed understanding of how the Democrats organized their data, and assumed VAN had been hacked (this is the day before Guccifer 2.0 would claim he got in through VAN, remember). Corsi also claims to have noted from the WaPo story that Perkins Coie and Crowdstrike were involved, the latter of which he tied to Google’s Eric Schmidt (who was helping Dems on tech), which together he used to suggest that in real time he believed the Democrats had “manufactured” evidence to pin the hack on the Russians. Again, Corsi is suggesting he got to the conspiracy theories it took the rest of Republicans a year to get to, but in real time.
  • Corsi incorrectly read the Crowdstrike white paper (on which the WaPo story was obviously based and which Ellen Nakashima had had for about a week, and which includes an update written in response to the appearance of Guccifer 2.0) as a response to Guccifer 2.0’s post on June 15 and — in spite of the WaPo report that Cozy Bear had been “monitoring DNC’s email and chat communications” — concluded that the hackers had not taken email.
  • After the DNC emails were released, Corsi had what he claims was his big insight: that these emails largely came from DNC’s Comms Director and their finance staffers, which meant Podesta’s (and DWS’, which he logically should but did not, pursue) had to be what was left. Mind you, the former point is something WikiLeaks made clear on its website:

On July 22, 2016, Wikileaks began releasing over two days a total of 44,053 emails and17,761 email attachments from key figures in the DNC. What I noticed immediately was that the largest number of emails by far came from DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda (10,520 emails), who had approximately three-times the emails released for the next highest on the list, National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3,799 emails) and Finance Chief of Staff Scott Corner (3,095 emails). What I noticed immediately was that emails from Debbie Wasserman Schultz and John Podesta were missing. Yet, by analyzing the addresses in the emails, it was clear the “From,” “To,” and or “CC” listings indicate the email was sent by or to an addressee using the DNC email server, identified as @dnc.org.

  • In his narrative of how he “figured out” there must be Podesta emails, he relies not on the July 25 NBC story he cites earlier in his book, quoting Assange saying there was “no proof” the emails came from Russia (and suggesting his set were a different one than the ones analyzed by cybersecurity experts), but a CNN story he dates to July 26 but which got updated early morning July 27, citing Assange saying, “Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are;” Corsi also cites a July 27 NYMag story citing the CNN one. Corsi claims that as he was listening to this interview, he realized that Assange had Podesta emails “lifted from the DNC server,” which would be incorrect even if it were true, given that Podesta’s emails were from his Gmail account.

Listening to this interview on CNN, all the pieces fit in place for me. Assange had Podesta emails that were also lifted from the DNC server and these were the emails he was holding to drop later in the campaign.

  • Corsi describes “the last piece of the puzzle” to be Seth Rich’s death on July 10, 2016, but which occurred before Assange’s post DNC release interviews, in one of which Assange suggested his sources were still alive to “step forward,” then points to Assange’s offer of a reward for information leading to a conviction on August 9. This happened after he had already suggested to Stone that Podesta’s emails were coming.

None of this explains how Corsi would not have decided that Clinton Foundation emails were what was missing, which is what Stone believed when he instructed Corsi to reach out to Ted Malloch on July 25, the day before the Assange interviews Corsi says led him to conclude WikiLeaks instead had Podesta’s emails. And much of it assumes that a unified hack occurred (otherwise it would be impossible to decide what was coming from what had already been released), an assumption he claims not to believe in much of the rest of his crap.

Corsi’s crap

In addition to that chronology, though, Corsi throws in a bunch of crap meant to discredit the evidence laid out in the Mueller GRU indictment. Much of this evidence post-dates the moment he claims he figured out that WikiLeaks had Podesta’s emails, which makes it irrelevant to his theory, nevertheless Corsi throws it out there.

  • Corsi takes the Guccifer 2.0 leak of DCCC files to Aaron Nevins — which didn’t happen until over a month after he told Stone that WikiLeaks had Podesta emails — to be “proof” not just that Guccifer 2.0 only hacked DNC files, which he again asserts incorrectly came from VAN, but also that Guccifer 2.0 had not hacked emails.
  • Corsi claims that Guccifer 2.0 “never bragged that he hacked the DNC email server that contained the Podesta emails,” even though Guccifer 2.0 did brag that WikiLeaks had published documents he gave them after the DNC leak.
  • Corsi claims that Guccifer 2.0 published donor lists and voter analysis at DCLeaks, which is generally inaccurate (indeed, some Podesta files came out via DCLeaks!), but also admits a tie between Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks that would either rely on contemporary reporting that asserted a tie, the GRU indictment, or some personal knowledge not otherwise explained.
  • Corsi claims that, unlike Marcel Lazar, “Guccifer 2.0 has never been positively identified let alone arrested,” without explaining how he’s sure that the 12 GRU officers Mueller indicted don’t amount to positively identifying the people running Guccifer 2.0. Indeed, rather than addressing that indictment, Corsi instead tries to rebut the Intelligence Community Assessment’s “high confidence” attribution of Guccifer 2.0 to GRU, which he claims relies on ‘tradecraft’ that relies on circumstantial evidence at best, presuming a hacker leaves a signature.” In the ICA, that discussion appears in a section that also notes that “Some analytic judgments are based directly on collected information,” as the Mueller indictment makes clear the GRU one was.
  • Corsi claims the Vault 7 release suggesting the CIA has a tool to falsely attribute its own hacks “undermined” the IC’s attribution of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, without realizing that’s a different issue from whether the CIA, NSA, and FBI can correctly attribute the hack (though if the Russians obtained those files in the weeks after Joshua Schulte allegedly stole them in 2016, it would have made it harder for CIA to chase down the Russians).
  • Corsi initially argues, providing no evidence except that he’s sure the DNC emails come from the DNC email server and not NGP-VAN or Hillary’s private server, that, “While the DNC email server could have been hacked by an outside agent, what is equally plausible is that the emails could have been stolen by someone on the inside of the DNC, perhaps an employee with their own @dnc.org email address.” He then feeds the Seth Rich conspiracy.
  • Corsi uses what he claims to have learned about serialization in a college course covering Dickens (but details of which, regarding the history of Dickens’ serialization, he gets entirely wrong) to explain how he knew the Podesta emails would come out in a serialized release.
  • Corsi dismisses the possibility the Russians used a cut-out with this garble:

The attempt to distinguish is disingenuous, suggesting the Russians may have been responsible for the hack, turning the information to a third party, not the Russians or a state actor, who handed WikiLeaks the emails and thus became “the source.”

