398
As Josh Marshall says this is fire not smoke.
It’s been clear for a few months that Mueller is very interested in Stone who has been predicting that he may well get indicted since April, 2018. Then in October, Jerome Corsi, Stone’s co-conspirator in Comeygate (Chapter A) has been singing the same sad song for the last month. Now he’s revealed that he’s actually working on a plea deal with the Special Counsel:
“Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to Corsi and another person with knowledge of the talks.”
“The talks with Corsi — an associate of GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller’s team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisers were linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails in 2016, a key part of his long-running inquiry.”
“The deal is not yet complete and could still be derailed. Last week, Corsi said his efforts to cooperate with prosecutors had broken down and that he expected to be indicted on a charge of allegedly lying. He described feeling under enormous pressure from Mueller and assured his supporters that he remains supportive of the president.”
In a webcast and interviews, Corsi said he had spoken to prosecutors for 40 hours and feared that he could spend much of the remainder of his life in prison.
After two months of interviews, Corsi, 72, said he felt his brain was “mush.”
“Trying to explain yourself to these people is impossible. . . . I guess I couldn’t tell the special prosecutor what he wanted to hear,” he added.
So basically, Corsi had a deal but Mueller didn’t feel as if he kept up his side of the bargain.
At that time, he gave no indication that he intended to plead guilty, instead casting himself as an unfairly targeted victim of a Mueller campaign against Trump.
“Then Corsi abruptly fell silent, canceling a scheduled Nov. 13 interview with NBC. Gray, his attorney, told NBC that he had just spoken to the special counsel’s office and had advised Corsi to cancel.”
“Since then, Corsi has resumed talks with Mueller’s team about a possible deal that could result in him agreeing to plead guilty in exchange for leniency, according to the person familiar with the situation.”
Speaking on a Buffalo radio station Friday, Stone said Corsi is under pressure “to say what the special counsel wants him to say, rather than the truth.”
Marcy Wheeler suggests Corsi may be angling for a Trump pardon.
UPDATE: Of course he would go on to leak the draft indictment and that could explain part of why he wasn’t charged-one of many important questions for Mueller.
End of UPDATE
Stone for his part claims to know nothing about Corsi working on a deal with Mueller.
Back to the Washington Post:
Stone said in a statement that he was not aware of any plea discussions involving Corsi, describing him as an investigative journalist “whose activities I would think would largely be covered under the First Amendment.”
But is Corsi an investigate journalist or is he an political opposition researcher?
Corsi provided research on Democratic figures during the campaign to Stone, a longtime Trump adviser. For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone’s activities in an effort to determine whether he coordinated with WikiLeaks. Stone and WikiLeaks have repeatedly denied any such coordination.”
That certainly sounds like an opposition researcher.
On the one hand Stone plays the same game Trump does complaining that Corsi’s being treated ‘so unfairly.’
“I feel badly for Jerry Corsi. He looks like he’s been squeezed,” Stone said on the WBEN radio program hosted by his longtime ally and friend Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign communications official.
UPDATE 2.0:
https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/corsi-explains-suspected-lynchpin-of-mueller-russia-collusion-investigation
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-corsi/corsi-person-1-in-roger-stone-indictment-says-hes-done-nothing-wrong-idUSKCN1PJ28C
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/27/jerome-corsi-roger-stone-mueller-investigation-1128618
Marcy Wheeler on Roger Stone’s new issue of his book
“I Can’t Be Seen Taking Credit for HIS Victory:” The Purpose of Roger Stone’s Paperback
But in the next breath he throws Corsi under the bus saying he’s not so credible:
Stone questioned the credibility of Corsi as a witness, calling him an “eccentric guy. He doesn’t believe the moon landing happened, for example. He believes it was staged.”
“I don’t know how credible a witness he would be,” Stone added.
Exactly-how credible is someone who’s a friend of and provides opposition research to Roger Stone?
Stone then asserts that Corsi has his own relationship to ‘President Trump’-presumably to suggest that Corsi sent whatever information he had directly to Trump.
Stone has said that Corsi also has a relationship with President Trump, built on their shared interest in the falsehood that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.”
And Stone and Corsi both believe in the falsehood that LBJ killed JFK. Interesting that Stone is now pretending he never claimed Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.
FN: Stone and Corsi books.
Corsi’s lawyer has argued it the opposite way. Back to Marcy Wheeler:
And Corsi’s own lawyer has suggested Corsi declined to take part in criminal activity that Stone may have invited him to be a part of.
