Roger Stone Is Running Out of Options
Stone, who is under investigation by Robert Mueller, says he’ll never “roll” on Trump. Is he betting on a presidential pardon, or simply taking a cue from Paul Manafort?
Abigail TracyOctober 22, 2018 1:08 pm
Mueller Investigation
Roger Stone
By Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images.
For months, Roger Stone has been predicting his indictment by Robert Mueller. “It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” he told Meet the Press in May. At least eight of his current or former associates had been “terrorized” by the special counsel’s office, he claimed. In an August e-mail to supporters, urging them to help fund his legal defense, he sounded resigned to his fate. “Robert Mueller is coming for me,” he wrote.
Stone, a longtime Republican operative who has worked with Paul Manafort and advised Donald Trump, remains a free man. But as the midterms approach and Mueller prepares to re-enter the spotlight, a flurry of activity inside the special counsel’s office suggests that Stone’s “time in the barrel,” as he memorably said of John Podesta, may finally be at hand. In recent weeks, federal prosecutors have interviewed nearly a dozen Stone associates, a number of whom have testified before a grand jury. They have also interviewed Manafort, who recently cut a plea deal with the special counsel, about his former colleague. According to multiple reports, investigators are interested in whether Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks and the Russian hacker known as “Guccifer 2.0,” who allegedly hacked the Clinton campaign, constitute a criminal conspiracy.
At issue is whether Stone or other Trump associates had prior knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans to release the thousands of e-mails obtained by the Russians, or whether they coordinated their efforts in any way. Stone, for his part, has long maintained that he knew nothing of the e-mail dumps himself, despite his August 2016 boast about communicating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his subsequent prediction that Podesta—Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager—would be their next target. When Podesta’s hacked e-mails were indeed leaked, some six weeks later, Stone immediately came under suspicion. Throughout October, the self-described “dirty trickster” continued to make predictions about future WikiLeaks e-mail dumps, hinting often at an “October surprise.”
Stone has since downplayed his ties to WikiLeaks, insisting that he never actually spoke with Assange, and that his real source was radio personality Randy Credico. The supposed prophecy regarding Podesta, Stone later claimed, was also a reference to his brother, Tony Podesta, a well-known Democratic lobbyist.
Stone’s account puts him at odds with Credico, who has denied that he acted as the intermediary between WikiLeaks and Stone. Credico allies told The Washington Post that he believes Stone has set him up as a “decoy.” Of course, both men have an incentive to blame the other. According to a person familiar with the matter, Credico has testified before a grand jury that Stone told him about his back channel to WikiLeaks. But two Stone associates, filmmaker David Lugo and attorney Tyler Nixon, said Credico has acknowledged that he was Stone’s source. In text messages Lugo provided to the Post, Credico wrote, “I knew Rodger [sic] was going to name me sooner or later and so I told you that I’m the so-called back Channel.”
The stakes are high for Stone as Mueller seeks to disentangle the conflicting claims. During his September 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Stone claimed he had “never said or written” that he had any direct communications with Assange, and that any of his communications with WikiLeaks were through Credico. Stone’s phrasing may have been deliberately unclear. But if Credico’s account is truthful, then Stone may have perjured himself.
It is a federal crime to “knowingly and willfully” provide “materially” false statements to Congress—even if one is not under oath. If Stone is determined to have misled lawmakers about his contacts with WikiLeaks and Assange, he could face up to five years in prison. And notably, Stone wouldn’t be the first individual to get saddled with this charge as part of a special-counsel investigation. John M. Poindexter, who served as the national-security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, was sentenced to prison for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, though the conviction was later overturned. More recently, Mueller has leveraged false statements by Mike Flynn, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos to gain their cooperation. If the special counsel is still working his way up the food chain, as the White House fears, then he may be seeking to flip Stone next.
Stone, for his part, has said he will never turn on Trump. “The special counsel pokes into every aspect of my social, family, personal, business, and political life, seeking something—anything—he can use to pressure me, to silence me, and to try to induce me to testify against my friend Donald Trump,” he told the Post. “This I will not do. When I say I won’t roll on the president, what I mean is I will not be forced to make up lies to bring him down.” The strength of that assertion may suggest Stone is holding open the door for a presidential pardon if things go south. Or perhaps Stone is simply taking his cue from Manafort when it comes to dealing with the special counsel, and waiting until the last moment to cave.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10 ... estigation
Mueller drills down on Roger Stone's WikiLeaks contacts
Mueller investigating Stone's WikiLeaks contacts
Washington (CNN)Special counsel Robert Mueller's scrutiny of Roger Stone includes investigating whether Stone had backchannels to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election beyond the New York radio host and political activist whom Stone claims was his primary go-between, according to people familiar with the matter.
