„You don’t understand Donald Trump.“
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone told The Washington Post that he met with a Russian man who attempted to sell damaging information on Hillary Clinton to then-candidate Donald Trump for $2 million during the 2016 election.
The meeting was arranged by Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo, according to the Post’s report, and took place in May 2016 in Sunny Isles, Fla. Stone said he met the man, who identified himself as Henry Greenberg, at a restaurant there to discuss making a deal.
They were ultimately unable to come to an agreement because Greenberg was demanding too much money, Stone said.
“You don’t understand Donald Trump,” Stone told the Post he said at the time. “He doesn’t pay for anything.”
He later told Caputo that the meeting he’d arranged was a “waste of time,” as evidenced in a string of brief text messages provided to the Post.
Both men now allege that Greenberg was an FBI informant hired by anti-Trump U. S. law enforcement officials as part of a setup.
Documents examined by the Post did not reveal that Greenberg was acting as an FBI informant at the time of the meeting, though they did show he had worked as an informant for the agency until 2013.
Greenberg denied that he was working for the FBI during the meeting and also said he did not ask for money from Stone, insisting instead that it was his friend, Alexei, who had asked for the money.
“If you believe that [Greenberg] took time off from his long career as an FBI informant to reach out to us in his spare time, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you,” Caputo told the Post.
Stone echoed Caputo’s remarks in a separate interview: “I didn’t realize it was an FBI sting operation at the time, but it sure looks like one now.”
Earlier this year, Stone came under fire over allegations that he had prior knowledge about WikiLeaks’ attempts to gather emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election.
Kelcey Caulder is a News Fellow at IJR. Previously, she worked with the web team at the Los Angeles Times and led the Student Press Law Center’s campa… more
