This post showed that the SSCI Report ignored a lot of evidence (laid out in the affidavits) that Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone had specific details — possibly even the John Podesta emails themselves — pertaining to Joule Holdings, which they tried to use to claim he was as corrupt as (!!!) Paul Manafort. This post showed how, rather than actually explaining what the investigation learned about whether, how, and why Stone optimized the release of the Podesta files, the Mueller Report instead gave us a comedy routine starring Jerome Corsi.
Both public reports, then, presented the question, what did the candidate’s rat-fucker know and when did he know it, exclusively in terms of what Stone knew about the Podesta release. Indeed, the SSCI Report treats this as a question exclusively about what Stone knew of WikiLeaks’ plans.
The Committee could not reliably trace the provision of non-public information from WikiLeaks to Stone, and as a result. could not evaluate the full scope of Stone’s non-public knowledge of WikiLeaks’s activities.
The investigation, however, examined evidence Stone knew what was coming much earlier.
Rick Gates testified at Stone’s trial, for example, that Stone was predicting new releases in April and May of 2016. A previously redacted passage from the Mueller Report echoes that testimony.
In debriefings with the Office, former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates said that, before Assange’s June 12 announcement, Gates and Stone had a phone conversation in which Stone said something “big” was coming and had to do with a leak of information. Stone also said to Gates that he thought Assange had Clinton emails.
SSCI reasonably reads those claims to relate to the uproar over Hillary’s “missing” State Department emails.
(U) In the spring of 2016, the Trump Campaign’s opposition research team primarily focused on Clinton’s “missing” emails, and financial contributions to the Clinton Foundation. 1437
1437 (U) FBI, FD-302, Gates 4/10/2018. The Committee assesses that, at this time, the references to Clinton’s “emails” reflected a focus on allegedly missing or deleted.emails from Clinton’s personal server during her tenure as Secretary of State.
But that’s not the only proof that Stone had advance knowledge earlier than August 2016.
There’s also the testimony from Stone aide Andrew Miller, testimony pursued for an entire year and the last bit of work completed by the Mueller team. Miller was subpoenaed for information about what he learned while scheduling Stone’s time at the RNC, the days before the DNC emails dropped. While Miller was subpoenaed for Stone’s trial and kept in DC for days awaiting possible testimony, he never did testify, so we don’t know what he might have said.
Still, Miller’s testimony might reveal that Stone learned of the impending DNC release, by WikiLeaks, days before it happened, as testimony from Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort supports.
All of those earlier claims, however, are presented in terms of what Stone knew about WikiLeaks’ plans. The affidavits tell a very different, albeit inconclusive story.
The FBI believed in 2018 that Stone had foreknowledge of Russia’s plans.
Two affidavits obtained in summer 2018 reveal that FBI had reason to believe that Stone was Googling the names of Russia’s personas, dcleaks and Guccifer 2.0, before they had been publicly unveiled. One of those affidavits described searches occurring starting on May 17, 2016.
93. During the course of its investigation, the FBI has also identified a series of searches that appear to relate to the personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, which predate the public unveiling of those two personas. In particular, between May 17, 2016, and June 15, 2016 (prior to the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog), records from Google show that searches were conducted for the terms “dcleaks,” “guccifer,” and ”guccifer june,” from IP addresses within one of two ranges: 172.56.26.0/24, 107.77.216.0/24.3 These IP ranges are assigned to T-Mobile USA, Inc., and AT&T Mobility LLC, respectively, and, according to Google, the searches were all conducted from Florida. On or about June 13, 2018, this Court issued a search warrant for information associated with these searches and, in particular, for the full search histories associated with the CookieIDs that conducted the search. 4 As set forth in the affidavit submitted in support of that search warrant, IP logs obtained from Twitter showed that STONE used multiple IP addresses within the ranges 172.56.26.0/24 and 107.77.216.0/24 to log into his Twitter account @RogerJStoneJr. A Facebook account controlled by STONE also used an IP address within the range 172.56.26.0/24 on or about June 13, 2016, to purchase a Facebook advertisement.