Investigators' queries to people connected to Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, suggest Mueller's team is skeptical of Stone's explanation that Randy Credico was his main intermediary, according to people familiar with interviews conducted by investigators. The scrutiny also includes probing Stone's relationship with right-wing journalist and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi about whether he also acted as a go-between with Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a source said.
The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal previously reported about Mueller's interest in Corsi's possible interactions with WikiLeaks.
Washington Post: Special counsel examining Roger Stone's conflicting accounts of WikiLeaks ties
Additionally, investigators are looking into whether Stone shared information that he believed was from WikiLeaks with members of Trump's presidential campaign, according to a source familiar with the probe. Investigators have been provided recordings of Stone claiming he talked to Trump regularly early in the 2016 presidential campaign, CNN has learned. Later, after various document dumps from WikiLeaks, Stone claimed in separate communications he should receive credit for coordinating with the group, the source said.
The queries about whether Stone may have shared information with the Trump campaign are a strong indication that Mueller's team is still actively investigating the possibility that someone close to Trump engaged in collusion with the Russians.
"We have said over and over again that he shared nothing with the campaign because he had nothing to share," said Grant Smith, an attorney for Stone. "He received nothing from anybody. At what point does this old record get worn out from being played over and over again?"
"I never discussed WikiLeaks stuff with Trump and would never have said I should get credit for coordinating with WikiLeaks since I did no such thing," Stone said.
A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment. A lawyer for the President declined to comment.
In an interview with the Associated Press last week, Trump denied that he knew about WikiLeaks before the shadowy website started releasing hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The President said, "When WikiLeaks came out ... never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it. When WikiLeaks came out, all I was just saying is, 'Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff.'"
Stone's associates questioned on contacts
While Stone said he has not been contacted by Mueller's team, many of his associates have been called in for interviews or testimony before the grand jury. Witnesses said the main focus of their interviews has been Stone's contact with WikiLeaks and Assange. Some of them are still actively cooperating with Mueller's team and have handed over troves of communications involving Stone, according to sources familiar with the matter.
A key area of inquiry is whether Stone actually received information from WikiLeaks and who helped facilitate that information-sharing. Investigators' questions to Corsi about his communications with WikiLeaks and Stone indicate they are trying to determine whether Stone had other go-betweens with WikiLeaks.
Corsi has participated in hours of interviews with Mueller's team and testified before the grand jury, according to sources familiar with the situation. Corsi's lawyer declined to comment.
2016 Presidential Campaign Hacking Fast Facts
At one point, Corsi appeared to provide cover for one of Stone's most inflammatory tweets: His summer 2016 claim that "it will soon (be) the Podesta's time in the barrel." It was later seen as an indication Stone may have had advance warning that then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked emails would soon be public.
In March 2017, Corsi -- who was then the Washington bureau chief for InfoWars -- wrote, "Having reviewed my records, I am now confident that I am the source behind Stone's tweet." In his article, Corsi claimed his own research inspired Stone's Twitter missive. Stone has since said he was referring to the business dealings of both John Podesta and his brother, DC lobbyist Tony Podesta.
Mueller's quiet period has not been very quiet
Stone has suggested that the special counsel may be interested in Corsi's own relationship with Trump rather than Corsi's interactions with Stone. But a person familiar with the situation said investigators were mainly interested in Corsi's interactions with Stone and whether he acted as Stone's backchannel.
Stone told CNN, "Corsi told me he was never in communication with WikiLeaks or Assange, I believe him and know of no evidence to the contrary."
Corsi's own attorney denied to CNN back in September that his client was in touch with Assange, WikiLeaks or Guciffer 2.0, US intelligence has determined that the online persona Guccifer 2.0 was a front for Russian intelligence and Russian officers who hacked Democrats and passed the stolen material on to WikiLeaks during the campaign.
Stone's own words fuel questions
Stone has been under scrutiny for his contact with Guccifer 2.0 and comments he made in 2016 that appeared to suggest he had advance knowledge of material from WikiLeaks before it was released.
"I actually have communicated with Assange," Stone said in a speech in Florida on August 8, 2016. "I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there's no telling what the October surprise may be."
The Atlantic reported Stone and WikiLeaks exchanged direct messages on Twitter, but both have denied that they were in direct contact about the release of Clinton emails.
