The Daily - The Story of Roger Stone and WikiLeaks

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

The special counsel’s indictment of Roger J. Stone Jr. contains details as over-the-top as Mr. Stone himself, revealing, for instance, that he encouraged an associate to use a tactic straight from ���The Godfather.” But the indictment — which shows the most direct link yet between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks — is wholly serious. Guest: Mark Mazzetti, a Washington investigative correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the special counsel's indictment of Roger Stone contains details as over-the-top as Stone himself, including encouraging an associate to use a tactic straight from the Godfather films. But the indictment itself is quite serious in finally making a link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

It's Monday, January 28th. agents showed up at my home, pounded on the door. I opened the door to, you know, pointed automatic weapons. I was handcuffed. There were, I don't know. We have some major breaking news in the Mueller investigation. Roger Stone, you see him right there. President Trump's longtime political advisor, former campaign aide, has been arrested in Florida. Charged with seven federal felonies, obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements, and one count of witness tampering. This has nothing to do with the president, has nothing I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself. I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated.

So, Mark Mazzetti, what do we need to know about who Roger Stone is? Roger Stone is a legendary Republican operative who, from the earliest days of his career, has plied the dark arts of scandal mongering and dirty tricks in aid of political campaigns. Are you telling me that that was a lie? Roger Stone is a trickster. Roger Stone is a shady character, okay? I know Roger Stone, and you know he worked for Nixon. He famously tattooed his hero on his back, and who among us can say that? The questionable consultant's resume is filled with work for Republican stars, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. He is someone who very proudly talks about how he tries to plant stories with the press.

Someone who tries to dig up any kind of personal dirt about a candidate in order to help the other side. I'm certainly guilty of bluffing and posturing and punking the Democrats, unless they pass some law against bulls**t, and I missed it, I'm engaging in tradecraft. It's politics. I'm sure it's driving the Democrats crazy, but there's nothing illegal about it. So this is someone who, well, for many people who hate politics, they would hate someone like Roger Stone. The truth is Jimmy Carter's middle name was not Hussein. A very substantial number of people wonder, because of the policies of this administration, about whether the president is a Muslim. They may wonder, but you're a presidential candidate,

like Trump be saying that, or at least condoning it with his silence. I don't think he commented either way. He goes on television in strange outfits. He gives interviews from his pool. And clearly, in many cases, doesn't take himself too seriously. So he's kind of a sideshow. Except he's someone who Donald Trump has taken seriously for a long time. He's a regular guy.

You can talk to him like a regular person. There's nothing formal or stilted about him. And he's funny. He's got a great self-deprecating wit. He's just fun to be with. He's been this sort of informal advisor to Trump over decades and someone who, long, long before anyone took seriously the idea of Donald Trump being the president of the United States, Roger Stone was pushing this idea. It was not until 1987, really, late 87, that I began thinking about him as a presidential candidate. Although it has often been a contentious relationship.

Yeah, I think we have a complicated relationship. But first of all, recognize I'm a Trump loyalist. Even when he's wrong, I'll be there. They've been at odds at times. He's someone who didn't last very long on the Trump campaign. He started out as an official campaign adviser, but was fired from the campaign pretty quickly. And more turmoil for Trump, a top longtime associate both from his business world and in the political realm. Roger Stone is out tonight. Dispute about whether he resigned or was fired.

Trump's campaign says Stone was fired because he was using the campaign to seek publicity for himself. I have no interest in going back. Although I strongly support Trump, we have managerial differences. And meanwhile, I'm just making the very best case for him in public that I can because I do think he has what it takes. And insofar as he was involved in the campaign, what exactly was his role as an informal advisor? What did that amount to? He was the classic late night phone call person to sort of listen to what Trump was thinking. He was the confidant of then-candidate Trump, talking to him by phone, being a sort of back channel of advice

outside official campaign communications. You didn't always know that Roger Stone was there because he did have this behind-the-scenes role, but it was pretty apparent to people close to Trump that Roger Stone had this sort of outsized influence over Trump. It seems to me there's more than meets the eye here with Roger Stone parting company from the Trump campaign, coming on my program and others, and giving the big Trump pitch.

You media types are so conspiratorial. No, no, the Stone Trump types, I think, are the conspiratorial. So he was behind the scenes until he wasn't. In August of 2016, a few months before the election, Roger Stone sent a very cryptic tweet about Podesta. Roger Stone tweeted that it would soon be, quote, Podesta's time in the barrel. And he said it will soon be his time in the barrel. Now, Podesta was John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton.

And no one really knew what that meant until a few months later in October, a few weeks before the election. He sent out another tweet. I think he said on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton is done. Hashtag WikiLeaks. Roger Stone writes Thursday, October 6th, Julian Assange will deliver a devastating expose on Hillary at a time of his choosing. I stand by my prediction. Hashtag handcuffs for Hillary. And then we need to talk about these hot emails. The Podesta emails spill out a few days later. WikiLeaks released more than 2,000 emails. They claim they came from her campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other staffers.

