Longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone contacted an acquaintance who was in touch with WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange during the 2016 U.S. presidential race, seeking potentially unreleased documents damaging to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Mr. Stone sought the documents in emails to radio host Randy Credico seen by the Journal, the newspaper reported, raising questions about his previous statements about the WikiLeaks website and its publication in 2016 of documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the chair of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, John Podesta.
“Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30—particularly on August 20, 2011,” Mr. Stone wrote to in an email dated Sept. 18, 2016, The Journal reported, referring to the former secretary of state by her initials.
Mr. Credico had interviewed the WikiLeaks publisher weeks earlier and was hoping to have him on his show again soon, The Journal reported. He responded to the email by pointing out that WikiLeaks had already released a cache of Democratic data on its website, prompting Mr. Stone to respond: “Why do we assume WikiLeaks has released everything they have ???”
“That batch probably coming out in the next drop…I can’t ask them favors every other day,” Mr. Credico wrote in another email, according to The Journal. “I asked one of his lawyers…they have major legal headaches riggt now..relax.”
Russian hackers sourced the documents published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election, according to U.S. intelligence officials, and federal authorities including members of the Justice Department’s special counsel office led by Robert Mueller are currently investigating the role of Russia in the race and any possible ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Mr. Stone previously claimed to be in contact with WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange during the campaign through an intermediary, but he told members of the House Intelligence Committee that he “merely wanted confirmation” from his source that the website would publish information about Mrs. Clinton, according to publicly available transcripts.
Reacting to the emails, California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House panel, told the Journal that “it would mean that his testimony was either deliberately incomplete or deliberately false.”
Mr. Stone told The Journal on Thursday that his testimony before the House committee was “complete and accurate.”
“There is no evidence that I participated in or have any knowledge of any collusion with the Russians to effect the 2016 elections. I had no advance notice of the content, source or timing of the Wikileaks publication of any material,” Mr. Stone previously told The Washington Times. “Nor did I receive any allegedly hacked material from any source and pass them on to Donald Trump or the Trump campaign. Nor did I know in advance that Wikileaks had obtained John Podesta’s emails and would publish them nor did I predict that his e-mail would be published.”
Mr. Stone served as an early adviser to Mr. Trump’s election campaign but left in 2015 prior to sending the emails cited by The Journal.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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