Roger Stone appears in federal court in Florida and is released on $250,000 bond
A longtime political adviser to President Trump, Roger Stone, was arrested in Florida early Friday on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with the website WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, in the latest indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
In an indictment returned in Washington on Thursday, Mr. Stone was also charged with obstructing an official proceeding and trying to persuade a witness to lie to investigators.
In a CNN interview Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said of the indictment, “This has nothing to do with the president and certainly nothing to do with the White House.” She declined to respond to questions about whether Mr. Trump had directed a campaign official to contact Mr. Stone about what releases WikiLeaks had planned.
.. The 24-page indictment accuses Mr. Stone of lying to the House intelligence committee in May 2017 when he testified he had no documents or records relevant to the panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and later when he testified in September 2017.
.. Mr. Stone had numerous emails and text messages dated to 2016 in which he discussed information possessed by WikiLeaks, the website U.S. officials say was the primary conduit for publishing materials stolen by Russia, according to the indictment and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Stone had also discussed his efforts to contact Julian Assange
.. The indictment alleges that on July 22, 2016, after WikiLeaks released a trove of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, a senior Trump campaign official “was directed to contact” Mr. Stone about any further releases the website had planned and to learn “what other damaging information” the organization had about the Clinton campaign. The indictment doesn’t specify who directed the official to contact Mr. Stone.
Five days later, Mr. Trump made a public plea: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to Mrs. Clinton’s email server
.. According to the indictment, on Oct. 3, 2016, Mr. Stone sent an email to a “supporter involved with the Trump Campaign” that read: “Spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.”
.. That same day, a reporter at Breitbart, whose chairman was also Trump campaign chief executive Steve Bannon, emailed Mr. Stone to ask about Mr. Assange’s plans. The reporter asked, “What’s he got? Hope it’s good.” Breitbart isn’t identified by name in the indictment, but a person familiar with the emails confirmed the exchange.
.. Mr. Stone replied, “It is. I’d tell [Mr. Bannon] but he doesn’t call me back.” In the indictment, Mr. Bannon is referred to as a “high-ranking Trump Campaign official.”
The next day, according to the indictment, Mr. Stone responded to an email from Mr. Bannon and told him that WikiLeaks would release “a load every week going forward.”
On Oct. 7, when WikiLeaks released the first set of emails on the same day that the Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape recording of Mr. Trump making lewd comments about women—an associate of Mr. Bannon texted Mr. Stone: “Well done,” according to the indictment.
Later, Mr. Stone claimed credit in conversations with Trump campaign officials for “having correctly predicted” the Oct. 7 release, the indictment said.
The indictment alleges Mr. Stone had asked two people to pass on a request to Mr. Assange for documents potentially damaging to the Clinton campaign.
In one July 2016 email, he asked his contact to “get to” Mr. Assange and “get the pending” emails, the indictment said. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported Mr. Stone sent such an email to conservative activist Jerome Corsi.
A Week After the Midterms, Trump Seems to Forget the Caravan
For weeks before the midterm elections, President Trump warned ominously about the threat from a caravan of migrants streaming from Central America toward Mexico’s border with the United States. It was a fearsome mix of criminals and “unknown Middle Easterners,” Mr. Trump claimed darkly, one that constituted a genuine national emergency.
But since the election last week, Mr. Trump has tweeted about the caravan exactly once — to issue a proclamation preventing those who cross the border illegally from applying for asylum in the United States. Fox News, which faithfully amplified Mr. Trump’s warnings about the migrants, has gone similarly quiet on the subject.
There was little dispute, even before Election Day, that Mr. Trump was exploiting the caravan for political purposes. But analysts, historians and veterans of previous administrations said there were few comparable instances of a commander in chief warning about what he called a looming threat, only to drop it as soon as people voted.
While the caravan has faded from television screens, the costs of Mr. Trump’s response to it have not. Nearly 6,000 active-duty troops remain deployed from the Gulf Coast to Southern California, where they are putting up tents and stringing concertina wire to face a ragtag band that is still not near the border.
“Now that the political utility of troops on the southern border to face a fictitious caravan invasion threat is over,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, a former commander of the military’s Southern Command, “let’s hope the president will stand down the troops so they can be with their families — especially over the holidays.”
But some officials in the Defense Department worry that Mr. Trump could do the opposite — seek an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that prohibits the government from using active-duty troops to enforce laws inside the country’s borders.
.. voters who made up their minds in the last three days before the election said they voted for Democrats over Republicans 53 percent to 41 percent. That coincides with the period in which Mr. Trump redoubled his focus on the caravan, rejecting the advice of aides who wanted to air a commercial promoting the healthy economy.
.. At one campaign rally after another, Mr. Trump said the election came down to “the caravan, law and order, and common sense.” In Mesa, Ariz., on Oct. 19, he said: “You got some bad people in those groups. You got some tough people in those groups. And I’ll tell you what — this country doesn’t want them. O.K.? We don’t want them.”
.. A day earlier, he tweeted about the “assault on our country at our Southern Border, including the Criminal elements and DRUGS pouring in.”