  • Corsi cites the Nation’s August 9, 2017 version of the Bill Binney theory purportedly proving that a set of files purporting to be from the DNC — which were never released by WikiLeaks — were copied inside the US and also noting that the Russian metadata in the first Guccifer 2.0 documents was placed there intentionally. As I noted at the time, the two theories actually don’t — at all — disprove the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. But they’re even worse for Corsi’s claims, because (even though the set of files were called NGP/VAN) they undermine his false claim about the Democrats’ servers and they acknowledge that the files he said disproved that Guccifer 2.0 had Podesta files actually were Podesta files.

These things are utterly irrelevant to the soundness of Corsi’s own claim to have been able to guess that the Podesta emails were coming and — as I note — a number of them sharply contradict what he claims to believe.

Corsi’s mistaken notion of his role in proving “collusion”

But the crap does serve Corsi’s larger point, which is to undermine what he imagines Mueller’s theory of “collusion” to be.

Mueller & Company had decided the Trump campaign somehow encouraged Russia to steal the DNC emails and give them to Assange, so WikiLeaks could publish them. Then to establish “Russian collusion” with the Trump campaign, Mueller was out to connect his own dots. The Mueller prosecutors had been charged with the mission to grill me until

I would “give up” my source to Assange. I was their critical “missing link.” If Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein only got me to confess, Mueller figured he could connect the dots from Roger Stone to me to Assange, and from Assange back again to me, and from me to Roger Stone, who would feed the information to Steve Bannon, then chairing the Trump campaign.

The final dots, the Mueller prosecutors assumed, would connect Bannon to Trump and the “Russian collusion” chain of communication would be complete. The only problem was that I did not have a source connecting me to Assange, so Mueller’s chain-link narrative does not connect.

While I actually think it possible that Corsi’s shenanigans may have harmed the neatness of Mueller’s case against Stone, perhaps even leading Mueller to charge Stone only with the obstruction charges rather than in a larger conspiracy, it doesn’t affect the understanding with which Mueller seems to be approaching the Don Jr side of any conspiracy, in which Trump’s son accepted a meeting offering dirt, thinking the family might make $300 million off it, and promised policy considerations that — even before he was sworn into office — his father took steps to pay off.

That conspiracy remains, even if Mueller can’t show that at the same time, Trump was maximizing the advantage of the WikiLeaks releases via his old political advisor Roger Stone.

But who knows? Perhaps Mueller may one day prove that, too?

One other thing that’s worth noting, however: As I laid out above, Corsi doesn’t just attempt to explain how he came to guess that WikiLeaks would release John Podesta’s emails. In the guise of doing that, he lays out what amounts to the Greatest Hits of the Denialist Conspiracies, throwing every possible claim mobilized to undermine the conclusion that Russia hacked the Democrats out there, even the ones that undermine Corsi’s own claimed beliefs.

And, as Corsi himself notes, Mueller has Corsi’s Google searches.

Truthfully, I was astounded because it seemed as if the FBI had studied me down to knowing the key strokes that I had used on my computer to do Google searches for articles. I realized my Google file would have much information about my locations and my Internet searches, but the way Zelinsky drilled down on how I wrote this article was shocking.

Repeatedly Zelinsky had warned me that I had no idea how truly extensive the Special Counselor’s investigation had been. Now, I imagined an army of FBI computer specialists at Quantico mapping out my every electronic communication in 2016, including my emails, my cellphone calls, and my use of the laptop and the Internet to conduct my research and write my various articles and memos.

They actually know whether he read this stuff (notably, the NBC, CNN, and NYMag articles he cites from late July 2016) in real time or only after the fact. They know when Corsi downloaded a bunch of other things (including the Guccifer 2.0 releases), and they know whether he read the GRU indictment. The FBI has also likely obtained what he was doing in November, 2018, as he was writing this stuff.

So it may be that when Corsi’s book comes out in hard cover on March 12, Mueller’s team will  already have put together the forensic evidence to prove that Corsi’s claims about how he came by his own forensic analysis — and the rest of these conspiracies — are absolute bullshit. It is, admittedly, frightening how much the government can obtain about our contemporaneous thinking.

But it would be an ironic and just outcome for Corsi if Mueller’s best demonstration about the power of FBI’s forensic analysis comes not in the GRU indictment Corsi so studiously avoided mentioning in the entire book attempting to discredit it, but in proving Corsi’s own claims about forensics to be utterly false.

Corsi’s Timeline

March 16, 2016: WikiLeaks indexes FOIAed Hillary emails

June 12, 2016: Assange announces he has more information on Hillary

In that interview, Assange disclosed that WikiLeaks has “upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” though Assange distinguished the Hillary Clinton emails WikiLeaks possessed pending publication came from a different source than the emails from Hillary’s private email server. This alerted me to the possibility Assange had obtained emails from the DNC email server.

June 14, 2016: WaPo announces the DNC hack

June 15, 2016: Crowdstrike publicly releases white paper on DNC hack and Guccifer 2.0 first posts

July 10, 2016: Seth Rich’s murder

July 22, 2016: WikiLeaks releases the DNC emails

July 25, 2016: Stone emails Corsi asking him to Get to Assange to “get the pending WikiLeaks emails;” Corsi forwards the email to Ted Malloch

July 26, 2016: Assange tells CNN a lot more material is coming and refuses to exclude Russia as a source because “to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are”

July 28, 2016: Corsi and his wife leave for Italy

July 31, 2016: Stone emails Corsi to “call me MON” instructing him to get Malloch to see Assange

August 2, 2016: Corsi emails Stone,

Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.… Time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.

