Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III asked the House Intelligence Committee on Friday for an official transcript of Trump adviser Roger Stone’s testimony, according to people familiar with the request, a sign that prosecutors could be moving to charge him with a crime.
.. Securing an official transcript from the committee would be a necessary step before pursuing an indictment that Stone allegedly lied to lawmakers, legal experts said.
.. The special counsel could use the threat of a false-statement charge to seek cooperation from Stone, as Mueller has done with other Trump advisers, such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
.. For weeks, the special counsel’s office has had access to an unofficial copy of Stone’s closed-door September 2017 interview, according to people with knowledge of the process. Mueller’s request of the official copy signals the special counsel could now be pursuing an indictment, several legal experts said... Stone accused House Democrats of “attempting to play frivolous word games, and hairsplitting about semantics over nonmaterial matters.”Stone added: “Where is the evidence of Russian collusion or WikiLeaks collaboration?”
.. Stone, who boasted during the race that he was in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has said since that his past comments were exaggerated or misunderstood. Both he and WikiLeaks have adamantly denied they were in contact.
.. As part of that review, ODNI shares copies of the transcripts with other agencies, including the special counsel’s office, that might have an interest in protecting information in the interviews, officials said.
However, because the Stone interview was conducted in executive session, the transcript officially belongs to the committee and may not be released unless authorized by the committee, according to its rules.
.. Stone released written testimony he provided the House Intelligence Committee before his September 2017 interview, in which he wrote that he had no “advanced knowledge of the source or actual content of the WikiLeaks disclosures regarding Hillary Clinton.”
.. He told the panel that he based some of his predictions on public information and tips from associates. He also said that he had an intermediary who provided him with information about WikiLeaks — but refused to name the person, indicating the person was a journalist with whom he had spoken off the record.
.. Shortly after his closed-door appearance, Stone wrote a letter to the committee saying he learned about WikiLeaks’s planned release from Randy Credico, a New York comedian who had interviewed Assange and is a longtime friend of New York attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler, who has represented WikiLeaks.
Credico has repeatedly denied passing any information from WikiLeaks to Stone. He said he may have speculated about the group’s tactics with Stone.
.. Stone has released numerous text messages that he says prove he was relying on Credico for information about the upcoming Wikileaks release of material damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In one of them Credico, who boasts of being best friends with Assange’s attorney, asserts that the Wikileaks founder will make an announcement soon. In another the comic writes: “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”
.. In recent weeks, Mueller’s prosecutors have been focused on another Stone associate who alerted him to an upcoming WikiLeaks release in 2016: conservative writer Jerome Corsi.
In an Aug. 2, 2016, email, Corsi wrote to Stone that the group planned to disclose emails that October that would embarrass Clinton, according to charging documents drafted by Mueller’s team and provided to The Washington Post.
.. “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote in the email quoted in the draft document, referring to Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since 2012. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
.. Corsi, who rejected a plea offer from the special counsel, said the email was based on his speculation of what WikiLeaks might be planning, not any inside knowledge.
.. The day after receiving the message from Corsi, Stone has said, he spoke with Trump by phone.
.. Stone has said he never discussed WikiLeaks or hacked emails with Trump. “Unless Mueller has tape recordings of the phone calls, what would that prove?” he told The Post last month.
.. “The emails prove nothing,” Stone added, “other than like every other politico and political reporter in America, I was curious to know what it was that WikiLeaks had.”
.. Over the past several months, Mueller’s investigators have interviewed a dozen Stone friends and associates, focusing on individuals who discussed WikiLeaks with Stone before to the election. Some have provided testimony and records that contradict Stone’s claims.
.. Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and conservative writer, told The Post that he was interviewed in New York last week by two FBI agents who asked about his 2016 contacts with Stone, Corsi and Credico.
Ortel said the agents were interested in an email from then-Fox News reporter James Rosen that Ortel forwarded to Stone on July 25, 2016. In it, Rosen wrote, “Am told WikiLeaks will be doing a massive dump of HRC emails relating to the CF in September,” referring to Clinton and her family foundation.
Ortel declined to disclose the full details of his FBI interview but told The Post that he did not know where Rosen had gotten his information about WikiLeaks’s plans.
Rosen, who no longer works at Fox News, has repeatedly declined to comment.
.. In written questions posed to the president earlier this year, Mueller sought information from Trump about his interactions with Stone and whether they discussed WikiLeaks.
According to people familiar with Trump’s responses, the president said he had no prior knowledge of what the group was going to do and that Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks’s plans.
.. In recent days, however, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was less definitive.
