Dirty Tricks Catch Up to Roger

NATASHA BERTRAND
3:42 PM ET

He relished his late-night phone calls with Donald Trump in 2016. He was in regular touch with a senior Trump campaign official about WikiLeaks’ plans to destroy Trump’s foe, Hillary Clinton. And now Roger Stone, the longtime adviser to Trump and a self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” has met his reckoning ...

Throughout his decades-long career operating in Republican circles, Stone, who has a likeness of Richard Nixon tattooed on his back, has taken pride in mastering the "black arts" of politics. He’s been accused of threatening political opponents, has been sued for defamation, and regularly spreads conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination and Hillary Clinton's infidelity. He served as Trump’s Washington lobbyist in the late 1990s and early 2000s and has been encouraging him to run for president for over a decade. “Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald," Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, said of Stone in a 2017 documentary. Though he wasn’t initially seen as an integral part of Trump’s campaign, he kept hovering ...

By the time Stone began seeking out more WikiLeaks releases in late July 2016, it had already been reported that Russia was behind the theft of Democratic emails released by WikiLeaks on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. Mueller, who has been investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia since May 2017, has not accused Stone of having any improper contacts with Russian nationals in pursuit of the Clinton emails. (Stone has long promoted the conspiracy theory, repeatedly debunked by the U.S. intelligence community, that the DNC hack was an inside job—effectively amplifying propaganda pushed by Russia to deflect blame for the election interference.) But like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen before him, Stone’s efforts to conceal his Russia-related activities during the 2016 election were his downfall.

In May 2016, Stone met with a Russian national, Henry Greenberg, on the promise of obtaining Clinton dirt, and exchanged private Twitter messages with a user known as Guccifer 2.0 who claimed to have “penetrated Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers” but was later characterized by U.S. officials as a front for Russian military intelligence. Stone also said several times in 2016 that he was directly in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but he began to walk those claims back in early 2017, drawing more scrutiny from congressional and federal investigators and ensnaring several of his contacts in the process ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/roger-stone-indicted-mueller/581338/