August 9, 2016: WikiLeaks offers $20,000 reward for information leading to conviction for murder of Seth Rich

August 12, 2016: Corsi returns from Italy

March 7, 2017: WikiLeaks starts to release Vault 7 documents, including an Umbrage file showing that CIA uses disinformation to hide which attacks it launches

May 25, 2017: WSJ reports on Aaron Nevins files that Guccifer 2.0 noted in real time; Corsi deems this (in a Murdoch paper) to be part of the anti-Stone narrative

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

NYT’s Trump Interview: Money for Nothing and Clicks for Free

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The NYT has an article this morning it purports to be from an interview with the President.

Here’s what it says about the Russian investigation:

Addressing a wide range of subjects, Mr. Trump brushed off the investigations that have consumed so much of his presidency, saying that his lawyers have been reassured by the departing deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, that the president himself was not a target. “He told the attorneys that I’m not a subject, I’m not a target,” Mr. Trump said. But even if that is the case, it remains unknown whether the matter would be referred to the House for possible impeachment hearings.

[snip]

Mr. Trump said he has likewise received reassurances from Mr. Rosenstein, who until Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fired in November was overseeing the Russia investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

“Rod told me I’m not a target of the investigation,” he said at one point, but then later suggested he had not talked with him directly. “The lawyers ask him. They say, ‘He’s not a target of the investigation.’” Asked if that also covered the separate investigation by federal prosecutors in New York, he said, “I don’t know about that.”

Neither Mr. Rosenstein nor Mr. Mueller has said whether Mr. Trump is a target, and the president could not recall when Mr. Rosenstein would have assured him. Mr. Mueller has been known to explore whether the president’s actions amounted to obstruction of justice. But since Justice Department policy bars indicting a sitting president, it is unclear whether the term “target” would apply.

Mr. Trump denied having anything to do with Mr. Stone’s involvement with WikiLeaks, which during the 2016 campaign posted Democratic emails online that were stolen by Russian intelligence services. He expressed sympathy for Mr. Stone for his arrest at the hands of heavily armed F.B.I. agents.

“I’ve always liked — I like Roger, he’s a character,” Mr. Trump said, insisting that the F.B.I. agents charging “a house like they did at six o’clock in the morning. I think that was a very sad thing for this country.”

Mr. Trump offered a vague account of his involvement in the proposed Moscow project. Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project and told the authorities that talks continued into the summer of 2016, even as Mr. Trump was securing the Republican nomination.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s current lawyer, said recently that talks went all the way through the November election, only to later claim that he was mistaken and speaking only hypothetically.

“He was wrong,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday. “Rudy has been wrong a little bit. But what has happened is this: I didn’t care. That deal was not important. It was essentially a letter of intent or an option.”

Asked when in 2016 the last conversation he had about the project was, he said, “I would say it was early to middle of the year. Now, I don’t know that Cohen didn’t go a little bit longer than that. I don’t think it would be much longer.” He added: “I was running for president; I was doing really well. The last thing I cared about was building a building.” [my emphasis]

Already in that excerpt, NYT gets something that Maggie is obstinately wrong about wrong: not only is Mueller obviously investigating Trump in the conspiracy in chief (which is all Mueller has asked him about), but he is or was investigating him as part of a counterintelligence investigation. The obstruction is the chump change of the investigation, yet the only thing the NYT mentions here.

But NYT posted an excerpted transcript–which takes out both off the record comments, including this one on Roger Stone where Trump goes from suggesting “we’ll do something” about Roger Stone being treated very badly and then bridging, in off the record content, to Stone’s claim he would never testify against Trump.

HABERMAN: Who else has been treated very badly, in your opinion?

TRUMP: Well, I’d rather save it for later. We’ll do something on it at the right time, but I did think this. When Roger Stone, who all of us know, I mean everybody knows Roger.

______________

TRUMP: He was not my consultant. But if you read the papers you know it’s like — the media, it’s like — but I’ve always liked him. He’s a character, and I’ll tell you what people respect what he said. Bearing false witness, etc. But yeah, people do respect what he said.

HABERMAN: What he said about what?

TRUMP: Bear false witness. I will never testify against the president.

It also removes “asides,” which for a verbal logorrhean like Trump are among the most important things he says.

But the other details in the transcript reveal how much the NYT spun what they got. First, as a number of people have noted, Trump corrected himself, repeatedly to make it clear that the only denial he got was about being a target — “target … target … target … target” — not a subject. NYT shouldn’t have included the mention of being a “subject,” at all.

NYT also doesn’t reveal that Maggie herself laid out the timing — “over the course of the last year” — on such reassurances, before complaining that Trump wasn’t more specific about the timing, when in fact he simply blew off the question.

HABERMAN: Has Rod Rosenstein given you any sense over the course of the last year about whether you have any exposure, either in — or there’s any concerns, or whether you’re a target of the Mueller report?

TRUMP: Well he told the attorneys that I’m not a subject, I’m not a target.

HABERMAN: He told your attorneys?

TRUMP: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[snip]

HABERMAN: Do you remember how long ago he said that?

TRUMP: I think the lawyers would speak to him a lot about that. Not a lot. But a number of times. He never said — I never asked him that question.

HABERMAN: But your lawyers have?

TRUMP: The lawyers ask him. They say, “He’s not a target of the investigation.”

Then, Maggie gets something subtly wrong about Trump’s denials of any ties to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.

HABERMAN: Did you ever tell him to — or other people to get in touch with them?

TRUMP: Never did.

HABERMAN: You saw that was in the indictment.

TRUMP: Can I tell you? I didn’t see it.

The indictment doesn’t say that Trump directed specific people to get in touch, themselves, with WikiLeaks. Rather, it says that someone “was directed” to contact Stone.

After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.

It’s a subtle difference, but one important given that we know Stone was using cut-outs himself, and used cut-outs in his phone calls to Trump during the campaign.

Finally, Peter Baker gets Trump to admit something amazing over and over, but it doesn’t make the final argument. Trump says the Trump Tower deal was no big deal because he didn’t have to put any money up.

BAKER: But you told people that you didn’t have any business there. People might have misunderstood.

