The White House said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone, a longtime associate of President Trump, in the Russia probe are unrelated to the president or the White House, Reuters reports.
Said press secretary Sarah Sanders: “The charges brought against Mr. Stone have nothing to do with the president, has nothing to do with White House. The president did nothing wrong.”
Former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon is the “high-ranking Trump campaign official” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone, CNBC reports.
Bannon is the Trump campaign official who in October 2016 reached out to Stone “about the status of future releases by Organization 1,” which clearly refers to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
“Roger Stone’s indictment by the Mueller investigation reveals a series of alleged conversations between the Republican operative and Trump campaign officials regarding the timing and content of Wikileaks’ email dumps during the 2016 campaign — which Stone allegedly lied about under oath,” Axios reports.
“Multiple Trump campaign officials — although we don’t know who — were allegedly told by Stone ahead of time about WikiLeaks releases considered damaging to Hillary Clinton. One campaign official was even instructed to reach out to Stone about future releases following the DNC email release in July of 2016.”
First Read: “Why does Stone talking to the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks matter? Because Trump and his campaign seized on the WikiLeaks disclosures during the last month of the 2016 election, with Trump mentioning the word ‘WikiLeaks’ some 140 times in that final month, per NBC’s count.”
“The caution here: Mueller’s indictment clearly shows collusion/cooperation between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. What we don’t know is if Stone and the Trump campaign knew that WikiLeaks might have been a front for Russian intelligence — since it was Russian intelligence that hacked the Democratic emails. Stone has denied being involved in any collusion.”
“Roger Stone, a longtime informal adviser to President Trump who has spent decades plying the dark arts of scandal-mongering and dirty tricks to help influence American political campaigns, was indicted Friday in the special counsel investigation,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering.”
The indictment also says Stone “was contacted by senior Trump campaign officials to inquire about future releases” of stolen information by Wikileaks.
After one WikiLeaks release, the indictment says an associate of a high-ranking Trump campaign official texted Stone “well done.”
CNN: “The indictment’s wording does not say who on the campaign knew about Stone’s quest, but makes clear it was multiple people.”
CNN has the view from Roger Stone’s arrest in Florida this morning:
A number of law enforcement vehicles with silent sirens flashing pulled in front of Stone’s home on a darkened Ft. Lauderdale street just after 6 a.m. Friday morning.
About a dozen officers with heavy weapons and tactical vests fanned out across Stone’s lawn.
Law enforcement shined a flashlight into Stone’s front door before one officer rapped against it, shouting, “FBI. Open the door.”
Seconds later, the agent shouted, “FBI. Warrant.”
A floor light turned on and moments later, Stone appeared in the front entryway.
A new CBS News poll finds that 50% of Americans now think the special counsel’s Russia investigation is justified, while 45% think it is politically motivated.
“As recently as November, a slight majority of Americans felt the investigation was politically motivated. This shift in opinion is due to more Democrats calling it justified. Eighty-three percent of Republicans continue to say the Russia investigation is politically motivated, the same as in November.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team “has expressed interest in the Trump campaign’s relationship with the National Rifle Association during the 2016 campaign,” CNN reports.
Said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg: “When I was interviewed by the special counsel’s office, I was asked about the Trump campaign and our dealings with the NRA.”
“The special counsel’s team was curious to learn more about how Donald Trump and his operatives first formed a relationship with the NRA and how Trump wound up speaking at the group’s annual meeting in 2015, just months before announcing his presidential bid.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Yahoo News that Republicans in the House of Representatives may have worked to obstruct justice in the ongoing Russia probe by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Said Whitehouse: “Whether it amounts to criminal conduct, clearly the efforts of the House Republicans were designed to impede and throw sticks into the spokes of the Mueller investigation.”
He added that GOP members of Congress “potentially even tried to communicate to potential witnesses or jurors their alternative narratives and thereby influence the proceedings.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) stated in divorce proceedings that she turned down the opportunity to be Donald Trump’s vice-president because she believed her husband Gail “hated any successes I have,” the Guardian reports.
In an affidavit filed as part of divorce proceedings with her husband of 26 years, Ernst states: “In the summer of 2016, I was interviewed by Candidate Trump to be vice president of the United States. I turned Candidate Trump down, knowing it wasn’t the right thing for me or my family. I continued to make sacrifices and not soar higher out of concern for Gail and our family.”
She added: “He hated any successes I had and would belittle me and get angry any time I achieved a goal.”
Rudy Giuliani walked back his statement from yesterday suggesting President Trump continued discussions on a Trump Tower Moscow deal through the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reports.