Another affidavit more specifically focused on searches on Guccifer (but not, at least by this description, Guccifer 2.0) on June 15, 2016, before the WordPress site for Guccifer 2.0 was unveiled.
22. During the course of its investigation, the FBI has identified a series of searches that appear to relate to the persona Guccifer 2.0, which predate the public unveiling of that persona. In particular, on or about June 15, 2016 (prior to the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog), records from Google show that searches were conducted for the terms “guccifer” and “guccifer june,” from an IP address within the range 107. 77 .216.0/24. 1 This IP range is assigned to AT&T Mobility LLC, and, according to Google, the searches were all conducted from Florida.
Without seeing the FBI’s forensics, there might be explanations for both these searches. Some journalists, for example, got advance or private alerts on some of this activity, and searches on “Guccifer” in 2016 might be focused on Marcel Lazar, the hacker who first used the moniker Guccifer, who was sentenced in that period.
But in July and August 2018, just as the Mueller team was beginning to pursue the obstruction charges against Stone that focused everyone’s attention on how Stone learned that WikiLeaks was going to release stolen Podesta emails, the FBI had, in hand, data that strongly suggested that Stone, virtually alone in the country, had non-public information about the Russian hack-and-leak campaign in advance.
They believed he had it in May, while Russian hackers were still in the process of stealing the DNC emails.
If FBI were to — if they did — validate those searches (particularly the May search on dcleaks), it would provide independent evidence making it clear Stone’s claims of foreknowledge to Gates weren’t just confused boasts about Hillary’s missing State emails, as the SSCI Report concludes, but instead knowledge of the Russian operation akin to that George Papadopoulos obtained.
If the FBI had proof that Stone knew of the hack-and-leak while the Russians continued hacking, then the drama over whether Randy Credico or Jerome Corsi was Stone’s source would just be theater. Corsi’s August 2, 2016 boasting of foreknowledge of the schedule of upcoming WikiLeaks leaks would be just a distraction.
Roger Stone spoke to Donald Trump at least 13 times in May 2016, a month when (the FBI suspected) the rat-fucker had foreknowledge of the Russian theft of Democratic emails. The Watergate investigation, with far more authority and a successful subpoena of the President, never proved that Richard Nixon had foreknowledge of that burglary. Here, though, the FBI got far closer to that proof.
The movie Rashomon demonstrated that any given narrative tells just one version of events, but that by listening to all available narratives, you might identify gaps and biases that get you closer to the truth.
I’m hoping that principle works even for squalid stories like the investigation into Roger Stone’s cheating in the 2016 election. This series will examine the differences between four stories about Roger Stone’s actions in 2016:
- The Mueller Report
- The Stone prosecution
- The SSCI Report
- The affidavits from the investigation
As I noted in the introductory post (which lays out how I generally understand the story each tells), each story has real gaps in one or more of these areas:
- While the Mueller Report made it clear Trump’s pardon dangles to keep details of his conversations with Roger Stone secret amounted to obstruction, it didn’t tell just just how many conversations they had
- Rather than telling us whether, how, and why Roger Stone optimized the release of John Podesta’s emails on October 7, 2016, the Mueller Report instead gave us Jerome Corsi slapstick
- Just one story presents the significant amounts of evidence suggesting that on August 14, 2016, when he started a file called “Podesta,” Jerome Corsi had or knew the contents of the Podesta files that would become public on October 11, 2016
- The later stories focus on Podesta, rather than the evidence that Stone learned of the hack-and-leak while the burglary was still ongoing
- Stone pitched both Manafort and Bannon on a way to win ugly–but none of the Stone stories tell us what that was
- Trolling for Russia
- The “highest levels of government” attempt to shut down an investigation into Julian Assange
- Guccifer 2.0 as go-between
My hope is that by identifying these gaps and unpacking what they might say about the choices made in crafting each of these stories, we can get a better understanding of what actually happened — both in 2016 and in the investigations. The gaps will serve as a framework for this series.