TRUMP: That wasn’t business. Peter, that wasn’t business.

BAKER: Isn’t that misleading to say you weren’t pursuing business there, right?

[Crosstalk]

TRUMP: I had no money invested. It was a letter of intent, or option. It was a free option. It was a nothing. And I wasn’t doing anything. I don’t consider that even business. And frankly, that wasn’t even on my radar. If you take a look at that, take a look at the deal. There was no money put up. There was no transfer. I don’t think they had a location. I’m not even sure if they had a location.

[snip]

BAKER: Clearly there was a hope of having money. That was the reason you were pursuing it, right?

TRUMP: My point is this — It was a free option to look at a deal, to look at deals. That was not like, “I’m going to buy a property in Moscow. I’m going to do — or I’m building a building in Moscow.” Now, I would have had every right to do a deal. That’s what I did. That’s what I did.

[snip]

But the way I view it is early in the year to middle of the year, no interest. I had very little interest in the first place, and again, I viewed it as a free option. [my emphasis]

This is the entire point! Trump was being offered $300 million … for free. Trump uses that to dismiss the import of the deal with respect to his campaign. But a free $300 million is a lot closer to a bribe — and therefore even more inexcusable — that an opportunity to shell out real money for a tower.

Finally, this language deserves more attention. The NYT actually gets a reference Trump makes badly wrong. Trump is not referring to Tony Podesta here. He’s referring to John Podesta.

TRUMP: I have nothing. All I did was be a good candidate. Russia didn’t help me. Russia did not help me. There was no collusion. There was none of that. I was a good candidate. I did a good job. I won’t say whether she was a good candidate or not. I mean, the primary collusion was Hillary Clinton. If you take a look, Peter. I mean, look at that phony dossier. Some of that money, they say, went to Russia. [Tony] Podesta was involved with Russia. [my emphasis]

That was precisely the [Joule Holdings] attack that Stone and Jerome Corsi book-ended their outreach to WikiLeaks over. It seems important to get it correct.

And in such immediate context, the fact that Trump claimed, again, that Russia didn’t help him deserves a fact check.

Of course they did. They may not have delivered on that $300 million “free option,” yet. But they certainly helped with the election, including an attack on John Podesta that the NYT doesn’t even recognize.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Two Details That Many Are Missing in/about the Stone Indictment

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I’ve been traveling most of the day to get out of the Midwest before the snow and record low temperatures show up, and will be buried for three days working on things that have nothing to do with any investigation Mueller has been involved in since 2013.

But I do want to add two details to the parlor game going on about whether or not the Roger Stone indictment is the tip of a conspiracy-burg or evidence there’s no there there. Joyce White Vance argues that Mueller charged Stone the way he did to hide the rest of the conspiracy prosecution.

Why didn’t Mueller charge Stone with conspiracy? The rules in federal cases require that prosecutors provide defendants with broad discovery. By indicting Stone on a fairly narrow set of charges, Mueller limits what has to be disclosed & can protect ongoing investigation.

Randall Eliason offers a respectable version of the argument that the indictment suggests there won’t be a conspiracy case.

There have always been at least two possible end games for the Mueller investigation. He could uncover evidence of a widespread criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians to influence the election. Or he could conclude that the campaign’s numerous documented interactions with Russians seeking to help Trump win were not criminal, but people close to Trump lied to cover up those interactions because revealing them would have been politically devastating.

Stone’s indictment falls into the coverup category. Mueller may have evidence of the broader conspiracy, and more charges may well be coming. But every case like Stone’s, or those against former campaign manager Paul Manafort, that is filed without charging a conspiracy with the Russians makes it seem more likely that criminal charges brought by the special counsel will end up being primarily about the coverups.

Andy McCarthy offers a less respectable version of the same.

Neither Eliason nor McCarthy account for one of the only new details in the indictment, showing that an unidentified Steve Bannon associate congratulated Stone on October 7.

On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails stolen from the Clinton Campaign chairman. Shortly after Organization 1’s release, an associate of the high-ranking Trump Campaign official sent a text message to STONE that read “well done.” In subsequent conversations with senior Trump Campaign officials, STONE claimed credit for having correctly predicted the October 7, 2016 release.

This detail shows that the Trump campaign at least believed that Stone succeeded in getting WikiLeaks to drop the John Podesta emails to distract attention from the Access Hollywood video, which in turn is consistent with a claim Jerome Corsi made about Stone having advance knowledge of the Access Hollywood video and that he and Stone succeeded in timing the email release.

 Corsi wrote in his forthcoming 57,000-word book that he told Zelinsky that Stone told him in advance that the “Access Hollywood” tape would be released.

He wrote that “although I could not remember exactly when Roger told me, or the precise substance of the discussion, I remembered Roger told me before the Washington Post went to press with the Billy Bush tape that the tape was coming and that it would be a bombshell.”

Corsi said he had three phone calls with Stone in the hours before the release of the tape.

“I know nothing about that, either does Jerry Corsi,” Stone told TheDCNF. When asked why Corsi might be motivated to make a false claim, Stone said: “He’s saying this because the prosecutors induced him to say it.”

Corsi also wrote that Zelinsky revealed that prosecutors had evidence of an email exchange between he and Stone “in which Stone expressed pleasure that Assange had released the Podesta emails as instructed.”

Corsi said he replied that he and Stone “should be given credit” for the release.

While Stone disputes Corsi’s claim and Corsi feigns forgetfulness about precisely what happened, by including a communication showing Stone getting credit for the timing, Mueller is suggesting that Corsi is right — and that he has credible, corroborating evidence to prove it.

That’s more coordination — between Corsi and Stone, but more importantly between some go-between and WikiLeaks — than would be the case if Stone’s indictment were all Mueller had. It would put Stone and Corsi in a conspiracy with WikiLeaks and their go-between(s).

Then there’s this detail from the motion to seal Stone’s indictment that no one has yet offered a full explanation for (indeed, most of the reports that noted that Amy Berman Jackson had been assigned the case didn’t explain this detail at all).