Said Giuliani: “My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow ‘project’ were hypothetical and not based on conversations with the President. My comments did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any such discussions. The point is that the proposal was in the earliest stage and did not advance beyond a free non-binding letter of intent.”
The New York Times explains why Rudy Giuliani’s admission that President Trump was pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the presidential campaign is a big deal.
“The new timetable means that Mr. Trump was seeking a deal at the time he was calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration. He was seeking a deal when he gave interviews questioning the legitimacy of NATO, a favorite talking point of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. And he was seeking a deal when, in July 2016, he called on Russia to release hacked Democratic emails that Mr. Putin’s government was rumored at the time to have stolen.”
As First Read notes, throughout the campaign Trump denied he had any business relationships in Russia: “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia. I don’t have any jobs in Russia. I’m all over the world but we’re not involved in Russia.”
Rudy Giuliani told NBC News that plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow remained an “active proposal” as late as November of 2016, leaving open the possibility that Trump’s orbit continued to pursue the business deal up until the presidential election, months later than previously known.
Said Giuliani: “It’s our understanding that it, that talks went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them… but the president can remember having conversations with Michael Cohen about it… Probably up to, could be up to as far as October, November.”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told NBC News that this was “big news.”
Said Warner: “The Republican nominee was actively trying to do business in Moscow… and if those negotiations were ongoing up until the election, I think that’s a relevant fact for voters … it’s remarkable we are two years after the fact and just discovering it today.”
“Rudy Giuliani sent an unmistakable message Wednesday night: It’s everyone for themselves,” Politico reports.
“During a CNN interview, President Trump’s personal lawyer blurted out that the only person he knows about who didn’t collude with Russia was Trump himself. Although Giuliani tried to walk back his comments on Thursday, the remarks put the sprawling web of people caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe on notice: no one is coming to save you.”
Rudy Giuliani “backtracked on Thursday from a surprising assertion he made a night earlier that left open the possibility that Trump campaign aides might have coordinated with Russia’s election interference in 2016,” the New York Times reports.
Said Giuliani: “There was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form. Likewise, I have no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign.”
He added: “The only knowledge I have in this regard is the collusion of the Clinton campaign with Russia which has so far been ignored.”
Greg Sargent: Giuliani’s absurd walk back signals serious worry about Trump’s vulnerability.
President Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney Michael Cohen paid a technology expert to rig online polls in Trump’s favor, the Wall Street Journal reports.
John Gauger, the owner of Red Finch Solutions and chief information officer at Liberty University, said Cohen offered him $50,000 to rig two online polls. Cohen handed Gauger a Walmart bag loaded with about $12,000 in cash during a 2015 meeting at Cohen’s Trump Organization office, but he never paid him the remainder of the promised $50,000.
President Trump’s legal spokesman Rudy Giuliani “appeared to grant the possibility that members of Trump’s campaign did, in fact, collude with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election campaign,” the Washington Post reports.
“And in the process, he contradicted dozens of previous denials that both the Trump team (and Trump himself) have offered.”
“In fact, the Trump team has moved the goal posts on this question no fewer than 10 times after initially denying any contact at all with ‘foreign entities.’ Trump has said dozens of times that there was ‘no collusion,’ full stop. This appears to be the first time anyone has acknowledged the possibility that someone colluded without Trump’s knowledge.”
“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign. Or between people in the campaign.”
— Rudy Giuliani, in an interview on CNN, later adding, “If the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago.”
Garrett Graff: “The pattern of his pro-Putin, pro-Russia, anti-FBI, anti-intelligence community actions are so one-sided, and the lies and obfuscation surrounding every single Russian meeting and conversation so consistent that if this president isn’t actually hiding a massive conspiracy, it means the alternative is worse: America elected a chief executive so oblivious to geopolitics, so self-centered and personally insecure, so naturally predisposed to undermine democratic institutions and coddle authoritarians, and so terrible a manager and leader that he cluelessly surrounded himself with crooks, grifters, and agents of foreign powers that he’s compromised the national security of the US government and undermined 75 years of critical foreign alliances, just to satiate his own ego.”
“In short, we’ve reached a point in the Mueller probe where there are only two scenarios left: Either the president is compromised by the Russian government and has been working covertly to cooperate with Vladimir Putin after Russia helped win him the 2016 election—or Trump will go down in history as the world’s most famous ‘useful idiot,’ as communists used to call those who could be co-opted to the cause without realizing it.”
“At least the former scenario—that the president of the United States is actively working to advance the interests of our country’s foremost, long-standing, traditional foreign adversary—would make him seem smarter and wilier. The latter scenario is simply a tragedy, or maybe a farce for everyone involved.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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