“Did Roger Stone ever give the president a heads-up on WikiLeaks’s leaks concerning Hillary Clinton and the DNC?” ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked him Sunday.
“No, I don’t believe so,” Giuliani said. “But again, if Roger Stone gave anybody a heads-up about WikiLeaks’s leaks, that’s not a crime . . . collusion is not a crime.”
Mueller Is Telling Us: He’s Got Trump on Collusion
The special counsel is connecting the dots and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture for the president.
a flurry of recent activity this past week all points in the same direction: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will likely implicate the president, his campaign, and his close associates in aiding and abetting a Russian conspiracy against the United States to undermine the 2016 election.First, Mueller has clearly identified collusion in the
- efforts of Trump aides and associates to contact WikiLeaks. In a draft plea agreement provided to conservative operative Jerome Corsi, Mueller details how Roger Stone, who the special counsel notes was in frequent contact with Donald Trump and senior campaign officials, directed Corsi to connect with WikiLeaks about the trove of stolen materials it received from Russia.
- Corsi subsequently communicated WikiLeaks’ release plan back to Stone, and
- the Trump campaign built its final message around the email release. That is collusion.
Third, Mueller has found evidence that Trump was compromised by a hostile foreign power during the election. In his plea deal, Cohen revealed that Trump had repeatedly lied to voters about the then-candidate’s financial ties to Russia. While Trump claimed during the campaign to have no business dealings with Russia, he was negotiating a wildly lucrative business deal not simply with Russian businessmen, but also involving with the Kremlin itself. Trump’s team even reportedly tried to bribe Russian President Vladimir Putin by offering him a $50 million penthouse.
Worse, Russia not only knew that Trump was lying, but when investigators first started looking into this deal, the Kremlin helped Trump cover up what really happened. That made Trump doubly compromised: first, because he was eager to get the financial payout and second because Russia had evidence he was lying to the American people—evidence they could have held over Trump by threatening to reveal at any time.
Since the president’s embarrassing performance at the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin—when he kowtowed to a foreign adversary rather than stand up for American interests—there has been open speculation about what leverage the Kremlin has over him. Now we know at least part of the picture, raising the specter of what other information Putin has, and how he is using it to influence Trump’s policy decisions.
Fourth, we know that Trump has engaged in an increasingly brazen attempt to cover up his actions: installing a political crony to head the Department of Justice by potentially illegal means in an effort to shut down the investigation; using his former campaign chairman and convicted criminal Paul Manafort to find out information about Mueller’s investigation; and even appearing to offer Manafort a pardon if he helps him obstruct the Russia probe. These may be components of an obstruction of justice case, but they also provide strongly circumstantial data points as to how serious Trump himself views the allegations of collusion being levelled against him.
Robert Mueller’s Plan
Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case.
The real flaw was the assumption that Special Counsel Mueller is lining up witnesses and building a criminal case, as prosecutors do.
.. He is not.
No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?
.. This kind of guilty plea signals to the world, including to all the other suspects, that the accomplice is ready to testify that the criminal scheme existed... The accomplice is ready to describe what he did and what everybody else did. Virtually every appellate opinion reviewing conspiracy convictions notes the principle that once a conspiracy is shown to exist, only slight evidence is needed to tie a conspirator to it... Juries do not convict people because they like or trust the prosecution’s witnesses. They convict because they are persuaded that justice demands redress for a real crime... we have stressed that the probe is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. The idea was not to dizzy you with Justice Department esoterica. The point is that we don’t want prosecutors involved until it has been established that a crime was probably committed.. Mueller does not have a crime he is investigating. He is investigating in hopes of finding a crime, which is a day-and-night different thing... collusion pours off every page of the narrative statements Mueller submitted to the courts in the cases of Papadopoulos and Cohen. They consult with Russian operatives, plan meetings for themselves and Trump with Russian officials, and — in Papadopoulos’s case — discuss the possibility of obtaining campaign dirt against Hillary Clinton from Russians. Yet, though these activities are the laser focus of his investigation, Mueller did not charge them as crimes because they are not crimes. Papadopoulos, Cohen, and the rest got jammed up, not for what they did, but for lying about what they did... We know from our own daily lives that crimes account for only a very small percentage of the things people lie about. Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Democrats insisted that prosecutors should leave Bill Clinton alone because everybody lies about sex. People lie about things that they are embarrassed or ashamed about.
.. Successful politics requires horse-trading and compromise, so pols are forever explaining how they could actually be against something they voted for. A lot of this is embarrassing stuff. Consequently, when people in and around politics get caught practicing politics, they often lie about what they’ve done.