Stone told CNN that "although my claims were dramatized for effect before a partisan audience, they were not fabricated and I clarified in a dozen interviews that my 'communication' with Assange had been through a third party." He added, "I had no advance knowledge of the source or content of the material WikiLeaks would ultimately release."
Roger Stone aide hopes Kavanaugh will support his case against Mueller
Meanwhile, Stone's claim that he used Credico as that third party has been met with inconsistencies as well as denials from Credico. The radio host, who is open about his friendship with Assange, has denied funneling information back-and-forth to Assange on Stone's behalf.
"I am a decoy, the patsy to divert attention," Credico told CNN. "Or he just didn't have one (an intermediary) and his ego was too big to admit that."
Stone also suggested to reporters and associates that he had other links to WikiLeaks. A source familiar with the matter said Credico told the grand jury that Stone mentioned having another link to WikiLeaks.
"I did tell Credico I had an additional source who also told me the material was coming and that the revelations would address the Clinton Foundation," Stone told CNN.
When he appeared before the House Intelligence Committee last year, Stone testified that he had no direct contact with Assange during the election and instead relied on a go-between.
In a letter following his committee appearance, Stone's lawyer identified his intermediary as Credico.
Special counsel's office has radio interviews between Roger Stone and alleged WikiLeaks 'back channel'
"Mr. Stone noticed Credico had traveled to London on at least two occasions and conducted two landmark interviews with Julian Assange on WBAI," Stone's lawyer wrote, referring to the New York progressive radio station where Credico worked.
But Stone's timeline doesn't align with public events.
Stone claims that Credico's interviews with Assange inspired Stone to use Credico as a backchannel, according to the letter from Stone's attorney. But Credico didn't interview Assange until August 25, 2016, weeks after Stone started touting an intermediary. Stone now says that he knew Credico had ties to WikiLeaks even before the Assange interview.
As first reported by CNN, in multiple radio interviews between Credico and Stone -- now in the special counsel's possession -- Credico also asked Stone about the backchannel and expressed doubt that any such backchannel exists.
In yet another discrepancy, the letter from Stone's lawyer to the House committee also insists that Stone had only ever asked Credico to confirm information that Assange had shared publicly in media interviews or via social media.
Roger Stone built a 'dirty trickster' image. Now Robert Mueller might build a case on it.
But on September 18, 2016, Stone asked Credico to ferret out other information from Assange that Stone believed would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. "Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30...," a portion of the email from Stone to Credico says about Clinton emails from 2011.
"My testimony before the House Intelligence Committee was entirely truthful and there is no credible evidence to the contrary," Stone told CNN, maintaining that Credico was his primary backchannel and that he has associates who will corroborate his account.
"From the beginning, I wanted to protect the identity of Credico, because I knew that his support for Julian Assange and the journalistic independence of WikiLeaks would not be popular in the progressive left circles where he made a living," Stone said. "I turned over Randy Credico's name to the House Intelligence Committee only reluctantly."
Stone's lawyer said there were "no inconsistencies in what we sent to the House."
While Stone has proclaimed his innocence, he has said he believes Mueller's team could bring charges against him to try to force him to cooperate against Trump.
Prosecutors may also be confronted with the possibility that Stone, a braggadocios self-proclaimed "dirty trickster," did not actually have access to a legitimate backchannel providing him information from WikiLeaks.
"He may have had somebody, I don't know," said Credico. "Who can tell with this guy?"
UPDATE: This story has been updated to add more detail about previous reporting from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/politics ... index.html
DETOUR: ROGER STONE’S EPICALLY SHITTY EXPLANATION FOR HIS PODESTA TWEET
October 22, 2018/1 Comment/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
I need to take another detour from my series on the universe of the known hacked and leaked emails from 2016.
While working on the Podesta email post, my treatment of how epically shitty Stone’s explanation for his August 21, 2016 tweet boasting that “it would soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel” grew so big it has become its own post.
For reasons I laid out in this post, the public record is not all that convincing that Stone did have foreknowledge of the Podesta dump. Both in August, when he started talking about foreknowledge of a Hillary release, and in October, when he promised it on a specific day (that turned out to be wrong), he predicted WikiLeaks would dump Hillary’s deleted emails, not Podesta’s emails.
But Stone’s explanation for the tweet is epically shitty and increasingly makes me think he not only knew that Podesta’s emails would be released, but may have seen some of them in advance.
