WikiLeaks rebuffed President Trump’s former campaign adviser Roger Stone this week as he comes under fire for allegations made prior to last year’s election involving his purported ties to the antisecrecy organization and its editor, Julian Assange.
Neither WikiLeaks nor its editor spoke with the Republican strategist during last year’s race, a representative for WikiLeaks told CNN, contradicting Mr. Stone’s earlier claim of maintaining “back-channel communication” with Mr. Assange.
“No communications, no channel,” the unidentified representative wrote in an email, CNN reported Monday.
“Stone is playing slovenly Democrat-aligned journalists like a fiddle, brilliantly inserting himself, as is his habit, to raise his profile and market his books,” the representative added. “He is entirely delighted with inviting scrutiny because of course, he is no one who knows nothing about anything and was pushed out of the Trump team a long time ago for just this type of opportunism.”
Mr. Stone’s purported ties to WikiLeaks have faced heightened scrutiny in recent days as the House, Senate and FBI each conduct investigations pertaining to the 2016 U.S. presidential race and Russia, particularly regarding potential ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Moscow.
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in last year’s White House race by ordering an influence campaign intended to hinder Mr. Trump’s opponent, former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, using WikiLeaks and other conduits to publish hacked emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
“I actually have communicated with Assange,” Mr. Stone boasted in August amid WikiLeaks’ publication of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
Mr. Stone later downplayed the degree of contact, and claimed in October to have “a back-channel communication” with Mr. Assange through a “good mutual friend.” He’s since admitted to communicating privately with a persona intimately implicated in the DNC hack, however, spurring members of Congress to demand details about the degree of Mr. Stone’s exchanges with individuals involved in the alleged Russian influence campaign.
“Since I never communicated with WikiLeaks, I guess I must be innocent of charges I knew about the hacking of Podesta’s email (speculation and conjecture) and the timing or scope of their subsequent disclosures. So I am clairvoyant or just a good guesser,” Mr. Stone told CNN on Monday.
The White House and Kremlin have denied involvement in the DNC and Podesta hacks.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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