Stone Indicted, Collaborated With Enormously Successful Ratfucking Campaign
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The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, revealed on Friday the most direct link yet between the Trump campaign’s and WikiLeaks’ parallel efforts to use Democratic Party material stolen by Russians to damage the election campaign of Hillary R. Clinton.
In an indictment unsealed Friday, the special counsel disclosed evidence that a top campaign official in 2016 dispatched Roger J. Stone, a longtime adviser to President Trump, to get information from WikiLeaks about the thousands of hacked Democratic emails. The effort began well after it was widely reported that Russian intelligence operatives were behind the theft, which was part of Moscow’s broad campaign to sabotage the 2016 president election.
The indictment makes no mention of whether Mr. Trump played a role in the coordination, though Mr. Mueller did leave a curious clue about how high in the campaign the effort reached: A senior campaign official “was directed” by an unnamed person to contact Mr. Stone about additional WikiLeaks releases that might damage the Clinton campaign, according to the court document.
In highly related news, this is an excellent thread about how the Wikileaks hacks — and remember, the Podesta inbox was released in the immediate aftermath of Farenthold’s report about the Access Hollywood tape — received an enormous amount of coverage in the closing weeks of the campaign, often with Wikileaks’s pro-Trump spin on them taken at face value although the emails revealed no substantial misconduct by Clinton or her associates.
And also dominated network nightly news and the 5 major US newspapers pic.twitter.com/FLTrhBEhbz
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) January 25, 2019
How WikiLeaks hijacked the news in 2016 https://t.co/TTHrnHt652 pic.twitter.com/sfBBiAeZCr
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) January 25, 2019
…Paul’s references were even more apt than he knew!
The FBI indictment of former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone contains the unsurprising revelation that Stone threatened an associate, and his pet dog, to prevent him from cooperating with authorities. He expressed his threat using the familiar trope of the Mafia movie. “On multiple occasions,” the special counsel reports, Stone told his associate (reportedly Randy Credico) to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” a reference to a Godfather: Part II capo who was prepared to inform on the boss before Congress, before recanting his testimony (and ultimately committing suicide to protect his family from reprisal.)