.. Politics is not a crime, of course. Consequently, if you criminalize politics — if you turn a prosecutor loose to investigate political campaign activities — you are apt to find unsavory conduct that is not criminal but that some people will lie about.
.. Second, with the media as his biggest cheerleader (other than Jeff Flake), the false-statements pleas create the illusion of a collusion crime, and thus appear to vindicate Mueller’s sprawling investigation... the media omits that no one has been charged, much less convicted, of any crime involving collusion between Trump and Russia... Convicted liars never get cross-examined in a report. Nor do they give the bumpy, inconsistent testimony you hear in a courtroom. Instead, their version of events is outlined by a skilled prosecutor, who writes well and knows how to make their stories sing in perfect harmony... prove that many people Trump brought into his campaign were corruptible and of low character. Mueller, the career Justice Department and FBI man, will deftly use this fact to argue that suspicions about these people, and hence the investigation, were fully justified even if — thankfully — there was no prosecutable Trump–Russia conspiracy... Trump’s Republican and conservative critics will cheer, figuring the president and his rogues’ gallery had it coming. Democrats will cheer, knowing this would never happen to Democrats.
‘The Enemy of the People’
Criticism of the media by a president is not necessarily a bad thing
Depending on your perspective, one of President Trump’s real talents, or one of his most baleful traits, is his knack for the zinger label, pinned on a political or institutional foe. “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted,” “The Swamp” — the labels often stick . . . and sting.
But who exactly is “the enemy of the people”? Trump maintains that he is not referring to the entire press, only to “fake news” coverage by mainstream-media outlets. Is such line-drawing appropriate? Even if the public at large may validly make such distinctions, should they be drawn by a president of the United States, or does that specter imperil constitutional free-press protections?
.. Before Trump zapped our politics with his lightning rod, it was a commonplace in conservative circles to complain about that most pernicious practice of the political press: the pretense of objectivity. No, we did not begrudge the New York Times and Washington Post their editorial pages, nor resent opinion pieces and programs clearly advertised as such. Our objection was to patently biased news coverage that was presented as if it were dispassionate, just-the-facts-ma’am reporting. The bias is seen and unseen, but pervasive. It is found in the reporting itself. It is intimated in the description of sources (e.g., conservatives always described as “conservative”; left-wing sources — the ACLU, SPLC, CAIR, etc. — described as civil-rights groups with no partisan agenda). Most important, it is concealed in editorial decisions about what gets covered and what does not, camouflaged by the thread that gets emphasis and the “lede” that gets buried.
.. By reporting this way, the media inculcate in the public the assumption that there is no other side of the story. The Left’s Weltanschauung is not presented merely as a worldview; it is portrayed as objective, inarguable fact, and any other way of looking at things is subversive, cynical, or psychotic... Nietzsche was right that we are hard-wired to exaggerate when speaking about what ails us. That goes double for political discourse. To limn one’s political opposition as “the enemy” is common. It has been throughout history, and I’m sure I’ve done it myself. No more thought goes into it than into a sportscaster’s use of “warrior” to laud some running back who just gained 100 grueling yards. It’s just rhetoric. When we resort to it, we’re not intentionally trivializing the danger posed by actual enemies or diminishing the courage of real warriors... Still, the older one gets, the easier it is to see why referring to partisan opponents as “enemies” is unhelpful. Over time, political coalitions shift. Notions about friend and foe change. To coexist and govern, we have to compromise, and casual condemnations of our opposite number as “the enemy” make compromise harder. When I was a prosecutor, I had genial relations with most of my defense-lawyer adversaries. We fought hard but saw that letting it get too sharp-elbowed, too personal, could rupture the working relationships needed to get through the case . . . and the next one. The stakes were high, but it was markedly less polarized than politics has become... This president runs hot and cold in a nanosecond, so it’s probably a fool’s errand to analyze his rhetoric too closely —
- one minute you’re “rocket man,” the barbaric dictator;
- the next minute, you’re the “funny guy” with the “great personality” who really “loves his people,
not that I’m surprised by that.”
.. Topsy-turvy, to be sure, but Trump’s mercurial outbursts, his cavalier resort to words like “enemy” — words other presidents have been circumspect about — does not mean he perceives no difference between Jim Acosta and Osama bin Laden.
