The festering scandal surrounding the Donald Trump campaign’s ties with Russia took a new turn on Friday night. One of Trump’s closest confidants during the campaign admitted to having chatted with one of the people responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee.
On Wednesday, The Smoking Gun got a tip that longtime conservative political consultant Roger Stone had exchanged numerous Twitter direct messages with “Guccifer 2.0,” a persona involved in the DNC hack. Reportedly, the FBI had obtained the exchange as part of its ongoing investigation into ties between Trump loyalists and the Kremlin. This seemingly implied collusion between Stone and Russia.
Stone pushed back on the Twitter account of his podcast, “Stone Cold Truth.”
https://twitter.com/StoneColdTruth/status/840337206048915456
He then reached out to The Washington Times, one of the most hard-right newspapers in the country, to give his side of the story. He provided copies of a direct message exchange between himself and Guccifer that took place in August, soon after Stone wrote an article in Breitbart News that tried to knock down any Kremlin involvement in the hack.
According to the exchange that Stone provided, he buzzed Guccifer on August 14 to say that he was “delighted” that Twitter had reinstated its account following a suspension for posting the private phone numbers of several Democratic electeds. He reached out to Guccifer again on August 16, asking him to retweet a column he’d written in The Hill about the possibility that the election had been “rigged” for Hillary Clinton. Inbetween, Guccifer thanked Stone for writing about him, and asked if Stone thought his latest document dump had anything juicy in it. On August 17, he praised Stone as “a great man.”
Stone characterized the exchange as “completely innocuous and perfunctory”–so much so that “I had forgotten it.” On the surface, it doesn’t look suspicious. But put in context with the larger furor over the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, it doesn’t look so innocent. The U. S. intelligence community concluded that Guccifer was one of several aliases used by the Kremlin in hopes of tilting the election to Trump.
Moreover, on at least one occasion, Stone seemed to know when a document dump was coming. In August, Stone fired off this tweet.
https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/767366825743097856
Then in October, just days before Wikileaks published emails from Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta, Stone fired off this.
https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/782443074874138624
Additionally, this marks the second time that Stone has admitted to communicating with major players in the hacking affair. Back in October, he admitted having been in contact with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The intelligence community fingered WikiLeaks as one of the conduits in the hacking. Long before then, John Schindler of the New York Observer declared that WikiLeaks was almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence.
Stone has been known as one of the most unsavory figures in American politics for some time. But did he really outdo himself this time? At the very least, we are once again in the position of asking questions about our president that we should never have to ask.
(featured image courtesy Stone’s Facebook)
