.. 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.
Trump’s Moral Holiday
The Florida-based Republican, Aaron Nevins, received and published Russian-hacked material—and in return, advised the hackers how to release their material to increase its damage to Democratic candidates. Nevins was not himself a high-ranking person in the Republican world. But the information Nevins obtained from Guccifer 2.0 was used by other Republican campaigns, including the national Republican congressional effort and Paul Ryan’s own super PAC. The earlier claim that Republicans were purely passive and unwitting beneficiaries of Russian espionage in the 2016 election has now been pierced.
In at least one instance, the cooperation was active, conscious, and initiated on the American side, not the Russian: collusion, in a word.
.. At the time, Kushner had already spent months trying to arrange fresh financing for a troubled building his family owns, 666 Fifth Avenue.
After one of those meetings, Kislyak arranged a meeting between Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, the powerful chief executive of a major Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB.
The U.S. had imposed financial sanctions on VEB because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military incursions in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. (During this period the Russians were also meeting with Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser.)
VEB has close ties to the Kremlin, and Gorkov attended a training academy for members of Russia’s security and intelligence services. A Trump spokeswoman has described Kushner’s meetings with the Russians as routine, which they may have been given his role at the time as Trump’s liaison to foreign powers.
But given the significance of 666 Fifth Avenue to Kushner and his family’s fortunes, it’s also possible that he saw the Russians as potential investors.
.. A remarkable number of those talkers condoned the attack, either outright or by pointing to other bad things that have happened elsewhere on earth at various points in the past. Rush Limbaugh went furthest, theatrically condemning the attack—but denigrating the reporter as a “smug and arrogant” Millennial “pajama boy” (a hugely derisive term in the conservative political lexicon) and praising Gianforte as “manly and studly.” (It’s hard to miss in some of the commentary from Trump’s elderly base a nostalgic yearning for lost physical prowess—and intense resentment of the vitality of younger generations with different views.)
.. Half a century ago, conservative commentators often blamed the riots of the 1960s on the “moral holiday” declared by permissive authorities. Leaders who might have delegitimized violence instead acquiesced in it, thus inviting more of it. For many conservatives, May 25 was a moral holiday of their own.
.. These four events each represent one of the great themes of the Trump era:
- The anti-alliance pro-Russia tilt of administration policy
- Collusion with hostile foreign nations for domestic political advantage
- Use of political power for personal financial advantage
- The breakdown of inhibitions and the weakening of sanctions against political violence.
.. But Greg Gianforte is headed to Congress. Jared Kushner and Donald Trump will soon return to the West Wing. There, they’ll continue to deploy the powers of the presidency to protect themselves. They’ll leverage dark and dangerous forces in American society to help them. Someday, maybe, they will cease to get away with it. But not yet.
Trump Adviser Had Twitter Contact With Figure Tied to Russians
Roger J. Stone Jr., an off-and-on adviser to President Trump for decades, has acknowledged that he had contact on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the mysterious online figure that is believed to be a front for Russian intelligence officials.
.. But Mr. Stone insisted in an interview that the contact had been brief and involved nothing more than the exchange of a few direct messages, well after the party committee had been hacked. “Even if he is a Russian agent, my cursory exchange with him happens after he releases the D.N.C. stuff,” Mr. Stone said on Saturday. “There’s only one exchange with him. I had no further exchanges.”
.. He denied any knowledge of what the hackers were up to before their attacks. “This is a witch hunt,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s the worst form of McCarthyism. Seems as if you’re not for nuclear war with the Russians over Syria, then you must be a traitor.”
.. During the campaign, Guccifer 2.0 used social media to invite individual reporters and Republican operatives to request specific caches of documents.