Effectively, Stone claimed to the House Intelligence Committee that his Podesta comment referred to a report Jerome Corsi did for him between August 14 and 31 2016 (which doesn’t identifiably show up in Stone’s political expenditures in this period).My Tweet of August 21, 2016, in which I said, “Trust me, it will soon be the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary” Must be examined in context. I posted this at a time that my boyhood friend and colleague, Paul Manafort, had just resigned from the Trump campaign over allegations regarding his business activities in Ukraine. I thought it manifestly unfair that John Podesta not be held to the same standard. Note, that my Tweet of August 21, 2016, makes no mention, whatsoever, of Mr. Podesta’s email, but does accurately predict that the Podesta brothers’ business activities in Russia with the oligarchs around Putin, their uranium deal, their bank deal, and their Gazprom deal, would come under public scrutiny. Podesta’s activities were later reported by media outlets as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. My extensive knowledge of the Podesta brothers’ business dealings in Russia was based on The Panama Papers, which were released in early 2016, which revealed that the Podesta brothers had extensive business dealings in Russia. The Tweet is also 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.
The claim is, particularly knowing what we know about efforts Paul Manafort was making to hide his own corruption by asking Tony Podesta to avoid legally mandated reporting, … interesting. Particularly given the way this timeline overlaps with some other events, notably Manafort’s increasingly desperate efforts to stave off bankruptcy even while working for Trump for “free.” There are also some oddities about how the timing evolved from those August “research” documents and later October publications. I’ll hit both those timing issues in my Podesta email post.
For now, consider what Corsi claimed back in March 2017, the first attempt to explain Stone’s tweet. In his version, Stone’s tweet was about four different reports.
Corsi first said that he started researching the Podestas and Russia in response to reading a July 31, 2016 Government Accountability Institute report, one not mentioned in Stone’s explanation.On July 31, 2016, the New York Post reported that Peter Schweizer’s Washington-based Government Accountability Institute had published a report entitled, “From Russia with Money: Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset, and Cronyism.”
That report detailed cash payments from Russia to the Clintons via the Clinton Foundation which included a Putin-connected Russian government fund that transferred $35 million to a small company that included Podesta and several senior Russian officials on its executive board.
“Russian government officials and American corporations participated in the technology transfer project overseen by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation,” the report noted in the executive summary.
“John Podesta failed to reveal, as required by law on his federal financial disclosures, his membership on the board of this offshore company,” the executive summary continued. “Podesta also headed up a think tank which wrote favorably about the Russian reset while apparently receiving millions from Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs via an offshore LLC.”
Reading Schweizer’s report, I began conducting extensive research into Secretary Clinton’s “reset” policy with Russia, Podesta’s membership on the board of Joule Global Holdings, N.V. – a shell company in the Netherlands that Russians close to Putin used to launder money – as well as Podesta’s ties to a foundation run by one of the investors in Joule Energy, Hans-Jorg Wyss, a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation.
Corsi appears to be playing some temporal games here. While he points to the NY Post’s August 1 report on the report, by URL, the public version of it appears to have been released on August 12. That’s not a huge deal (it’s not like Corsi couldn’t get Schweizer’s rat-fuckery directly, though he pointedly doesn’t cite it), but it does suggest he’s making efforts to play with the August timeline to date it to the first days of August, which is particularly interesting given that Stone claimed Corsi’s research took place in “early” August.
Having claimed this report got him interested in substantiating a tie between Hillary and Russia, Corsi then shifts, saying that the August 14 NYT story on Manafort’s secret ledgers did (which I would call “mid-August,” not early August). He claimed his goal in response to the NYT reporting — it’s not clear whether this started on August 1 or August 14 — was just to publicize the already-written GAI report.On Aug. 14, 2016, the New York Times reported that a secret ledger in Ukraine listed cash payments for Paul Manafort, a consultant to the Ukraine’s former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
When this article was published, I suggested to Roger Stone that the attack over Manafort’s ties to Russia needed to be countered.
My plan was to publicize the Government Accountability Institute’s report, “From Russia With Money,” that documented how Putin paid substantial sums of money to both Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.
Putin must have wanted Hillary to win in 2016, if only because Russian under-the-table cash payments to the Clintons and to Podesta would have made blackmailing her as president easy.
On Aug. 14, 2016, I began researching for Roger Stone a memo that I entitled “Podesta.”
So Corsi suggests the report he did for Stone was based on the GAI one.