Mr. Trump posted footage of an undocumented immigrant on trial for killing a police officer, and his campaign organization produced an ad featuring migrants trying to scale a wall to dramatize the stakes of the election.
“I’ve never before seen an American president, after going all over the country about this national crisis, then the day after an election shrug,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.
The closest parallel that Mr. Brinkley drew was to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who seized on — and mischaracterized — two murky encounters between American and North Vietnamese warships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as a pretext to accelerate America’s engagement in the Vietnam War. Still, he said, Mr. Trump’s response was of a different order.
“It was a dangerous form of xenophobia, aimed solely for electoral purposes and had nothing to do in the end with real national security,” Mr. Brinkley said.
For the troops, so far, it has mostly been an expensive field trip. The cost of the deployment is not known, but budget officials believe it could reach $200 million if all 15,000 troops that Mr. Trump pledged are ultimately sent.
.. Defenders of Mr. Trump said the troops would take little notice of his sudden lack of emphasis on the caravan.
“Knowing the troops, knowing how busy they are, they’re not focused on him,” said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who is a former vice chief of staff of the Army. “They’ve got a job to do.”
But other former military officers said the soldiers were well aware of the political motivation behind their mission. Lacking much else to do, they will quickly pick up on Mr. Trump’s loss of interest in the caravan, and it will add to their already depleted morale.
Normany Invasion: Operation Fortitude
Both Fortitude plans involved the creation of phantom field armies (based in Edinburgh and the south of England) which threatened Norway (Fortitude North) and Pas de Calais (Fortitude South). The operation was intended to divert Axis attention away from Normandy and, after the invasion on June 6, 1944, to delay reinforcement by convincing the Germans that the landings were purely a diversionary attack.
Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump
During the campaign, when President Trump’s advisers wanted him to stop talking about an issue — such as when he attacked a Gold Star military family — they sometimes presented him with polls demonstrating how the controversy was harming his candidacy.
During the transition, when aides needed Trump to decide on a looming issue or appointment, they often limited him to a shortlist of two or three options and urged him to choose one.
And now in the White House, when advisers hope to prevent Trump from making what they think is an unwise decision, they frequently try to delay his final verdict — hoping he may reconsider after having time to calm down.
.. The president is often impulsive, mercurial and difficult to manage, leading those around him to find creative ways to channel his energies.
.. Some Trump aides spend a significant part of their time devising ways to rein in and control the impetuous president, angling to avoid outbursts that might work against him, according to interviews with 18 aides, confidants
.. “I restrict no one, by the way, from going in to see him. But when we go in to see him now, rather than onesies and twosies, we go in and help him collectively understand what he needs to understand to make these vital decisions.”
.. Trump’s penchant for Twitter feuds, name-calling and temperamental outbursts presents a unique challenge.
.. One defining feature of managing Trump is frequent praise, which can leave his team in what seems to be a state of perpetual compliments. The White House pushes out news releases overflowing with top officials heaping flattery on Trump
.. One regular practitioner is Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who praised Trump’s controversial statements after white supremacists had a violent rally in Charlottesville and also said he agreed with Trump that professional football players should stand during the national anthem.
.. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers wrote in a Twitter post, “Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.”
.. Especially in the early days of his presidency, aides delivered the president daily packages of news stories filled with positive coverage
.. Some aides and outside advisers hoping to push their allies and friends for top postings, such as ambassadorships, made sure their candidates appeared speaking favorably about Trump in conservative news outlets — and that those news clippings ended up on the president’s desk.
.. H.R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, has frequently resorted to diversionary tactics to manage Trump.
.. he will volunteer to have his staff study Trump’s more unorthodox ideas
.. When Trump wanted to make South Korea pay for the entire cost of a shared missile defense system, McMaster and top aides huddled to come up with arguments that the money spent defending South Korea and Japan also benefited the U.S. economy in the form of manufacturing jobs
.. If [Trump] wanted to do something that I thought could be problematic for him, I would simply, respectfully, ask him if we could possibly wait on it and then reconsider,” Nunberg
.. During the campaign, after reading a story in the New York Times that said Trump’s advisers went on television to talk directly to him, the candidate exploded at his then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, chastising his top aide for treating him like “a baby,”
.. The president appreciates how Mattis, a four-star Marine general, speaks to him candidly but respectfully and often plays down disagreements in public.
.. Mattis’s focus has been on informing the president when they disagree — before the disagreements go public — and maintaining a quiet influence.
.. Mattis has also gone out of his way not to suck up to the president
.. Mattis has also worked to get on Trump’s good side by criticizing the media for putting too much emphasis on his disagreements with Trump
.. When he has broken with the president, Mattis has done it as subtly possible.
.. Several people who have met with Trump in recent weeks said he mocks other officials in Washington, especially fellow Republicans.
.. Trump upset Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) by cutting a deal with Democrats. In subsequent days behind closed doors, the president mocked the reactions of McConnell and Ryan from the meeting with an exaggerated crossing of his arms and theatrical frowns.
.. “They have an on-the-record ‘Dear Leader’ culture, and an on-background ‘This-guy-is-a-joke’ culture,”