Late-night phone calls between President Trump and former confidant Roger Stone in 2016 are being examined by special counsel Robert Mueller as he investigates links between the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks dump of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s own presidential ambitions, according to a report.
Trump’s legal team is nervous after the president’s history of direct contact with Stone was referenced in a draft court document compiled by Mueller’s office that was revealed this week, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. The Trump Organization has additionally provided Mueller’s team with phone and contact logs, the newspaper said.
But Stone — a self-described political trickster — on Wednesday denied speaking with Trump about WikiLeaks and refused to attribute any significance to Mueller’s possessing the logs, adding that the president also called him from other people’s phones.
“Unless Mueller has tape recordings of the phone calls, what would that prove?” Stone told the Post.
Trump has denied talking to Stone, a former President Richard Nixon administration aide, about WikiLeaks, according to reports about the written responses he gave Mueller as part of the federal Russia probe last week.
The Washington Post report comes as Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist and Stone friend, told MSNBC Wednesday that he and Stone had attempted to get any emails WikiLeaks had relating to Clinton back to the Trump campaign with the intention of boosting the president’s electoral prospects.
In a separate interview on Fox News, Stone said Wednesday that it was despicable that Mueller had tried to pit Corsi and him against each other.
Corsi this week rejected a plea deal from Mueller, in which he would have pleaded guilty to one count of lying to federal investigators regarding an email titled “Get to Assange,” referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, that he received from Stone on July 25, 2016. He argues that he never intentionally misled prosecutors.
One of Mueller’s main lines of inquiry is whether or not Trump associates had notice of WikiLeaks’ releases because it is suspected the emails were stolen by a group linked to Russian intelligence. Many connected to Stone have become central to Mueller’s investigation, but Stone has yet to be contacted by the special counsel.
