«Everybody knows Roger.»
No pussyfooting around the Roger Stone indictment, eh? Donald Trump made it categorical in a round-table interview with the New York Times, the transcript of which came out this morning. Maggie Haberman asked Trump if he ever directed Roger Stone to find out what Wikileaks had on Hillary Clinton, and Trump denied talking to Stone at all about it:
HABERMAN: Did you ever talk to him about WikiLeaks? Because that seemed —
TRUMP: No.
HABERMAN: You never had conversations with him.
TRUMP: No, I didn’t. I never did.
HABERMAN: Did you ever tell him to — or other people to get in touch with them?
TRUMP: Never did.
HABERMAN: You saw that was in the indictment.
TRUMP: Can I tell you? I didn’t see it. I know what was in the indictment if you read it, there was no collusion with Russia. But that’s in a lot of these things. And a lot of them are: They come in, they interview somebody and they get them for lying. I mean, you know.
“Everybody knows Roger,” Trump later added. However, Trump also made sure to point out that Stone had only briefly worked for his campaign and had left long before the DNC hack was known, and possibly before it took place, in mid-2015. (This was almost a full year before the hack took place .) Trump claims that even then, Stone was “not my consultant,” occupying a lower-rung position in the campaign even during that brief period.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes the categorical nature of the denial, but wonders how long it will last:
The reason this is such a big question is because of Roger Stone’s week-old indictment. In that document, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team noted that after the initial June 2016 dump of WikiLeaks documents, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE” about WikiLeaks and its future releases.
The passive voice loomed large. Many other people in these documents are alluded to using titles such as “senior official” and “high-ranking official,” but in this case Mueller’s team isn’t saying who “directed” that senior campaign official, despite having evidence that the person was directed by someone.
It’s difficult to dismiss that as some coincidence, drafting error or a careless choice of words. The people who write these things parse them endlessly, and had to know that line would stick out.
