After two years of denying any contacts with Russians, epic rat-fucker Roger Stone has now willingly disclosed one to the WaPo, revealing details about how a Russian approached Michael Caputo’s business partner, offering dirt on Hillary, which led Stone to accept a meeting with the guy. Here’s what a rat-fucker limited hang-out looks like:
One day in late May 2016, Roger Stone — the political dark sorcerer and longtime confidant of Donald Trump — slipped into his Jaguar and headed out to meet a man with a Make America Great Again hat and a viscous Russian accent.
The man, who called himself Henry Greenberg, offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent in the upcoming presidential election, according to Stone who spoke about the previously unreported incident in interviews with The Washington Post. Greenberg, who did not reveal the information he claimed to possess, wanted Trump to pay $2 million for the political dirt, Stone said.
“You don’t understand Donald Trump,” Stone recalled saying before rejecting the offer at a restaurant in the Russian-expat magnet of Sunny Isles, Fla. “He doesn’t pay for anything.”
Stone is disclosing this damning story now for two reasons: First, because he has discovered (surely tipped by someone) that “Greenberg,” whose real last name appears to be Oknyansky, worked as an FBI informant for years (apparently after being flipped in immigration custody) [Update: Caputo, who claims to have IDed this guy using his open source defense fund, says his real name is Gennadiy Vasilievich Vostretsov]. So it feeds the narrative that the Deep State is out to get Trump.
“If you believe that [Greenberg] took time off from his long career as an FBI informant to reach out to us in his spare time, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you,” Caputo said in an interview.
In a separate interview, Stone said: “I didn’t realize it was an FBI sting operation at the time, but it sure looks like one now.”
[snip]
Between 2008 and 2012, the records show, he repeatedly was extended permission to enter the United States under a so-called “significant public benefit parole.” The documents list an FBI agent as a contact person. The agent declined to comment.
Immigration lawyer David Leopold, former president of American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the documents described an immigration history generally consistent with Greenberg’s claims that he had been allowed to enter the United States to assist law enforcement.
In a 2015 court declaration, Greenberg — using the last name Oknyansky — said he’d been giving information to the FBI since returning to Russia from the United States in 2000.
They’re also raising it because Caputo was asked about it in his interview with the Mueller team on May 2 and are now both in the process of “correcting” their sworn testimony to HPSCI.
Stone and Caputo said in separate interviews that they also did not disclose the Greenberg meeting during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence because they had forgotten about an incident that Stone calls unimportant “due diligence” that would have been “political malpractice” not to explore.
Caputo said that he was asked during a session with the committee in July whether he’d ever been offered information about the Clinton campaign by a Russian, and he either answered “no” or that he could not recall.
However, Stone and Caputo said their memories were refreshed by text messages that Caputo said he no longer has in his possession but was shown during a May 2 interview.
By revealing that Mueller caught Caputo and Stone dealing in dirt with Russians, they reveal a certain detail to other co-conspirators: probably, that Mueller has obtained the contents of Roger Stone’s phone. As a reminder, on March 9, the FBI obtained the cloud-stored contents of 5 AT&T phones (and probably at least as many Verizon ones), at least one but not all of which were Paul Manafort’s. There’s a lot of reason to believe that at least one of the phones obtained was Stone’s.
An earlier filing explained that the second, AT&T, affidavit was obtained on March 9 and it covers “ongoing investigations that are not the subject of either of the current prosecutions involving Manafort.”
On April 4, 2018, the government produced in redacted form, and for the first time, an affidavit supporting a search warrant that had been obtained on March 9, 2018. That affidavit likewise contains redactions—albeit more substantial ones—relating to ongoing investigations that are not the subject of either of the current prosecutions involving Manafort.
As I believe others pointed out at the time, this would put it just a few weeks after Rick Gates pled on February 23, and so might reflect information obtained with his cooperation.
In her ruling, ABJ cited the last week’s hearing, suggesting that the phones still redacted in the affidavit materials might not be Manafort’s.
THE COURT: What if — I think one of them is about phone information. What if the redacted phones are not his phone?
MR. WESTLING: I don’t have a problem with that. I think we’re talking about things that relate to this defendant in this case.
Since just before this phone data was obtained, Mueller’s team has focused closely on Roger Stone, starting with the Sam Nunberg meltdown on March 5, including a retracted claim that Trump knew of the June 9 meeting the week beforehand (there’s a phone call Don Jr placed on June 6 that several committees think may have been to Trump, something Mueller presumably knows). Ted Malloch was stopped at the border and interviewed (and had his phone seized) on March 30, and scheduled for a since aborted grand jury appearance on April 13. Stone assistants John Sullivan and Jason Kakanis were subpoenaed earlier in May. Of particularly interest, Michael Caputo was interviewed about meetings he and Stone had with Gates before and during the campaign.
And Stone, by all appearances, still has the text exchange with Caputo to share with the WaPo. Which means Mueller has a whole slew of other text exchanges that Stone is not revealing.
We can be virtually certain, too, that Stone is offering just a limited version of the story, as he has done over and over again. Of note: Stone doesn’t claim he said to Oknyansky that he wasn’t interested in the information; rather, he only claims that Trump wouldn’t pay $2 million for it. By the end of the summer someone else — Peter Smith — was offering money for dirt on Hillary. And the Clinton Foundation was a key focus of Stone’s; he raised it 8 times on Twitter between that meeting at the election.
Now, as I said, the reason we’re learning about this particular lie from Caputo and Stone is because it feeds a certain narrative, that the FBI was seeking to set up the Trump campaign. That makes zero sense, given that even accepting the outreach from a Russian would have triggered attention from the FBI, and it’s clear FBI just got this information recently (probably, as I’ve noted, on March 9). Remember, too, the FBI didn’t formally learn that the Russians were targeting the Democrats, to the extent they did (and the Russians targeted Rubio and Graham as well) until June. So there’s no reason the FBI would have used a Russian to deal dirt in May. In other words, Caputo and Stone’s story makes zero sense.
But it is notable that Russians and their partners have used so many former informants in their outreach to Trump’s team. In addition to Oknyansky (whom the Russians would have known by the networks he helped expose), there’s Felix Sater (whose role as an informant was already known), who pitched both a Tower deal and “peace” in Ukraine. And while it hasn’t been confirmed, George Nader would not be a free man right now if he hadn’t traded cooperation for freedom, in light of his serial child pornography violations.
Of course, the Trump team hasn’t said a word about Nader and Sater being FBI informants infiltrating their campaign, perhaps because Mueller had them cooperating before this strategy got rolled out.
I have long said that one of the easiest ways to avoid network analysis scrutiny the US is known to do is to become (or remain) an informant. Both David Headley and Tamerlan Tsarnaev appear to have evaded scrutiny that way, and even Omar Mateen may have gotten less scrutiny because his father was an informant. There’s lots of reason to believe that gets your communication channels pulled from the network mapping programs, for two reasons: first, because informants need to be deconflicted (meaning you need to make sure the DEA doesn’t arrest someone who’s working for the FBI), and because if they remain in the network mapping pool, you’ll soon have half the FBI two degrees from drug lords and terrorists and therefore subject to NSA’s analytical tradecraft.
If I know that, Russia knows that (and there’s good reason to believe Russia has exploited that in the past). Moreover, the FBI has been hacked itself in recent years, multiple times. If data on the FBI’s own networks is available, it’d make it even easier for Russia to identify people it could use as outreach to the Trump campaign.
In other words, it’s possible, if not likely, we’ll see more former FBI assets networked into efforts to compromise the Trump campaign. Because that would be the best way to avoid scrutiny.