Today Roger Stone has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering in the Russia/Mueller case. This, of course, has thrown Donald Trump in a twitter tizzy as he whines and complains about the “unfairness” over his longest political advisor being prosecuted for denying that he was in communication with Russian Intelligence (Guccifer 2.0), Wikileaks and also with the Trump campaign sharing information back and forth between both camps.
Robert Mueller’s report declared that no one in the “Trump campaign coordinated with the Russia campaign effort” but that’s only true because Roger Stone wasn’t technically part of his campaign. He had informed the campaign through contacts with links to RT that Wikileaks planned to release emails from John Podesta’s account months before it happened, then when the WaPo questioned the campaign about the Access Hollywood tape, they contacted Stone who reached out to Wikileaks and had the Podesta emails released just 30 minutes after the WaPo report was posted.
On October 7, 2016, The Washington Postpublished the“Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasts about groping women, dealing a major blow to the Trump campaign just a month before the election. Twenty-nine minutes after the tape was published, WikiLeaks began posting Podesta’s stolen emails online. WikiLeaks continued to post leaked Podesta emails throughout October 2016; in a concerning twist of events, Russian news outlet RT seemed to know about these leaks before they happened. On both October 13 and October 22, 2016, RT tweeted about a new batch of Podesta emails 30 minutes before WikiLeaks announced their release.
Longtime Trump associate Roger Stone also seemed to foreshadow these leaks, tweeting“it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel” in August 2016. Although Stone initially denied having any contact with Wikileaks, he later revealed that he communicated with WikiLeaks through an intermediary. Stone did not reveal whether he talked with this intermediary about the Podesta hack, and he reiterated his denial of any “advance knowledge of the plan by WikiLeaks to publish [Podesta’s] hacked emails.”
Stone was lying. He knew all about the Podesta hack, he specifically requested that Wikileaks begin releasing their hacked emails at a strategic moment when it would help Trump the most and do the most damage to Clinton’s campaign. That is “coordination.” That is collusion. That is a conspiracy.