Recently released FBI documents show that jailed Trump ally Roger Stone told Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that he was working to help Assange’s legal problems by “address[ing] the issues at the highest level of Government.”
The documents, which include affidavits that the bureau submitted in order to obtain a search warrant for Roger Stone, were released after the Associated Press brought a court case.
The new information sheds more light on Stone’s relationship with Assange. In a conversation just after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, Stone told told Assange that he would “bring down the entire house of cards” if prosecutors went after him.
Assange is charged with a number of federal crimes, including violating the Espionage Act. In 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo called Wikileaks a “hostile intelligence service” and said, “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
In a Twitter direct message, Assange told Stone of his legal woes, “Between CIA and DOJ they’re doing quite a lot. On the DOJ side that’s coming most strongly from those obsessed with taking down Trump trying to squeeze us into a deal.”
The Trump ally responded that he was working to “address the issues at the highest level of Government.”
In February, Stone was sentenced to just over three years in prison for lying to Congress.
President Trump immediately threw his support behind the political operative, saying that Hillary Clinton and James Comey lied to Congress.
“They say Roger Stone lied to Congress.” @CNN OH, I see, but so did Comey (and he also leaked classified information, for which almost everyone, other than Crooked Hillary Clinton, goes to jail for a long time), and so did Andy McCabe, who also lied to the FBI! FAIRNESS?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2020
Stone told the Associated Press, “There is, to this day, no evidence that I had or knew about the source or content of the Wikileaks disclosures prior to their public release.”
Trump’s former senior advisor Steve Bannon testified in Stone’s trial that, although the Trump campaign had no “official” access to Assange, “Roger would be considered if we needed an access point.”