The leak revealed transcripts from some of Clinton's paid Wall Street speeches. This is the first time that we're actually getting a look at these Wall Street speeches. What you see is that her own words really hit on her own perceived weaknesses, particularly around relatability and trust. You see why she really wasn't in a hurry to release these as it really highlights a lot of concerns that voters have about her. And so this is, again, Roger Stone creating this image that he had a direct channel to WikiLeaks and knew what the information was going to be before it became public. Right, and if I remember correctly, one of those WikiLeaks dumps of emails was right around the time of the Access Hollywood tape being published. October 7th, the Access Hollywood tape comes out.

One hour later, WikiLeaks starts dropping my emails into the public. One could say that those things might not have been a coincidence. Which was interesting timing. Within hours. And of course, that's very fortuitous timing if you're candidate Trump. Very quickly, a lot of the media started focusing on the Podesta emails rather than this explosive story about the Access Hollywood tape. So at this point, justifiably, everyone is starting to wonder, does Roger Stone, this informal advisor to the president who is in touch with the campaign, does he have inside knowledge of what's going on at WikiLeaks? Is he coordinating with this organization?

Yes. And remember, Roger Stone has built a career on creating an image that he does have great access. I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation. He does have insight that others don't. I think that Assange is going to be very influential in this election because he's going to be educating the American people about the Clintons. Once the Russia investigation heats up, though, he has to reverse course. I had no advance notice of the content source or the exact disclosure time of the WikiLeaks disclosures. Assange himself has said so. In fact, Assange has said in his own

tweets and in interviews that Roger Stone never predicted anything that I hadn't already said in public. He has to sort of paint himself as someone who didn't have that knowledge, who didn't have any insight, because that was something that could potentially put him in real legal jeopardy. real legal jeopardy. So what did we learn from this indictment last week about what was really going on here? So what we learned on Friday is that Roger Stone, in fact, did have insights into what WikiLeaks was doing. He made extensive efforts to find out what Julian Assange was planning.

And we find out that he was directed by people inside the campaign to go find out what WikiLeaks was doing. So we really, for the first time, have a sense that there was a link between WikiLeaks' efforts to damage Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign's efforts to damage Hillary Clinton. And that link was Roger Stone. And something else that should not be lost in all this is that all of this was happening months after it was first revealed that the Russian government was behind this operation to hack the Democratic servers and put the information out through WikiLeaks. And that's significant because it's one thing to be coordinating with WikiLeaks when no one quite knows how it got those internal Clinton emails. It's another to be coordinating with WikiLeaks once it's understood that the emails it's disseminating were stolen by Russia.

It seems to elevate this above wanting negative information about your opponent out in the world. That's right. All of this was done while it was well known that the Russians were behind this operation. So do we know who on the campaign was talking to Roger Stone and encouraging him to keep communicating with WikiLeaks and find out when their leaks would occur. That's where it becomes really interesting. The Times reported a few months ago that Steve Bannon, who was the campaign chairman at the end, was in contact with Roger Stone about this.

In early October, Stone writes Steve Bannon that WikiLeaks would release, quote, a load every week going forward. He separately writes to a supporter involved in the Trump campaign, quote, spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming. Friend in London, presumably meaning Julian Assange. Right. But the Mueller indictment has a very tantalizing detail. What's that? The indictment said that a senior campaign official, quote, was directed by someone to contact Stone about additional WikiLeaks releases.

There's a very odd use of the passive voice that you would not expect in an indictment written by lawyers with Ivy League educations. The indictment does not say who it was that directed the senior campaign official. Of course, it's led to speculation that that person could only be Donald Trump. We don't know. Everything you're describing here about Roger Stone's communications with the campaign and Roger Stone's communications with WikiLeaks, it sounds quite nefarious. But I wonder if it is illegal. Is his communication with WikiLeaks what Roger Stone was indicted for? No. The charge is Stone lying to Congress about his interactions

with WikiLeaks, trying to tamper with witness testimony, and an overall charge of obstruction of justice. As for the witness tampering charge, that centers around Stone's interactions with someone named Randy Credico, who is a longtime New York radio personality, on-again, off-again friend of Stone, and someone who did, in fact, seem to have direct connections to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And what the indictment details is that Roger Stone had several communications with Credico trying to make sure that Credico told the same story

to the House that Roger Stone had told, and even suggesting that he should pull a, quote, Frank Pentangeli before the committee. Did you serve under Capo regime, Peter Clemenza, under Vito Corleone, also known as the Godfather? And that is a reference to a character in The Godfather 2 who is called before Congress to testify about the mob and all of a sudden gets amnesia.

I ask you again, sir, here and now under oath, were you at any time a member of a crime organization headed by Michael Corleone? I don't know nothing about that. Oh, I was in the olive oil business with his father, but that was a long time ago, that's all. And why isn't Mueller going after Stone for anything other than the lying, for the actions he lied about?

It's hard to make a conspiracy case. The fact is that the emails appear to have been stolen before Roger Stone knew about them, so he didn't seem to have participated in the theft. And he seemed to maybe be trafficking in information that was becoming public or was about to be public.

