Roger Stone: I would never 'bear false witness' against Trump
Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone said Sunday morning that he would never testify against President Trump in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller — because to the best of his knowledge, Trump has done nothing wrong.
George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week,” asked Stone whether he thought Trump would pardon him if he were indicted or convicted for any wrongdoing.
“Generally speaking in politics you avoid hypothetical questions. That said, there’s no circumstance under which I would testify against the president because I’d have to bear false witness against him. I’d have to make things up, and I’m not going to do that,” Stone replied.
Stone said he’d had no discussions with anyone in the White House about a potential pardon for Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, either. Stone said the only person he encouraged Trump to pardon was black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, posthumously. In the 1920s, Garvey, who was born in Jamaica, was convicted of mail fraud, imprisoned and deported from the U.S. He died in 1940.
“I’ve had no discussion regarding a pardon, and the only person I’ve pushed for a pardon for was Marcus Garvey, who I think should be pardoned posthumously,” Stone said. “I wrote the president about that.”
Mueller’s probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to tilt the 2016 presidential election in his favor picked up momentum last week. Trump’s longtime attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying about his work toward the possible construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow. A few days earlier, Mueller had accused Manafort of violating his plea deal by lying to investigators. More criminal charges are expected.
A slew of recent reports about Stone’s emails with former associate Jerome Corsi suggest that Stone could be Mueller’s next target. The emails between the two Trump allies appear to show they knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plan to publish hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. American intelligence agencies believe the emails were obtained by Russian hackers and disseminated through WikiLeaks.
Stone has been named in media reports as a suspected intermediary between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign, and emails obtained by NBC News suggest that Corsi was his go-between with WikiLeaks. Corsi has said an email to Stone in which he predicted “2 more dumps” of documents from Wikleaks founder Julian Assange were based on his intuition rather than direct information. Stone has denied having contact with WikiLeaks in the run-up to the election and says the emails have been “mischaracterized.”
“None of that is true of course, and there’s no evidence to support that supposition. It is now two years in, $30 million. I think few Americans could withstand the kind of legal proctological examination that Mr. Mueller has put me under,” Stone said.
Despite an August 2016 video showing Stone claiming to have communicated with Assange, Stone now says that no such conversation happened and that his actual source for knowing about the “bombshell” WikiLeaks planned to reveal the month before the election was actually a progressive radio host in New York.
“Where is the crime? I engaged in politics,” Stone said. “My purpose was to take a tip, which I thought to be solid, and then after that to follow the WikiLeaks Twitter feed and set a Google News alert for ‘Julian Assange’ and use Twitter to hype as much voter and media attention to the disclosures when they came as politics.”
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