Gray said he was confident that Corsi has done nothing wrong. “Jerry Corsi made decisions that he would not take actions that would give him criminal liability,” he added, declining to elaborate.
Asked if Corsi had opportunities to take such actions, Gray said, “I wouldn’t say he was offered those opportunities. I would say he had communications with Roger Stone. We’ll supply those communications and be cooperative. My client didn’t act further that would give rise to any criminal liability.”
No honor among Trump’s co-conspirators…
Clearly Mueller’s focus is on wether Corsi was in fact Stone’s back channel he talked and tweeted so much about in the Summer and Fall of the 2016 campaign.
Stone has claimed that Randy Credico was his back channel-though Marcy Wheeler herself is dismissive of that idea.
Certainly there is no evidence that demonstrates Credico himself told Stone anything about Podesta being the subject of Wikileaks coming email dump. Though, as we saw in (Chapter B) the recently reported texts between Credico and Stone make it clear that Credico was representing himself as having inside information about the emails-Hillary is done now pretend you don’t know me Credico texted him on October 1, 2016. On October 2, Stone tweeted the same thing: Hillary is done. Was he repeating Credico in this tweet?
It’s also notable that Credico at the time was actually living with and very close to a man who just happened to be the father of Julian Assange’s lawyer.
Yup-coincidences take a lot of planning.
But clearly Corsi was the one who telegraphed the leak of Podesta’s emails. As we see in (Chapter B) he claims that he just made a lucky guess in predicting Podesta. Back to the Washington Post:
“Jerry Corsi never told me that John Podesta’s emails had been stolen and would be published,” he said on WBEN.
On Aug. 21, 2016, Stone tweeted that “it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” He has insisted his tweet had nothing to do with any plan by WikiLeaks and that it was based on research Corsi had provided to him about work Podesta and his lobbyist brother Tony had done involving Russia.
“He simply told me of their Russian business deals in banking gas and uranium,” Stone said in a text message this week to The Post. “There was NO WikiLeaks context.”
UPDATE for more on this canard-ie lie-see Chapter A
This is not what he told the House Intelligence Committee in September, 2017:
Stone told the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017 that his Podesta tweet was “based on a comprehensive, early August opposition research briefing provided to me by investigative journalist, Dr. Jerome Corsi, which I then asked him to memorialize in a memo that he sent me on August 31st, all of which was culled from public records. There was no need to have John Podesta’s email to learn that he and his presidential candidate were in bed with the clique around Putin.”
Right-Hillary Clinton was ‘in bed with Putin’ because John Podesta’s brother-not him-was also a partner in Manafort’s-and Stone’s-own sleazy consulting firm.
Stone has since said that the information in the Aug. 31 memo — which he received 10 days after his now-infamous tweet — was similar to information that Corsi had relayed to him verbally before the tweet.”
As for Corsi he says it was just a lucky guess:
“The prediction that Corsi said he made that Assange would publish Podesta’s emails was correct: On Oct. 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began publishing 50,000 emails stolen from Podesta’s account, releasing them in batches of a few thousand at a time each day leading up to the November election.”
Corsi told the Daily Caller that he based his prediction on public sources of information, including the fact that Podesta was not among the Democrats whose emails had been published by WikiLeaks when the group released Democratic National Committee correspondence in July.
He said he concluded that WikiLeaks must be holding back Podesta’s correspondence to make a bigger splash later in the campaign.
But how would he know that Wikileaks had Podesta’s emails at all?
UPDATE: As noted in Chapter A this is reminiscent of what Corsi did with Huma Abedin’s emails after the came out-though the notion that he didn’t have information from Assange here is false.
Podesta did not work for the DNC and the emails were stolen from his private Gmail account, not an address linked to the Democratic Party.
Not so surprisingly, Mueller’s team didn’t’ believe Corsi’s explanation.
Corsi told the Daily Caller that Mueller’s prosecutors did not believe his explanation and pressed him to name his WikiLeaks source. They were especially interested, he said, in a trip he took to Italy with his wife that he said coincided with his realization about the Podesta emails.
“They said they wanted me to tell the truth, but when I did tell the truth they told me it was preposterous, and they wouldn’t accept it,” Corsi said.
The idea that this was just a lucky guess seems about as believable as Rob Goldstone’s claim that he actually made up the ‘Crown Prosecutor’ as a version of Trump’s own ‘truthful hyperbole’ and that it emerged that Natalia Vesselnitskaya actually did speak with Russia’s top prosecutor about the research she used at the meeting was just a pure coincidence. That one must have taken a whole lot of planning.