Someone — and it would almost certainly have to be the prosecutors (including one who, DC US Attorney’s office prosecutor Jonathan Kravis, is on the internet Research Agency case),  — told the court that Stone’s namby pamby “process crime” is related to the big conspiracy case involving WIkiLeaks with a bunch of Russian hackers. (I’ve updated my running docket of Mueller and potentially related cases to reflect Stone’s indictment.) And while it’s true that Stone is described in the GRU indictment, he is not named in a way that the court would identify that by themselves. WikiLeaks shows up in both, but there’s no need to tie WikiLeaks cases together unless some defendant is going to show up to face prosecution (and WikiLeaks is does not take any of the overt acts described in the Stone indictment).

I don’t pretend to understand how this happened or what it all means. But there’s nothing about the Stone obstruction prosecution that would overlap with the evidence in the GRU indictment. And, as charged, the GRU indictment won’t be prosecuted at all until Julian Assange or someone else involved in it ends up in DC to face charges.

By all means, continue the parlor game. But at least explain how those two details fit into your theory of nothing-“berder” or grand conspiracy.

Update: By popular demand, I’m including the definition of a “related case” under DC’s local rules.

A related case for the purpose of this Rule means as follows:

(1) Criminal cases are deemed related when

(i) a superseding indictment has been filed, or

(ii) more than one indictment is filed or pending against the same defendant or defendants, or

(iii) prosecution against different defendants arises from a common wiretap, search warrant, or activities which are a part of the same alleged criminal event or transaction. A case is considered pending until a defendant has been sentenced.

Certainly, WikiLeaks is named as a co-conspirator in both. But it is not yet a defendant. Though both cases may rely on a wiretap targeting Wikileaks. Or perhaps Stone’s search warrant included his conversations with Guccifer 2.0, and so the other indictment.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Things Not Said in Roger Stone’s Indictment: “Trump Directed” and Other More Damning Details

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I’m a leading purveyor of the theory that Robert Mueller is producing his mythical “report” via one after another speaking indictments. That said, it has always been true that some of the most interesting parts of his indictments involved what didn’t get said. That’s especially true in today’s Roger Stone indictment. Before I explain what didn’t get said, let me review what got said. The indictment shows that Stone was asked to figure out what emails on Hillary Julian Assange had, and using at least Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico as go-betweens, Stone did so, providing information (most explicitly) to Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. When Congress asked Stone about all this, he lied, first hiding any of his go-betweens, and then seemingly using Randy Credico to hide Jerome Corsi. Mueller provides a lot of the communications between Stone and his go-betweens and the communications from October 2016, as well as some of the ones from the cover-up period.

But he doesn’t provide us everything.

I have argued that the early morning raid, not to mention the larding on of charges, suggest this is an effort to get Stone to flip, both against Jerome Corsi (which is why Meuller locked in testimony from Corsi’s stepson yesterday) and Trump himself.

With that in mind, here are the things that Mueller doesn’t say.

With whom — besides Campaign Manager Steve Bannon — at the Trump Campaign did Roger Stone speak

The word “campaign” shows up 52 times in Stone’s indictment, of which (by my count) 7 are generic references, 16 are to Hillary’s campaign or a descriptor for John Podesta, and 29 are to Trump’s campaign or associates of it. The indictment describes Stone’s discussions with people on the campaign over and over. While a number of those are to identified individuals — most notably Steve Bannon — a number of those are generic, including the following references.

During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1.

[snip]

STONE also continued to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign about Organization 1 and its intended future releases.

[snip]

By in or around June and July 2016, STONE informed senior Trump Campaign officials that he had information indicating Organization 1 had documents whose release would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign.

[snip]

STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1.

It does so in an indictment that alleges (correctly, obviously) that one of Stone’s lies to the House Intelligence Committee that was material was whom he was speaking with on the campaign. The description of that lie cites the October 4 Bannon communication and the “supporter.” But it still leaves who else he spoke with unstated.

STONE’s False and Misleading Testimony About Communications with the Trump Campaign

35. During his HPSCI testimony, STONE was asked, “did you discuss your conversations with the intermediary with anyone involved in the Trump campaign?” STONE falsely and misleadingly answered, “I did not.” In truth and in fact, and as described above, STONE spoke to multiple individuals involved in the Trump Campaign about what he claimed to have learned from his intermediary to Organization 1, including the following:

a. On multiple occasions, STONE told senior Trump Campaign officials about materials possessed by Organization 1 and the timing of future releases.

And, of course, there’s this reference, which uses the word “directed” exactly a week after BuzzFeed got pilloried for using it about Trump.

After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.

Mind you, this indictment had to have been approved in advance by Big Dick Toilet Salesman Matt Whitaker, and the last time he permitted prosecutors to name Individual-1 in an indictment, he got chewed out for it.

So maybe Mueller is not saying who else on the Trump campaign Stone was talking to (though we know he had frequent calls with Trump all through the campaign) to hide what else he knows. Maybe the Big Dick Toilet Salesman wouldn’t let Mueller lay this out (though I doubt that’s the case). Or maybe Mueller is just trying to avoid a second week in a row featuring headlines about what Trump “directed” his associates to do as part of the Russian conspiracy.

Corsi’s (and possibly Credico’s) role in the conspiracy

As I noted above, Mueller got aggressive with Stone to get him to flip on others. Obviously, the big prize is Trump. But there’s space for Stone to take his revenge on Jerome Corsi (and possibly even Randy Credico).

I suspect that Credico is not in any danger here. That said, he is described as a potential co-conspirator, Person 2, and did clearly discuss a conspiracy to obstruct HPSCI’s investigation. “‘Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan’ . . . Richard Nixon,” Stone wrote as he tried to persuade Credico not to testify to HPSCI.

There’s just one detail that makes me wonder if Credico was not fully truthful with Mueller. When Credico discussed Stone’s September request that he ask Assange about emails pertaining to Hillary’s efforts to undermine a Libyan peace effort with WSJ last year, he denied he had sent the request to either Assange or his lawyer Margaret Kunstler.

“Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30–particularly on August 20, 2011,” Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Donald Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.