So . . . what does the president mean by “the enemy of the people”? More specifically, to whom is he referring? Well, there was an interesting exchange about that last weekend, during Trump’s sit-down interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
.. In the discussion, Trump several times tried to clarify that when he refers to “the enemy of the people,” he is not speaking of all journalists; he is referring to a large subset of journalists that he calls “the Fake News.” According to the president, these are the mainstream-media outlets that align with Democrats and treat him as a partisan opponent, resulting in dishonest and inaccurate coverage of his presidency.
.. Now, you can agree or disagree with him on that, but he is entitled to his opinion. To my mind, there has been plenty of dishonest and inaccurate coverage of Trump. To be sure, there has also been plenty of honest and accurate coverage of the president saying things that are dishonest or inaccurate. Nevertheless, the sheer contempt in which this president is held by journalists is manifest. Even for those of us old enough to remember the coverage of Nixon and Reagan (as well as the Bushes), it is something to behold.
.. For one thing, the effort to delegitimize Trump’s presidency by claiming that he “colluded” in the Kremlin’s 2016 election-meddling has been tireless, and apparently effective. The effort was fueled by selective intelligence leaks and the modern media melding of opinion journalism with news reporting. After over two years of digging, investigators have lodged no collusion allegation; to the contrary, the indictments that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed tend to undermine any theory of a Trump–Russia criminal conspiracy. Yet the president remains under suspicion and the media routinely insinuate that Mueller’s mere issuance of indictments validates that suspicion — even though the indictments have nothing to do with Trump.
.. As Power Line’s John Hinderaker relates, recent polling by The Economist and YouGov found that nearly half of American women (48 percent) and fully two-thirds of Democrats (67 percent) actually believe that “Russia tampered with the vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President” — notwithstanding that investigators have never even suspected Russia of tampering with vote tallies, for Trump or anyone else. (The investigation involves allegations that Russia hacked Democratic email accounts.)
.. As Wallace framed the matter, there is only one press, all the journalists are part of it, and no distinctions may be drawn. “We are all together . . . we are in solidarity, sir,” he told the president, adding that, for these purposes, there is no difference between CNN, the New York Times, and Fox. Even though Wallace acknowledged that some coverage of Trump is “biased,” he maintained that the press is a monolith; therefore, the argument went, to condemn a subset of journalists is to condemn the whole of journalism.
.. While he did not air them fully (it was, after all, an interview of the president), I imagine he worries that the “enemy of the people” formulation is a case of Trump wrongly conflating opposition to Trump with opposition to America. Perhaps the issue is not so much the drawing of distinctions between worthy and unworthy journalism, but rather that the president of the United States should not be doing the drawing. The president, clearly, is not just anyone. He is the highest official of a government that is constitutionally obligated to respect freedom of the press, to refrain from threatening it. If people hear an analyst decrying media bias, that is one thing; if they hear the president decrying “the media,” they may not grasp that he intends to rebuke only a subset of the media. They may not be so sure that the rebuke is good-faith criticism, as opposed to despotic intimidation. They may conclude that free-press principles are imperil
.. The fact that Trump’s bombast makes many of us wince — “enemy” — is a style point. If you don’t like it, do a better job running against him next time. After all, when vivid language is directed at conservatives, rather than at themselves, journalists are quick to tell us that life and progress in a free society require thick-skinned toleration of objectionable language and transgressive gestures. What’s sauce for the goose . . .
.. Before President Trump started using the phrase “the enemy of the people,” fair-minded people acknowledged media bias. Conservatives complained bitterly about it. These were not attacks on journalism; they were cris de coeur for real journalism. The president’s “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” epithets are best understood as a reiteration of these longstanding complaints in the barbed Trump style. This is no small thing. While the complaints are getting more of an airing than they have in the past, the president’s manner is off-putting to many people who were once sympathetic to the point he is making.
.. The mainstream press, meanwhile, is becoming more unabashedly hostile. At least that means there is more transparency, but is that a good thing? I don’t know. It would be good to be rid of the pretense of objectivity. But there are many reporters who do not pretend to be objective; they actually are objective, even if they have strong political views, even if they dislike the president for reasons of substance or style. We need those pros. We need to appreciate what they do, not reject real news because it may be news we don’t want to hear.
.. I do not lose much sleep over a president’s lashing out at what he perceives as, and what often truly is, biased reporting. This is not Turkey; a president would be impeached before a journalist spends an hour in prison for unflattering coverage. And I don’t worry much about whether criticism of a readily identifiable portion of the media harms the entire media as an institution. If journalists are worried about that, they should police their profession better. Jim Acosta hurts journalism more than he hurts Trump, and if the president is really as awful as many journalists contend, then simply asking his administration straightforward questions, rather than posing as “The Resistance,” should expose that.