Trump Ally Roger Stone Found Guilty On All Counts Of Lying To Congress, Witness Tampering

• Stone’s trial was the highest-profile loose end remaining from
  the Mueller investigation.

The verdict is in for Roger
Stone’s trial — and a Washington, DC, jury found President
Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser guilty on all counts
Friday.^[1]

Stone was convicted of one count of obstructing an official
proceeding, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and
one count of witness tampering.

The verdict makes Stone the sixth former Trump adviser to be
convicted of or plead guilty to charges stemming from special
counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The special counsel
indicted Stone in January, before completing his work, and Stone’s
trial was the highest-profile loose end remaining from the
probe.

Prosecutors alleged that Stone tried to obstruct the House
Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in
the 2016 election by lying to the committee about his efforts to
contact WikiLeaks, and by encouraging another witness to lie for
him.

The trial featured testimony from two other former top Trump
campaign aides — Steve
Bannon^[2] and Rick
Gates^[3]. Both said that Stone
repeatedly suggested he had inside information on WikiLeaks’s plans
to release material that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Gates gave testimony suggesting that Stone shared this
information with Donald Trump himself. And Trump’s name came up
frequently in the trial — prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky argued that
Stone’s motivation for his lies and obstruction was that “the truth
looked bad for Donald Trump.”

But what wasn’t really cleared up in the trial was whether Stone
in fact had legitimate inside information about
WikiLeaks and its posting of Democratic emails that had been hacked
by Russian intelligence officers. To an extent, that makes sense —
the charges against Stone weren’t about anything he did in 2016,
but rather the alleged cover-up he perpetrated the following
year.

The government presented voluminous documentary evidence that
the story Stone told Congress — that all his WikiLeaks information
came from a single “intermediary,” radio host Randy Credico — was
false. And they suggested Stone concocted this false story to hide
his true WikiLeaks connection — conservative author Jerome Corsi.
But what, exactly, Corsi learned, and how he learned it, remain
murky.

Stone, however, has now been convicted, and will be sentenced at
some point in the coming months by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. He
will likely try to appeal his case — and hope President Trump
pardons him — but, as of right now, it looks like the legendary
dirty trickster may well serve prison time.

The timeline of Stone and WikiLeaks

It was all the way back in spring 2016 that Stone began saying
he knew that WikiLeaks had information coming that would damage
Clinton, according to both Bannon (testifying under subpoena) and
Gates (testifying as part of a plea deal he struck with the
government).

Back then, Gates was the deputy Trump campaign chair, serving
under his longtime boss Paul Manafort. Gates testified that he and
Manafort were initially skeptical that Stone really knew what he
was talking about.

But then, on June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
announced that he had pending releases related to Clinton. Two days
later, on June 14, the Democratic National Committee announced it
had been hacked by the Russian government.

At the trial, the government revealed that Stone had called and
spoken with Trump that same day (though it’s unclear what they
discussed). Gates also testified that, the following day, Stone
told him that more information was coming soon.

A little over a month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks posted the
hacked DNC emails online. Gates testified that Trump campaign chair
Paul Manafort then instructed him to keep in touch with Stone and
find out what else he knew about WikiLeaks’s plans — so Trump could
be briefed on them. On July 25, Stone emailed his associate Jerome
Corsi, telling him to “get to Assange” and “get the pending WL
[WikiLeaks] emails.”

Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between
Trump and Stone in late July, while Gates was in a car with Trump
driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that he could not hear
exactly what was said on the call but that after the call ended,
Trump told him that “more information would be coming.” About an
hour after the call, Stone emailed Corsi again, to say a friend of
theirs in London should see Assange.

A few days later, on August 2, Corsi emailed Stone about what he
said were Assange’s plans, and vaguely mentioned “Podesta” — a
reference to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair.
(Podesta’s emails had been hacked, but that was not public
knowledge at this point.) The next day, Stone emailed Manafort
saying he had an idea “to save Trump’s ass.”

Manafort was ousted from the Trump campaign in mid-August, and
replaced by Bannon. Stone then emailed Bannon on August 18, saying
he knew a way to win the 2016 election, but that “it ain’t pretty.”
Bannon testified that afterward, Stone continued to suggest
privately that he had a “relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange.” Bannon added that the Trump campaign didn’t really have
an official access point to WikiLeaks — but that the closest thing
to that would have been Roger Stone.

Still, despite all of Stone’s ominous predictions, no one at the
trial testified that Stone ever
offered specific knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans
on timing or that he specified what information, exactly, they had
in advance.

In any case, none of that was actually the focus of the charges
against Stone.

The charges were about Stone’s alleged cover
up

The government alleged that when the House Intelligence
Committee asked him to testify in their Russia investigation in
2017, Stone concocted a false cover story to hide whatever actually
happened.

Specifically, Stone omitted Jerome Corsi from the story, and
claimed all of his information about WikiLeaks came from comedian
and radio host Randy Credico. But, as prosecutors argued and
Credico himself testified, that didn’t make sense with the
timeline.

Credico did get in touch with WikiLeaks to do a radio interview
with Assange, but that wasn’t until late August 2016 — months after
Stone started claiming to know about WikiLeaks, and weeks after his
emails with Corsi.

Stone was also charged with falsely telling Congress he had no
emails or texts discussing WikiLeaks (he had a ton); with falsely
saying he never asked for any requests to be communicated to
Assange (he did); and with falsely saying he never discussed his
conversations with his WikiLeaks intermediary with anyone in
Trump’s campaign (Bannon and Gates said he did talk WikiLeaks with
them).

The fuller story of what happened with Stone and WikiLeaks
remains unclear — but Mueller’s own conclusions are already in
his 448-page final report on the Russia
investigation^[4], hidden under black
bars.

That’s because all material about Stone in the Mueller report
was redacted, to avoid prejudicing this trial’s outcome. Now that
it’s over, we’re finally getting closer to learning what the
special counsel found — and whether he thought any Trump associates
were involved in the dissemination of hacked emails.