Mr. Credico initially responded to Mr. Stone that what he was requesting would be on WikiLeaks’ website if it existed, according to an email reviewed by the Journal. Mr. Stone, the emails show, replied: “Why do we assume WikiLeaks has released everything they have ???”

In another email, Mr. Credico then asked Mr. Stone to give him a “little bit of time,” saying he thought Mr. Assange might appear on his radio show the next day. A few hours later, Mr. Credico wrote: “That batch probably coming out in the next drop…I can’t ask them favors every other day .I asked one of his lawyers…they have major legal headaches riggt now..relax.”

Mr. Credico said in an interview with the Journal that he never passed the message on to Mr. Assange or his lawyers, but “got tired” of Mr. Stone “bothering” him, and so told Mr. Stone he had passed along the message.

The indictment says he in fact did forward the request to Kunstler.

On or about September 20, 2016, Person 2 forwarded the request to a friend who was an attorney with the ability to contact the head of Organization 1. Person 2 blind-copied STONE on the forwarded email.

That said, the indictment clearly remains silent about a lot of the details Mueller has incriminating Corsi in a cover-up (who, remember, prosecutors threatened to charge in a conspiracy to suborn perjury with respect to Stone’s testimony, and whose stepson Mueller locked into testimony before this indictment). The indictment includes this reference to a November discussion between Stone and Corsi.

On or about November 30, 2017, STONE asked Person 1 to write publicly about Person 2. Person 1 responded, “Are you sure you want to make something out of this now? Why not wait to see what [Person 2] does. You may be defending yourself too much—raising new questions that will fuel new inquiries. This may be a time to say less, not more.” STONE responded by telling Person 1 that Person 2 “will take the 5th—but let’s hold a day.”

But it remains silent on the report that Stone asked Corsi to write in August 2016 to establish a cover story, and it remains silent on whether Stone paid Corsi hush payments to stay silent after that.

Farage and Malloch and any other go-betweens

The indictment names Ted Malloch, though not as a co-conspirator.

On or about the same day, Person 1 forwarded STONE’s email to an associate who lived in the United Kingdom and was a supporter of the Trump Campaign.

[snip]

The body of the email read in part that Person 1’s associate in the United Kingdom “should see [the head of Organization 1].”

It doesn’t, however, put the Malloch references into context.

For example, it doesn’t reveal that — around the time someone “was directed” to get Stone to find out what WikiLeaks had — Stone and Alex Jones met with Nigel Farage at the RNC, which ultimately led to Farage joining Trump at a campaign event.

One night during the convention, Farage was introduced to Trump’s longtime adviser, the infamous political trickster, Roger Stone, at an Italian restaurant in The Flats district of Cleveland, according to both men.

Stone, who was accompanied that night by the Internet radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, said Farage’s main goal appeared to be to get a meeting with Trump.

The next day, Stone said, he tried to help by calling his former business partner, Paul Manafort – then Trump’s campaign chairman – and suggested that the Republican nominee get together with Farage. Manafort’s response was something along the lines of, “I’ll put a good word in,” Stone recalled.

Then, Stone met Ted Malloch — with Corsi — for dinner in NYC.

Asked about the nature of his relationship with Malloch, Stone said he did not know the other man well. He initially said he met Malloch three times but later said he recalled only two meetings with him.

Stone’s and Malloch’s first meeting was at a New York restaurant, Strip House, during the 2016 campaign. The two men dined with Jerome Corsi, a far-right political commentator and conspiracy theorist, Stone said.

Stone said his conversation with Malloch and Corsi at dinner was friendly but not memorable, and that they discussed “Brexit and globalism.” He added that they never discussed WikiLeaks, Assange, or Russia.

Stone, at least, is very sketchy about the timing of this, though it may actually precede when Stone asks Corsi to reach out to Malloch (indeed, might be the very reason he thought Corsi could get to Assange via Malloch).

That led to Farage’s campaign appearance with Trump on August 23.

Note, too, that the Stone indictment actually doesn’t say that Corsi is the go-between that Stone was hiding when he instead claimed Credico was his link to Assange. Indeed, of that go-between, he says he had only phone contact (though as I’ll write in a follow-up, that may have been for other reasons).

Particularly given Stone’s move to begin setting up a cover-story in August 2016, I’m not yet convinced we know who Stone’s real go-between is (and I’m still fairly certain that he and possibly Corsi had actual Podesta emails by then). He could have been working with Malloch directly. Or it could be someone else entirely.

Whoever it is, nothing in the Stone indictment tells us that for sure.

The Assange pardon

The Stone indictment is also silent about something that they have evidence — in the form of texts between Credico and Stone, surely among other things — that Stone tried to get Assange a pardon early last year.

In early January, Roger Stone, the longtime Republican operative and adviser to Donald Trump, sent a text message to an associate stating that he was actively seeking a presidential pardon for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—and felt optimistic about his chances. “I am working with others to get JA a blanket pardon,” Stone wrote, in a January 6 exchange of text messages obtained by Mother Jones. “It’s very real and very possible. Don’t fuck it up.” Thirty-five minutes later, Stone added, “Something very big about to go down.”

The recipient of the messages was Randy Credico, a New York-based comedian and left-leaning political activist whom Stone has identified as his back channel to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign—a claim Credico strongly denies. During the election, Stone, a political provocateur who got his start working for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, made statements that suggested he had knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to publish emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other Democrats, and his interactions with WikiLeaks have become an intense focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian election interference. As Mueller’s team zeroes in on Stone, they have examined his push for an Assange pardon—which could be seen as an attempt to interfere with the Russia probe—and have questioned at least one of Stone’s associates about the effort.

Particularly given that any pardon would have had to involve the one guy in the United States who can pardon Assange, it seems relevant to Mueller’s investigation. And yet it doesn’t show up in this indictment.

That’s something, then, that Stone could walk Mueller through as an effort to get rid of the 20-year witness tampering charge he faces.

Russia

Finally, the indictment remains mostly silent about Russia, particularly Roger Stone’s 180-turn on August 1 to claim that Russia may not have been behind the hack of the DNC. That’s all the more interesting given the way the indictment lays out the attribution to Russia made in mid-June.

