WASHINGTON — Every criminal case brought against a senior member of the Trump campaign as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has revealed a…
WASHINGTON — Every criminal case brought against a senior member of the Trump campaign as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has revealed a new attempt to conceal contacts with Russia or intermediaries linked to the Kremlin.
Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney to President Donald Trump; Michael Flynn, the Trump administration’s first national security adviser; Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman; and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign; all have been implicated in back-channel efforts to establish lines of communication with the United States’ primary adversary – Russia.
In a 24-page indictment revealed Friday against Roger Stone, one of Trump’s longtime political advisers, Mueller’s prosecutors took their deepest plunge yet into the inner workings of the Trump campaign and its intense interest in the Kremlin’s effort to undermine Clinton’s presidential bid with hacked emails laundered through the group the government says became its de facto publishing arm: WikiLeaks.
Since launching his investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, Mueller hasn’t charged any Americans with plotting to help the Kremlin’s effort. Instead, his office has indicted a succession of Trump associates – now Stone – for lying to investigators about their activities, and in the process has sketched an increasingly detailed picture of a series of efforts by the campaign to benefit from hacking by Russian intelligence services that the U. S. government says was meant to help deliver Trump the presidency.
Stone’s relationship with WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published troves of documents stolen from Democratic political organizations by a hacking group backed by Russian military intelligence, is at the heart of the Friday court filing in which the self-avowed political «dirty trickster» was charged with lying to investigators, obstruction and witness tampering.
Following a brief court appearance Friday morning, a defiant Stone stood before jeering protesters and cheering supporters claiming that he was «falsely accused» and would «plead not guilty.»
Stone’s remarks came shortly after prosecutors detailed a series of alleged contacts between Trump campaign officials, who were not identified in court documents, and the colorful political adviser who had publicly boasted of his connections with WikiLeaks and its embattled founder, Julian Assange. Some of the exchanges had been known previously, because Stone and his associates had made them public, but their inclusion in Friday’s indictment marks the first time prosecutors themselves have offered such detailed information about interactions within Trump’s campaign.
Assange has been living in exile at the Ecuadoran embassy in London since being granted asylum in 2012, in part to avoid the reach of British authorities and possible prosecution in the United States.
Starting in the summer of 2016, as Trump was securing the Republican nomination for president and as the FBI was launching its initial inquiry into Russia’s interference campaign, prosecutors alleged Friday that Stone communicated with senior Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks and the politically-charged material in its possession.
In those contacts, according to court documents, the campaign officials referred to information that «would be damaging to the Clinton campaign.
