The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Adviser Roger Stone Indicted In Russia Probe; Trump Agrees To End The Shutdown

Episode Date: January 26, 2019

Roger Stone was arrested on Friday after being indicted on seven counts including obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements in connection with the Russian attack on the 2016 election. Plus, President Trump has endorsed a bipartisan deal that would end the 35-day partial government shutdown. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, political reporter Tim Mak, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, and White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Evelyn Espinoza-McGinnity, vacationing in San Diego, visiting my friend Carol Edelman, Tamara Keith's fifth grade teacher in Hanford, California. Oh my god. Hi, Tamara. Hey! I'm just reminding you to turn in that late homework assignment. This podcast was recorded at 4.35 p.m. on Friday, the 25th of January, the 35th day of the partial government shutdown, and possibly, possibly the last day.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Here's the show. Do you know what the homework assignment you didn't turn in was? Lord only knows. Do you have a habit of not turning in homework assignments? It was the one. She said it was the one. The one piece of homework. Oh, I'll have to call her. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. This morning, Roger Stone, Donald Trump's longtime advisor, sometimes on, sometimes off, was indicted in the Russia investigation.

I am falsely accused of making false statements during my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee. That is incorrect. And President Trump announced a plan to reopen the government. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. All right, let us start with the news about Roger Stone, which was delivered to our email inboxes just after 6 a.m. Right and early. U.S. versus Roger

Stone. He was arrested this morning by the FBI, indicted on seven counts. What are the allegations against him? Well, the seven counts are one of obstruction of an official proceeding, one count of witness tampering, and then five counts related to alleged false statements that he made to congressional investigators. At its root, what this indictment essentially alleges is that Stone was directed by Trump campaign officials to get into contact with WikiLeaks, find out what hacked Democratic emails WikiLeaks had, when they planned to release them, what their plan for all of those materials were. And it's important to remember that WikiLeaks published those hacked Democratic emails online. Those are emails that the U.S. government says were hacked by Russian operatives and shared with WikiLeaks. Let's just pull back. How big a deal is this? This is a big deal. This indictment essentially portrays Roger Stone as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks pertaining to the hacked Democratic emails that the U.S. Intelligence Committee says was hacked by Russia and shared with WikiLeaks. Roger Stone and Donald Trump have been close personal friends for nearly 40 years.

And so there's a direct personal connection, not just a political or professional connection, between Donald Trump and Roger Stone. You see through the special counsel's indictments that many of Trump's associates have been charged with lying or obstructing in some way. And the overarching question is, who are they lying for and for what general purpose? And we don't have the answer to that yet. We do not. We are certainly waiting, though. Now, it is important to say in all of this that Roger Stone is not charged with conspiring with WikiLeaks. He's not charged with conspiring with Russia. But he emerges in the story that this indictment tells as essentially an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. All right, Tim Mack, you have met Roger Stone.

Well, I've talked to him on more than one occasion. I'm the recipient, like a lot of reporters are, of his texts and his press release. He's a very eclectic guy. He's a very flamboyant man. He kind of dresses like a Batman villain would. But he's been a really important figure in politics for decades. He was involved in the Nixon campaign. He was involved in the Reagan campaign. He was involved in getting campaign finance through outside party groups. One thing that I'll add about Roger Stone's past is he, of course, was a business partner with another individual who has been tied up in the Mueller investigation, and that's Paul Manafort. They ran a lobbying shop for years in D.C. Yeah, that was a powerhouse lobbying firm that really reached its apex in the

1980s. It was called Black, Manafort, and Stone. And, you know, in 1985, he was 32 years old. He's making essentially, in today's dollars, he's a million dollars a year basically lobbying for some of the world's worst dictators. He was said to be working for African nations that had serious human rights abuse allegations against them. And that paid well for him at a time where lobbying was considered by a lot of lobbyists as being something that was kind of prestigious. You would turn your head down if you had to do something as awful as lobby for that sort of client. He also has a tattoo of Richard Nixon's face on his back. He's been very loyal to Richard Nixon.

In fact, today, when he was at the courthouse, as he was finishing off his press conference, he put out those famous V for victory, you know, Richard Nixon leaving the White House sign. He appeared to almost relish coming out of that courthouse and being surrounded by reporters and a crowd of public that also included people who were basically jeering him. People immaterial and without intent. I find it disturbing. And he really does, as people who know him have told me,

he seems to relish the fight. You know, the funny thing is people were yelling, lock him up, while he was actually giving his press conference. And there's a part of me that thinks that Roger Stone, in the back of his mind, would approve these kinds of tactics because that's exactly what he would do if his opponent were in that position. He's sometimes referred to as a dirty trickster. And he relishes in that description of him. I think one way to show exactly how he can kind of be that trickster is how he described he would cooperate with the Senate Intelligence Committee if he were asked to produce documents. I will give them the documents that they have requested, even though the request is onerous. Just to be clear, the documents that they have requested from me will fail to trailer trucks if printed out. And I know that there is no legal obligation to supply them in an electronic form.