CF:
Did Jerome Corsi (or Roger Stone) Get Podesta Emails from Guccifer 2.0?
Stone says Corsi was linked to Peter Smith’s buddies.
Marcy Wheeler-find link- has more on what Coris and Stone may have known about the coming leak of Podesta’s emails-it seems that they did anticipate emails about Podesta’s role in the company Joule Unlimited:
Is THIS the link?
“Basically, over the course of August, several key events happened: Stone first started publicly claiming foreknowledge of what WikiLeaks would drop, tried to launch a counterattack against public reporting on Paul Manafort’s sleazy ties to Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian oligarchs, and then warned that it would soon be John Podesta’s time on the barrel. Those events came amidst two separate oppo research efforts: An early one initiated by Bannon and (Clinton Cash author) Peter Schweizer that accused Hillary of corrupt ties to Russia, largely through John Podesta’s role a company called Joule Unlimited.”
So this claim of Hillary’s ‘corrupt Russian ties’ based on Podesta’s past history with Joule Unlimited originated with Bannon and Schweitzer’s Clinton Cash.
“And then a later one (starting at 39), written by Corsi, trying to impugn Hillary because her campaign manager’s brother was so corrupt he had worked with Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and at Manafort’s instructions not properly declared the work. Stone seems to have wanted to conflate those two efforts, in part to suggest his August 21 tweet (and an August 15 one that may end up being just as interesting) referred to both brothers, not just John, and therefore not the earlier oppo effort.”
“What’s interesting, however, is that while Corsi claims Stone was quite interested in the Bannon/Schweizer effort and that his own report arose out of it, Stone was virtually silent about it up until the Podesta emails started dropping in October. In fact, the day before the Podesta emails dropped, Corsi renewed the focus on Joule, which in turn teed up a Stone report and then a Corsi one integrating but not linking emails released by WikiLeaks, followed four days later by a Corsi report actually showing how those WikiLeaks emails supported claims he and especially Stone had already made. While it is true that Stone doesn’t integrate evidence from the WikiLeaks emails until they were released, the analysis of those emails (Corsi’s) took place days after his first report on them.”
So this could show both foreknowledge on the part of Corsi/Stone and coordination-which is what the Mueller investigation is looking for-‘coordination’ rather than ‘collusion.’
UPDATE: Actually it turns out Mueller was looking for ‘conspiracy with the Russian government’ a very narrow search one that nevertheless found much evidence for.
CF
The Universe of Hacked and Leaked Emails from 2016: Podesta Emails
One possible scenario to explain all that (and this is all speculative) is that Roger Stone, back when he was trying to find a way to respond to stories about Manafort, asked someone with access to the files Russia either already had or planned to share with WikiLeaks, and learned there were files in the dump pertaining to the attack already launched, focused on Joule. That is, Stone may have figured out that those emails were coming in August, and therefore held his focus on Joule until they were eventually released. In this scenario, then, when Stone predicted it would soon be Podesta’s time on the barrel, he may have been anticipating that the upcoming WikiLeaks dump would substantiate an attack his cronies had already made.
We know, for example, that in September 2016 he asked Randy Credico for help learning what Clinton emails on Libya — which Stone appears to have known or believed were in Assange’s hands but that had yet to be released — said. So it is consistent to assume that Stone tried to learn and plan for what was coming at other times. And his October 13 Joule attack is, as far as I’m aware, the one for which there is the most public evidence that he did plan the later attack.
As Wheeler says, it’s rather arresting how far back this attempt to tie Clinton to Russia went.
But all that raises another question I’ve been pondering: Why did Bannon and Schweizer already have an attack claiming Hillary had corrupt ties to Russia, ready to release on August 1? The timing was key: the report came out just over a week after the WikiLeaks DNC dump made the question of Russia’s tampering to defeat Hillary really pressing, and just days after Trump asked Russia to go find more Hillary emails. It also came as Manafort would have had the first rumors that stories of his own Russian ties would break.
The question is all the more important given that this was not a last minute report.
“Indeed, according to the footnotes, the report was started in March 2016, even before John Podesta was hacked. The Obama White House fact sheet on that Administration’s attempted reset with Russia was accessed March 14, days before Podesta was hacked, and again on March 18, the day before Podesta was spearphished.”
