Roger Stone to Tell House Panel He Pulled No Treasonous ‘Trick’
.. the suggestion that Mr. Stone knew in advance, or predicted, that John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman of the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, would be hacked or his emails released. Not long before Mr. Podesta’s emails were released last fall, Mr. Stone wrote on Twitter that “it will soon” be the chairman’s “time in the barrel.”
His prepared remarks, however, said that Mr. Stone was merely referring to his expectation that Mr. Podesta’s business connections to Ukraine would soon come to light, based in part on opposition research.
.. Mr. Stone is also expected to tell the House panel that he was never in direct communication with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and therefore did not know in advance about emails that were stolen from the Democratic National Committee during the campaign. Rather, according to Mr. Stone’s prepared remarks, he learned about them on Twitter and later asked a journalist who knew Mr. Assange to confirm the report.
.. The statement does not dispute that Mr. Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona who American officials believe was a front in the Russian hacking efforts. But it does say he believed that the interactions were entirely “benign,” and it casts doubt on American intelligence concluding that the online account was a Russian intelligence front.