So I may give them to the Senate committees in hard copy. Why? Because I can. OK, so let's go back to the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale after the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, this sort of raucous scene. He comes out of the courthouse and he says he will plead not guilty and that he will not turn on President Trump. There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president, nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself. I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated. We should just say what his relationship is with the president.

Well, they met in 1979. And basically, in four or five election cycles, Roger Stone has been trying to convince Donald Trump to run for president. 1987, 1999, 2011, 2015. Finally, he succeeded in 2015. And, of course, Donald Trump is president today. So they've always had this relationship. It's always been political. It's been up and down. They've definitely had their differences. But you get the sense that that relationship is based on mutual respect. And Stone worked on the Trump campaign in the early days, left around August 2015. But my understanding is he didn't stop talking like he like many people

that fall out of the Trump orbit. They don't actually leave the orbit. He remained a constant advisor informally and a very public vocal supporter of the president. And what the indictment does is paint a picture of the contacts that he had with Trump campaign officials after he had left the campaign. The indictment says that he continued to be in contact with Trump campaign officials essentially up until the election. And some of that was about what he was attempting to find out and what information he was gathering about what WikiLeaks had and when they would release them. Now, Stone, we must say, as you noted, he said he will plead not guilty. Stone has maintained publicly from the beginning that he did nothing wrong. He had heard stuff that was public.

He was just repeating what was already known elsewhere. But the indictment paints a picture of what was going on behind closed doors. So the White House and President Trump's outside lawyers and Roger Stone say there's no collusion. Does this indictment tell us anything about that? So Mueller, over the course of his investigation, has provided details of contacts that Trump campaign officials had with Russians or Russian proxies, ways that Russians themselves, Russian intelligence operatives hacked into Democratic emails. What he does with this indictment essentially is lay out the contacts that existed between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks and presents Roger Stone as the intermediary between these two. That is something that we did not have from the special counsel's office up to this point. A lot had been discussed

publicly, and now we have it in court filings. And I guess it's important to say how significant WikiLeaks was in that final month of the campaign. You know, the Access Hollywood video comes out October 7th. It is this blockbuster. It is the darkest day of the Trump campaign. Which is the same day that the director of national intelligence in the Department of Homeland Security released its report saying that Russia was indeed behind the hacks of democratic political institutions, so the Democratic National Committee, as well as John Podesta. And after that announcement from the intelligence community and an hour after the Washington Post story broke with the Access Hollywood video, WikiLeaks released its first tranche of emails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account. And we can't understate the impact of the WikiLeaks releases more broadly,

which I recall in 2016, they were weekly dumps. Every week, there'd be thousands of documents that people would go through, new information would come out, and it dominated the conversation in a way that almost nothing else in those last weeks of the campaign could or did. And one last thing, since this whole thing is like some surrealist movie, in the indictment, there is a reference to The Godfather Part 2. Part 2. Can you explain this? Well, what the indictment says is that in December of 2017, Stone told Randy Credico, one of his associates with whom he was in contact, allegedly in contact with WikiLeaks, that Credico should do a Frank Pentangeli before the House Intelligence Committee so that he did not contradict Stone's testimony to the committee.

Now, the indictment goes into who Frank Pentangeli is. Yes, he's a character from the godfather part two uh a movie that stone and apparently credico had discussed according to the indictment um who testifies before congressional committee and in the testimony in the movie claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know mr pentangeli you uh you are contradicting a sworn statement you previously made to me in sign. 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. We have a sworn affidavit. We have it. Your sworn affidavit that you murdered on the orders of Michael Corleone. Do you deny this confession? And do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial?

Look, the FBI guys, they promised me a deal. So I made up a lot of stuff about Michael Corleone because that's what they wanted. But it was all lies. Stranger than fiction. Everything. Here we are. All right. I'm going to let you two go, Ryan and Tim.

And when we come back, we have a whole new crew here to talk about plans to reopen the government finally. Hi, this is Peter Sagal. For 20 years, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me has been making fun of the news with comedians and celebrity guests. We got silly limericks. We got terrible impressions. If you think the news is a joke, wait till you hear our show. New podcast episodes are available every Saturday. And we're back. And we've got Kelsey Snell and Aisha Roscoe here with us. Hey, guys. Hey there. Hey. All right. President Trump walked into the Rose Garden this afternoon and said that a deal had been reached to open the government. I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government. Aisha, you were there. What's the deal?