“All of this suggests that, by May 10, 2016, the report was just sitting there at Rebekah Mercer funded Government Accountability Institute, waiting for the right opportunity to accuse Hillary of ties to Russia; virtually the entire report was done before Democrats confirmed they had been hacked by Russia, and all the research was done before WikiLeaks dumped the DNC emails.”
Ms. Mercer and a person close to her had a brief conversation regarding Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails in June 2016, a month after Mr. Cruz had dropped out of the race, the person said. The person said they discussed whether it would make sense to try to access and release those emails, but ultimately decided that looking for them would create “major legal liabilities” and would be a “terrible idea.”
This also touches on Mercer’s attempts to work with Wikileaks:
“REBEKAH MERCER KEPT TRYING TO WORK WITH WIKILEAKS ON OPTIMIZING EMAILS”
Indeed she kept trying to optimize them or should we say coordinate?
So Mercer was funding this attack long before her and her father started supporting Trump. Of course, as leaked Wikileaks communications show (Chapter C) Wikileaks also didn’t just support Trump but the GOP-DM messages show that as far back as 2014 Assange wanted the GOP to win the 2016 elections and as this book documents in (Chapter D) Assange had already stated his support for ‘the Rand Paul libertarian wing of the Republican party’ in 2013.
“That Rebekah Mercer was funding this attack (one that started long before the Mercers started backing Trump) is all the more interesting given several different efforts she or her employee made to reach out to WikiLeaks. There’s Alexander Nix’s offer to help WikiLeaks organize emails we weren’t supposed to know about yet in June 2016.
Mr. Nix responded that he had reached out to Mr. Assange two months earlier—in June 2016, before Cambridge Analytica had started working for the Trump campaign—to ask him to share Clinton-related emails so the company could aid in disseminating them, the person familiar with the email exchange said. He said Mr. Assange had turned him down. That outreach and subsequent rejection was confirmed by Mr. Assange earlier this week on Twitter.
Also in June, Ms. Mercer had a discussion about accessing Hillary’s deleted emails.
Ms. Mercer and a person close to her had a brief conversation regarding Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails in June 2016, a month after Mr. Cruz had dropped out of the race, the person said. The person said they discussed whether it would make sense to try to access and release those emails, but ultimately decided that looking for them would create “major legal liabilities” and would be a “terrible idea.”
Then, again in August, Mercer asked Nix — or the GAI, the same outlet that did the Hillary Russia attack — about helping WikiLeaks with emails.
On Aug. 26, 2016, roughly a month after Mr. Trump formally became the Republican nominee, Ms. Mercer passed along to Mr. Nix an email she had received from a person she met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), whose presidential campaign she had initially supported during the GOP primaries, the person familiar with the exchange said. The email’s author suggested to Ms. Mercer that the Trump campaign or an allied super PAC ought to better index the WikiLeaks emails to make them more searchable, the person said.
Ms. Mercer forwarded the email to Mr. Nix, whose firm had started working for the Trump campaign in July 2016 after previously working for the Cruz campaign, according to the person. In the email, Ms. Mercer asked Mr. Nix whether the suggested organization of the emails was something Cambridge Analytica or the Government Accountability Institute—a conservative nonprofit that focuses on investigative research—could do, the person said. Ms. Mercer has sat on the board of the institute, which has received funding from her family.
Clearly, Mercer was thinking a lot about how to optimize the emails Russia had stolen.
Optimize. Or collude.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/fire-not-smoke
UPDATE: No honor among co-conspirators-things later turned rather nasty between Stone and Corsi
UPDATE 2.0:
https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/corsi-explains-suspected-lynchpin-of-mueller-russia-collusion-investigation
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-corsi/corsi-person-1-in-roger-stone-indictment-says-hes-done-nothing-wrong-idUSKCN1PJ28C
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/27/jerome-corsi-roger-stone-mueller-investigation-1128618
Suffice it to say that what Stone is now saying about Corsi is a far cry from what he said in the original preface to his book.
Marcy Wheeler on Roger Stone’s new issue of his book
That is, if Stone’s efforts to maximize the value of Russia’s active measures campaign really were key, then the last thing he’d want to do is release a paperback crowing about that.
Of course, because of the boneheaded efforts of his lawyers, his concerns about doing so are now public.
If Stone didn’t want to minimize his dirty tricks it would be a first-as we’ve seen he argued over who gets credit for Brooks Brothers, for bringing the Clinton accusers to the debate after Hollywood Access-and in the first edition of this book he boasted of the role he and Corsi played in getting Huma Abedin’s emails into the FBI’s hands-and on Weiner’s laptop.