And this is what his defenders and the president's defenders have pointed out, that these are all crimes that happened after the fact. He is not being charged with something that's at the bottom of this whole thing. Collusion, conspiracy, etc. And this is what, of course, President Trump has fallen back on for some time. This is why this thing is so weird, strange. The crime is conspiracy to hack. Collusion is not a crime.

It doesn't exist. Conspiracy to defraud the government, you're right. Conspiracy to hack, that is the crime. We don't know whether— Now, did Donald Trump engage in a conspiracy to hack with the Russians? They've been going at it. The counterintelligence investigation came to the conclusion, no evidence. Mark, it feels like time and time again, when it comes to the Mueller investigation, he and his prosecutors are charging people around the president with lying or tampering with a witness or doing something

deceptive around their interactions with his own investigation, but not with actually colluding with Russia or coordinating with Russia or being involved in a conspiracy that involves Russia, which, of course, is what this investigation is really about. What do you make of that? If you want to look at it as a best case scenario for President Trump, it's that there's no original crime here. There's no collusion. There's no conspiracy. They were charged because they were just lying to Congress.

Today's surprise guilty plea by Michael Cohen coincide in federal court that he lied to Congress. He says to support Mr. Trump's timeline of a Moscow real estate deal. Lying to the FBI, withholding evidence. Tonight, former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos admitting he lied to the FBI about his contacts with someone the FBI suspected of being a Russian operative to cover for President Trump. But the worst case scenario is that they are lying to protect something big. They were so concerned about what's at the bottom of this story that they had to lie

to keep investigators from getting there. That's been one of the enduring mysteries of this entire story. Was there a grand conspiracy? Or does this all add up to small individual acts, individual contacts with Russians, individual business deals gone bad, that individual people were trying to lie to cover up their own role. The fact that we don't know where Mueller is going and Mueller only reveals his strategy in individual indictments means that we're still left with these kinds of questions. And in this latest indictment, we've learned that Roger Stone, who has not been taken very seriously all this time, now seems to represent something quite

important in all of this. Yes, in many ways, Roger Stone was this kind of cartoonish figure. If this were a whodunit, he'd be the obvious suspect that a reader would have long ago dismissed because he's too obvious. And yet, here's Roger Stone being charged with very serious crimes, and for the first time, we see Mueller show his hand that there really was this direct link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. But I think the bigger point is the question of how directly the Trump campaign officials were working with the original source of the information, and that is the Russian government. WikiLeaks was a pass-through here. The Russian government, Russian hackers gave it to WikiLeaks to distribute.

The real question at the end of the day is not the communications necessarily with WikiLeaks, but whether there was foreknowledge about what Russia was doing and any direct communication with the Russians about their campaign to sabotage Hillary Clinton's political future. Mark, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Thank you very much, my fellow Americans. I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government. On Friday afternoon, just hours after the FBI raid of Roger Stone's home, President Trump walked into the Rose Garden of the White House and announced victoriously that he was temporarily ending the shutdown with no agreement from the Democrats to fund his border wall.

I want to thank all of the incredible federal workers and their amazing families. The announcement came a day after two bills to reopen the government, one sponsored by Republicans, the other by Democrats, failed to pass in the Senate, and as frustration over the shutdown began to boil over in highly public and disruptive ways. Both clowns, both sides should sit down and make it happen, including our president, including Pelosi. It's ridiculous. Not fair. Not TSA's, you know, fault that they're not getting paid and stuff. It's the government's

fault. So the government should get it together. By Friday, so many air traffic controllers had called in sick that the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights across the Northeast. Hundreds of workers at the IRS refused to show up for work, and the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, had released a public message to his employees. Hi, everyone. We're now five weeks and two missed paychecks into this mess, and I wanted to touch base with all of you again. Making some people stay home when they don't want

to and making others show up without pay, it's mind-boggling, it's short-sighted, and it's unfair. It takes a lot to get me angry, but I'm about as angry as I've been in a long, long time. Unity among congressional Republicans, which had held for a month, began to collapse with Republican senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, telling Vice President Mike Pence

that the president's shutdown strategy was not working and needed to end immediately. In his speech that the president's shutdown strategy was not working and needed to end immediately. In his speech, the president, who has made the $5.7 billion in funding for his wall a non-negotiable condition for ending the shutdown, and who repeatedly rejected Democratic proposals to reopen the government while negotiations continue, ultimately did just that, restoring government to normal function for the next three weeks and promising to quickly pay back federal workers who have missed paychecks since the shutdown began.

But... If we don't get a fair deal from Congress, the government will either shut down on February 15th again, or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the Constitution of the United States to address this emergency. Democrats and Republicans will enter formal negotiations this week to see if they can find a compromise on border security funding and on what constitutes a wall, a definition that is evolving for the president himself. We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shiny sea. We never did. We never proposed that. shiny C. We never did. We never proposed that. We never wanted that because we have barriers at the border where natural structures are as good as anything that we can build. They're already there. They've been there for millions of years.

That change in language and the decision to reopen the government with no funding for the wall drew condemnation from conservatives like Ann Coulter, who many believe helped push the president into a shutdown in the first place. Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush, Coulter wrote on Twitter. As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp to ever serve as President of the United States. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.