Prosecutors also revealed how frequently Stone was in touch with Trump’s campaign as he bragged about having information on WikiLeaks election-year plans.
The texts and emails came cascading out on Thursday. A visceral insult, a chilling threat, a garbled reference to the mafia. And expletives, so many expletives.
Federal prosecutors unveiled a barrage of evidence against longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone on Thursday as they tried to show that Stone tried to bully an associate to stay silent when a House committee investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference came calling.
It all made for riveting courtroom drama at Stone’s trial for obstruction of Congress, lying and witness tampering as jurors heard all the juicy details from a variety of crude communications between Stone and liberal talk show host Randy Credico — the witness Stone is charged with threatening and trying to silence.
While the crass messages jolted the normally staid courtroom setting, they also illustrated the degree to which Stone was in touch with Trump’s campaign during the peak of the 2016 election, when the GOP provocateur was bragging and winking about WikiLeaks’ plans to dump emails that would roil Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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The current president was also featured again on Thursday, one day after prosecutors revealed that Trump and Stone spoke on several occasions as the longtime conservative activist worked diligently to gain information about the stolen Democratic emails and prod the pro-transparency organization WikiLeaks to release them.
Government lawyers showed jurors a chart detailing how Stone was regularly in touch with the presidential candidate and his top 2016 campaign aides at the same time the WikiLeaks document dumps rocked Clinton’s White House bid.
One colored line detailed the frequency of Stone’s contacts with Trump.
The information came via an August 2018 FBI search warrant that the government is using to showcase apparent contradictions in Stone’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee from the fall of September 2017, when the panel was chasing down various leads about the Russian hack attacks.
Stone testified he had no relevant records about that critical time period and he denied having contact with the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. But the government prosecutors argued that call logs, email exchanges and other communications show something else. During the late summer of 2016, for example Stone had two calls with Trump himself and nearly 30 calls with deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates.
Stone also was in touch with Erik Prince, an informal Trump campaign adviser, in October 2016. They discussed the WikiLeaks document dumps, according to the documents.
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Despite the profane and sometimes cruel exchanges, Credico repeatedly warned Stone that he was putting himself in legal danger by not being candid with the House committee. For months, the talk show host pleaded, unsuccessfully, with Stone to change his testimony about his intermediary to Assange. Federal prosecutors say Stone had actually been communicating about Assange with conspiracy theorist and author Jerome Corsi.
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Federal prosecutors unveiled a barrage of evidence against longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone as they tried to show that Stone tried to bully an associate into staying silent when a House committee investigating 2016 election interference came calling https://t.co/ulxqnMFy98
— POLITICO (@politico) November 7, 2019
Prosecutor in Stone case: “President Trump was more personally involved in his campaign’s effort to obtain Democratic emails stolen by Russian operatives in 2016 than was previously known, phone records introduced in federal court on Wednesday suggested.”https://t.co/XfgEbo68Q5
— Facts Do Matter (@WilDonnelly) November 7, 2019
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