On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC—through Company 1—publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.

And then included Stone’s denial that Russia had hacked the DNC in his statement before HPSCI.

“These hearings are largely based on a yet unproven allegation that the Russian state is responsible for the hacking of the DNC and [the Clinton Campaign chairman] and the transfer of that information to [Organization 1].”

The indictment makes these two nods to attribution even as (as a number of people have observed) in their motion to seal Stone’s indictment, prosecutors deemed Stone’s indictment to be related to the GRU indictment, and his docket includes one of the DC AUSAs also on the Internet Research Agency case, Jonathan Kravis. (I’ve updated my running docket of Mueller and potentially related cases here.)

Remember, the GRU indictment describes (but doesn’t charge) Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0.

On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, wrote to a person who wasin regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, “thank u for writing back . . . do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs i posted?” On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, “please tell me if i can help u anyhow . . . it would be a great pleasure to me.” On or about September 9, 2016, the Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online and asked the person, “what do u think of the info on the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign.” The person responded, “[p]retty standard.”

So prosecutors are saying that Stone’s crimes are more closely related to the actual Russian hack (which, remember, continued into September, after Stone deemed the DCCC analytics Guccifer 2.0 released to be “standard”) than they are to Flynn or Manafort or Papadopoulos or anyone else’s indictments.

Mind you, WikiLeaks appears as an unindicted co-conspirator in both the Stone and the GRU indictments, which may explain the connection.

But for some reason, Mueller thinks it important to note in Stone’s indictment that he pretended to believe Russia didn’t hack the DNC long after the hack had been attributed, without ever once mentioning that he had also spoken with the GRU persona dumping files.

Update: I’ve taken out the reference to Sam Nunberg, who says he’s not the person listed in this indictment.

Update: I’ve corrected this to reflect it was Jerome Corsi’s stepson who appeared before the grand jury Thursday. h/t AK

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Trump Boasts of His Imaginary 87-Page Rebuttal Without Noticing Mueller Has Already Released 127 Pages

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This is off-topic, but I wanted to share that I was on KPFA in the last few days and the host talked about how great this site is (!!), paying particular attention to the quality of the commenters. He’s right: you guys rock.

Yesterday, the Atlantic captured Rudy Giuliani’s despair, in fairly inexcusable language for a purported defense attorney, of being able to rebut an eventual Mueller report. Rudy himself ascribed his inability to prepare for a Mueller report to the difficulties he faced even getting the President to answer a few questions.

Giuliani said it’s been difficult in the past few months to even consider drafting response plans, or devote time to the “counter-report” he claimed they were working on this summer as he and Trump confronted Mueller’s written questions about the 2016 campaign.

“Answering those questions was a nightmare,” he told me. “It took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days.”

He blames that difficulty not on the fact that his client is a compulsive liar, but on what looks like a staged interruption from John Kelly, who oh by the way is not in his office this morning, amid reporting that Mueller has already interviewed him.

There was the sheer problem of finding time—Giuliani recalled one instance when they were working on the list and Chief of Staff John Kelly broke in to tell Trump about the migrant caravan, which grabbed the president’s attention immediately. And there was the specificity of the questions themselves: “He’s got a great memory,” Giuliani said. “However, basically we were answering questions about 2016, the busiest year of his life. It’s a real job to remember.”

He also comes perilously close to admitting how uncontrollable this client is.

Giuliani initially pushed back on the prediction that Trump would take center stage after the report drops. “I don’t think following his lead is the right thing. He’s the client,” he told me. “The more controlled a person is, the more intelligent they are, the more they can make the decision. But he’s just like every other client. He’s not more … you know, controlled than any other client. In fact, he’s a little less.”

For Giuliani, letting Trump guide the response post-report may not be ideal, but “I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that can stop Donald Trump from tweeting,” he acknowledged. “I’ve tried.”

That may be necessary to excuse some of the more obvious explanations for Trump’s complaints about his epically corrupt campaign manager being held in protective custody.

The president has also devoted much of his energy to following Paul Manafort’s case rather than prepping for the full report. “The thing that upsets potus the most is the treatment of Manafort,” Giuliani said. When Trump learned that the former campaign chairman was in solitary confinement, Giuliani said, “he said to me, ‘Don’t they realize we’re America?’”

I mean, maybe Trump wants his former campaign manager to meet an untimely death in jail?

Rudy repeated some of the same comments to the WaPo.

Giuliani pronounced himself “disgusted” by the Mueller team’s tactics, complained about the length of time it took to complete written answers to questions from the special counsel’s team and said Mueller’s probe was essentially out of control.

“I think he crossed the line a while ago. I think it’s a situation badly in need of supervision,” Giuliani said. He’s “the special prosecutor of false statements.”

As Jonathan Chait (yes, I am linking Chait, it’s Pearl Harbor Day if you want to mark the date) noted, this despair from Rudy comes as his boasts about progress on a the report have dwindled from an almost-finished report to 58 pages to 45 to not started yet.

So we’ve gone from the first half alone being 58 pages, to the entire report being 45 pages, to “it’s difficult to even consider drafting” the report at all. This is like an episode of Matlock that lasts all season long and where the client is actually guilty and Matlock is going through early-stage dementia.

Meanwhile, others in the Atlantic article describe the problem posed by responding to a “report” that might include real allegations of impeachable offenses.

There have also been few frank conversations within the White House about the potential costs of Mueller’s findings, which could include impeachment of the president or the incrimination of his inner circle. Those close to Trump have either doubled down on the “witch hunt” narrative, they said—refusing to entertain the possibility of wrongdoing—or decided to focus on other issues entirely.

[snip]

Attempting to plan “would mean you would have to have an honest conversation about what might be coming,” a former senior White House official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told me.

So the White House is just going to follow the lead of the Tweeter-in-Chief.

“We would always put together plans with the knowledge that he wouldn’t use them or they’d go off the rails,” one recently departed official told me. “And at this point, with Mueller, they’ve decided they’re not even going to do that.”

“It’s like, ‘Jesus, take the wheel,’” the source added, “but scarier.”