So I was there. It was very cold in the Rose Garden, but I digress. You were there for a long time. It took forever for him to show up. You must have been freezing. My feet were ice blocks, but I digress. Basically what he announced was a three week reopening of the government and that during that time there would be a kind of a bipartisan conference committee between the House and the Senate that would work on trying to figure out what is going to happen when it comes to border security. Can we just be clear here? This seems like a complete and total adoption of what has been Nancy Pelosi's position for five weeks. It is 100 percent what happened here. Pelosi has been saying reopen the government. We'll talk about the Department of Homeland Security after that's done. And that's essentially what they're doing here. They even agreed that as a part of this to say that they would go to what's known as a conference committee. So people from the House and the Senate are going to go meet in a room. The people, appropriators, the people who are really good and really adept at figuring out how to spend money

are going to go into a room and talk about how to write a Department of Homeland Security spending bill, which includes presumably where the wall money would go. And they have those three weeks to work out a deal on that. The thing is, is Pelosi was asked again today about that wall funding idea. Would she support a wall? And we have a little bit of what she said. She was a little bit snarky about it. Are you no longer ruling out any money for the wall?

Wait, wait, wait. Have I not been clear on a wall? Okay. No, I have been very clear on the wall. Wait, have I not been clear on a wall? Okay. No, I have been very clear on the wall. So you notice there that she's shooting down the question, but she didn't actually answer it. The way I do understand things here is that Democrats want to have a conversation about border security in the way that they traditionally think about it, repairing existing fencing and talking about, you know, different ways to patrol the border with sensors, with drones, with more agents, and to work with the Department of Homeland

Security about what they actually say they want and need, not focusing on this wall that kind of the president created without consultation with the people who actually patrol the border. So Ayesha, do you have any idea why it was that today President Trump reversed course and decided today is the day to reopen the government? So White House officials say they've been working on a of rank and file Democrats have reached out to the administration and signal that they would be willing to provide wall funding if the government reopens. Kelsey, do you have any sense of whether these Democrats actually exist? All right. So it is possible that some of them do exist. White House is landing on something that is true, which is that it has been a lot easier for Democrats to stay united on the concept of reopening the government than it will be for them to stay united once the details of border security and immigration come to the actual debate table. They don't totally agree on all of those details. But I talk to rank and file Democrats on a daily basis.

And while some of them really are more comfortable with more enhanced protections on the border, most of them say a wall isn't part of that. So it's hard for me to see where dozens of rank and file Democrats are talking to the White House about this. Can I offer a couple of other possible pressure points that might be involved here? One, today was the day that federal workers who are caught up in this missed another paycheck. 800,000 people did not get paid today who should have gotten paid today. FBI Director Christopher Wray put out a flaming video where he talked about, not much makes me angry, but this makes me angry. You shouldn't have to be putting up with this. 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. And also, today was the day where all morning long, the indictment of Roger Stone was dominating the headlines. And then the president went to the Senate floor and went on for over an hour giving speeches about how they needed to reopen the government right now. And they were talking about a three-week spending bill, which is what they ultimately passed today. And let's not forget today with air traffic controllers, there was an issue with staffing. And so at LaGuardia Airport today, there was like a stoppage in delays with some of the flights. And that was a big deal. Yeah, it was starting to mount pretty, pretty aggressively. And we should say that this is for the president. This is a huge

moment of him caving and backing down. And it also shows a weakness now that you have Democrats in control of the House. He has real pushback. And he basically did what Democrats were saying to do weeks ago, and he got nothing. Now, conservatives who back the president are not accepting this as capitulation, rather just saying, we've got three more weeks to get the wall. Right. And the particular Mark Meadows, who runs the House Freedom Caucus, that really about 40 person group of conservatives in the House basically said that the wall is not over. And even if they don't get a wall and a spending bill, executive action is not out of the question. OK, so right now the government is not yet reopened. Is that right?

It is not at the very moment that we are speaking, but we expect that to happen fairly quickly. At this moment, the Senate has passed the short-term spending bill, and it has been sent to the House, and then it's supposed to be passed by voice vote there shortly. Voice vote, meaning unanimous consent, meaning no one's actually voting. They are just saying, yep, this is good. Let's go send it to the White House. It's a speedy way to make sure that not any single person has to put their name to supporting this. So it's kind of a it's a protection move in some ways, but it's also a quick move. And it's also something that the Senate already did. If you remember back in

December, the Senate already unanimously approved a bill to keep the government open. So this one runs until February 15th. Does this mean that we should not make any plans for Valentine's Day? Well, you can make plans for Valentine's Day, but your day after might be rough. 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. Don't drink too much champagne. Yeah, don't go too wild on Valentine's Day.

All right. Well, with that advice, that is a wrap today. Remember that you can keep up with all the latest news by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and wherever else you choose. Just search for NPR Politics on your favorite platform. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I also cover the White House. And I'm Kelsey Snell.

I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.