Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates testified in court Tuesday that Donald Trump did in fact discuss WikiLeaks with his longtime political adviser, Roger Stone, during the 2016 campaign.
Roger Stone trial testimony casts doubt on Trump’s answers to Mueller
Trump said he did not recall discussing WikiLeaks with Stone. Rick Gates testified that it happened.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
That’s a big deal because in sworn written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump claimed he couldn’t recall doing any such thing. “I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with him,” Trump wrote. “Nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.”
Yet Gates, a longtime associate of Paul Manafort who struck a plea deal with Mueller’s team last year, told a very different story in court Tuesday.
Going back as far as April 2016, Gates said, Stone told him that information would be released by WikiLeaks that could be helpful to Trump’s campaign. He reiterated this the following month. All this was before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated publicly on June 12, 2016, that he had pending releases related to Hillary Clinton.
Gates said that he and then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort were initially skeptical about the quality of Stone’s information — particularly when months passed without any new releases showing up. But then, on July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee — emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers.
After that, Gates testified, the top levels of the Trump campaign were very interested in what Stone knew about WikiLeaks. For instance, Gates said Manafort asked him to follow up with Stone to try to learn more about WikiLeaks’s plans. And Gates said that Manafort indicated he would update others on the campaign, “including the candidate” — that is, Donald Trump.
Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, shortly after the DNC email releases began, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that he could not hear exactly what was said on the call but that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.”
Under questioning by Stone’s defense attorneys, Gates said that Stone had never predicted what was specifically coming from WikiLeaks (that is, that Assange had emails from the DNC and John Podesta). But, Gates said, he interpreted Stone’s statements to mean that Stone had inside information.
Gates’s testimony conflicts with Trump’s answers to Mueller
We should keep what was revealed at this trial in perspective: Mueller — who would have already known the information Gates just testified to publicly when he wrote his final report — did not find any criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and WikiLeaks.
Still, President Trump said in a sworn statement to Mueller that he couldn’t recall Roger Stone telling him anything about WikiLeaks — and Gates now says in his own sworn testimony that that’s not true. Here were Trump’s answers, submitted to Mueller’s team and published in the Mueller report:
Now, both Gates and former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon have testified at this trial that, over months, Stone suggested repeatedly that he had inside information on WikiLeaks’s plans.
Gates went further by saying Stone talked about this with Trump himself, and, separately, that Manafort planned to update Trump on what Stone was saying.
Trump is unlikely to face any legal jeopardy over this, though, for several reasons:
- There’s no record of what Stone told Trump on their phone call, and Gates himself admits he couldn’t hear it.
- In Trump’s answer, he used the phrase that he does not “recall” these discussions about WikiLeaks — he didn’t outright claim they didn’t happen.
- Gates is the only known witness here, so it’s his word against everyone else.
- And, again, Mueller knew all this at the time of writing the report and evidently took no further action.
The big question avoided by the trial: Did Stone even know anything?
Stone’s trial, which will likely be sent to the jury for a verdict on Wednesday, is focused on whether he lied to and tried to obstruct the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference by misleading them about his communications and documents regarding WikiLeaks.
That is: He’s been charged over the attempted cover-up, not for anything he actually did during the 2016 campaign.
But that leaves open one important question: What did Stone know (and do) during the 2016 campaign regarding WikiLeaks, exactly?
Stone’s defenders have said that, in fact, Stone had no intermediary — that he knew nothing at all about WikiLeaks beyond what the group had said publicly. That is: that Stone was just bluffing and making insinuations to try and hype up his own importance.
The prosecution, meanwhile, has chosen to avoid answering this question, likely because what actually happened is difficult to prove. But prosecutors are pointing to emails Stone sent to conservative author Jerome Corsi in July 2016, telling Corsi to “get to Assange,” and that an associate of theirs, Ted Malloch, “should see Assange” — and to this response from Corsi in early August.
“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging... Time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”
There, Corsi is certainly claiming to have gotten word on Assange’s plans. And there is an interesting mention of “Podesta” — the focus of the October 2016 email dumps — there, though Corsi does not go so far as to say that the dumps would be Podesta’s emails. Still, the government has not established whether Corsi did in fact get inside information or established who he might have gotten that information from.
It is true, though, that within days of Corsi’s email, Stone began publicly proclaiming that he had inside information about Assange’s plans — first saying he’d communicated with Assange and then claiming their contacts had been through an intermediary.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have presented a plethora of evidence that, when the House Intelligence Committee started asking questions about all this in 2017, Stone went to great lengths to mislead them — by trying to hide Corsi’s role and claim all his information on WikiLeaks came from radio host Randy Credico. (This seems to be false, as Credico’s contacts with Assange began weeks after Stone began speaking of an intermediary.)
That is, appropriately, what prosecutors have focused on: the lies to Congress. But they haven’t done much to clear up whether anything of significance actually happened between Stone and WikiLeaks in 2016.
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