Speaking of the Tweeter-in-Chief, very early this morning, Trump started wailing about the Mueller report, in what even for him is a long string of unthreaded (grr) tweets.

That rant was followed a few hours later by a specific denial of Rudy’s comments, followed by a boast (take that, Chait!) that he’s got 87 pages written.

A remarkably chastened Rudy followed up on Trump’s denial to complain that the media was misrepresenting his comments about how difficult answering a few questions was.

This morning at WaPo, I reprised an argument you’re all familiar with: that as Rudy and Trump focus their entire strategy on responding to a final Mueller report, he continues to produce his report in snippets in one after another “speaking indictment.”

Mueller has already been submitting his report, piece by piece, in “speaking indictments” and other charging documents. He has left parts of it hiding in plain sight in court dockets of individuals and organizations he has prosecuted.

Click through for my latest summary of what we’ve seen.

We may (or may not, given the Flynn precedent) see far more before the day is out, with Cohen reports and one Manafort report.

In any case, if you’re counting just the fragments we’re already seeing, Mueller has released the following details beyond what was legally required:

How Paul Manafort runs campaigns for his Russian paymasters: 38 pages (Manafort plea exhibits)

How Russians dangled a Trump Tower to entice Trump: 9 pages (legally superfluous Cohen plea)

How Russian assets dangled stolen emails to entice Trump: 14 pages (Papadopoulos plea)

How Russians hacked — and continued to hack, literally in response to Trump’s request — Hillary: 29 pages (GRU indictment)

How Russians magnified attacks on Hillary and fed disinformation: 37 pages (IRA indictment)

So Mueller has released 127 pages of reporting, much of it legally superfluous, even before charging anyone in the case in chief.

All that’s before Jerome Corsi leaked his 6-page draft statement of the offense, revealing how Roger Stone tried to cover up their advance knowledge of the timing and content of the stolen John Podesta emails. And before whatever we get in the Michael Cohen (which is unlikely to be very detailed) and Paul Manafort (which is) filings today.

Since I first started pointing out how much reporting Mueller was doing in these filings, a whole slew of people in the media have adopted the observation. And now I’ve stolen it myself for the WaPo (note, I didn’t write the headline; I in no way think Mueller has released “most” of his report).

But even with all that reporting, it seems half the Trump strategy still lies in plotting feebly in fearful anticipation of what Mueller might one day report, without noticing what he has already reported.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Are Mueller and Matt Whitaker Already Battling over Immunity or a Plea Deal for Jerome Corsi?

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From the very first reporting on Jerome Corsi’s testimony to Robert Mueller, his lawyer hinted that he may have been invited — but declined — to engage in criminal activity with Roger Stone.

Gray said he was confident that Corsi has done nothing wrong. “Jerry Corsi made decisions that he would not take actions that would give him criminal liability,” he added, declining to elaborate.

Asked if Corsi had opportunities to take such actions, Gray said, “I wouldn’t say he was offered those opportunities. I would say he had communications with Roger Stone. We’ll supply those communications and be cooperative. My client didn’t act further that would give rise to any criminal liability.”

Yesterday on his broadcast, Corsi seemed a lot less certain that he has avoided legal jeopardy.

He billed the broadcast as a historic one and made it clear it was all about Mueller, even while he feigned that he was not commenting on Mueller. He announced he would not broadcast Friday, because he’d be with his lawyers, and suggested he might not broadcast Monday. He invoked both Stone and Alex Jones in his comments. Chuck Ross laid out some of this here, including that he invoked Jeremiah 20:11, presumably as a veiled attack on Mueller.

But the Lord is with me as a mighty terrible one; therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail; they shall be greatly ashamed; for they shall not prosper; their everlasting confusion shall never be forgotten,

Corsi also invokes Jesus’ superior access to truth before Pontius Pilate.

What Ross doesn’t lay out — but I have — is that Roger Stone’s excuses for his “Podesta time in a barrel” comments seem to be a retroactive excuse for some attacks he and Corsi made on John Podesta that seem to reflect some pre-knowledge that the Podesta emails Russia leaked in October 2016 would include information on Podesta’s ties to Joule Unlimited. Corsi returned to the attack in October 2016 even before WikiLeaks started releasing the emails and Stone adopted without showing signs of reading the emails he relied on. The awareness that the Podesta dump would include emails on Joule seems to date back to mid-August 2016, precisely the period when Stone (and his associate, Lee Stranahan) were first engaging with Guccifer 2.0, and it happened just two weeks after Stone flipflopped on his claimed beliefs about who did the DNC hack.

So, in his broadcast, Corsi suggests something about his two month cooperation with Mueller coming to a head, and he may have been the means by which Stone knew of what the Podesta emails included ahead of time. But with all that, Corsi’s lawyer suggests Stone is the one with the really serious exposure.

It may be that Mueller is pressuring Corsi to cop a plea deal. That might explain two months of close work with Mueller’s team. But Corsi’s concerns about his immediate future may, instead, suggest that Mueller has immunized Corsi, because if he refused to testify about something having immunity, then he could be jailed right away.

As I’ve laid out, in the hearing on Andrew Miller’s challenge yesterday, Michael Dreeben seemed to be arguing about which actions Mueller could take without getting Matt Whitaker’s approval first.

Prosecutors do this all the time. They seek immunity. They make plea agreements,. They bring indictments.

[snip]

We have to get approval requires just like US Attorneys do. If we want to subpoena a member of the media, or if we want to immunize a witness, we’re encouraged if we’re not sure what the policy or practice is, to consult with the relevant officials in the Department of Justice. If we wanted to appeal an adverse decision, we would have to get approval of the Solicitor General of the United States. So we’re operating within that sort of supervisory framework.

While none of those issues pertain to Miller, all of them might apply to Corsi, including the subpoena for a journalist. To prevent any of these actions — immunizing a witness, making a plea agreement, or even bringing indictments — Whitaker would have to deem them “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.”

Perhaps Corsi is praying that Whitaker will rescue him from Mueller-as-Pontius Pilate by deeming that conspiring with Russian assets to attack a political opponent is totally normal?