Except Corsi’s report (starting at PDF 39, copies of the report are at this point just reproductions without metadata to track when they were written, but Corsi claims to have handed over ways for Mueller to track such things when he interviewed with Mueller’s team and then appeared before the grand jury in September) doesn’t deal with the GAI report at all. Instead, it is a direct response to the NYT Manafort report, claiming that the NYT reporting (the stuff that has since been confirmed by all of Manafort’s guilty pleas) was not substantiated. It then makes a key logical move, admitting that his report is an attempt to undermine the claim that Russia’s close ties to Manafort had some relation to the hack-and-leak.From there, the Democratic Party narrative continues to suggest Manafort’s close relationship to the Kremlin allowed him to position the Trump campaign to receive a dump of hacked emails that embarrassed the Clinton campaign by exposing the efforts Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as chairman of the DNC, took to rig the primaries for Hillary, to the distinct disadvantage of challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The entire Democratic Party narrative is thrown into disarray if it turns out the Podesta brothers, via the Podesta Group, have tighter and more easily documentable financial ties to Russia, involving far greater numbers than have ever been suggested to tie Manafort to Russia via Ukraine.
This is a key distinction. While the report definitely responds to the burgeoning scandal about Manafort’s ties to Russian oligarchs, Corsi admits that this report is about undercutting the claim that Russia would have reason to target Hillary in a hack-and-leak effort. So yeah, it’s about Stone’s “boyhood friend and colleague” (who at the time was setting off on a crime spree to hide his Russian ties), but it’s also about his longtime buddy Donald Trump, too.
From there the Corsi report focuses on the Podesta Group, on Uranium One, on Clinton’s ties to Fethulla Gulen (whom Mike Flynn was moving towards on kidnapping at the time), as if any of that suggests closer ties to Russia than Manafort has. Virtually the only claim about John Podesta (as opposed to Tony) is that he had ties to Hillary’s Foundation.
The idea behind Corsi’s story, I suppose, is that if Corsi started writing this report on August 14, then when Podesta tweeted on August 21, it would reflect a draft of the report that bears the final date of August 31. There’s no public record to support that chronology, though.
From there, Corsi notes that he and Podesta returned to the subject of the GAI report — Podesta’s ties with Joule — in October.On October 6, 2016, I published in WND.com the first of a series of articles detailing Putin’s financial ties to Clinton and Podesta, based largely on the research contained in the Government Accountability Institute’s report, “From Russia With Money.”
On Oct. 13, 2016, Stone published on his website an article entitled, “Russian Mafia money laundering, the Clinton Foundation and John Podesta.”
So thus far, Corsi argues that the progression goes from an August 1 GAI Report, to … something … to his research starting on August 14 about entirely unrelated allegations about the Podestas, back to both he and Stone writing on Joule in October.
In his description of the October pieces, Corsi claims — citing selectively — that Stone’s Joule piece relied on his and (he seems to claim, but this is nonsense) his private research report.A comparison of the two articles will show the extent to which Stone incorporated my research into his analysis.
Though he cites Stone’s denials of advance knowledge that WikiLeaks would dump the Podesta emails, Corsi doesn’t cite this passage in Stone’s October 13 piece.Wikileaks emails tie John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, into the money-laundering network with the confirmation Podesta had exercised 75,000 shares out of 100,000 previously undisclosed stock options he was secretly issued by Joule Unlimited, a U.S. corporation that ties back to Vekselberg connected Joule Global Stichting in the Netherlands – a shady entity identified in the Panama Papers as an offshore money-laundering client of the notorious Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
As a clear indication of guilty conscience, the Wikileaks Podesta file further documents that Podesta made a serious effort to keep the transaction from coming to light as evidenced by his decision to transfer 75,000 common shares of Joule Unlimited to Leonidio LLC, another shady shell corporation – this one listed in Salt Lake City at the home apartment of the gentlemen who registered the company.
Stone mentions — but does not link to — some of the WikiLeaks files he’s discussing. It is true that two Podesta emails released two days earlier on October 11 (December 31, 2013 resignation letter, January 7, 2014 severance letters) relate to the stuff Stone mentions and have some of the same numbers. They certainly don’t substantiate Stone’s claim about mob ties and shell corporations. Plus, two of the Joule documents that might actually pertain to Stone’s claims weren’t released until October 31 and November 1.
That at least suggests that Stone may have had those WikiLeaks emails earlier — and it may suggest he had “WikiLeaks documents” that never got published, which he ironically would have referenced in a piece purporting to prove he didn’t have advance knowledge of the release.
Stone also claims further research reflects an unsubstantiated further tie with (Trump inauguration donor) Viktor Vekselberg, one he didn’t repeat when he revived the post to implicate Michael Cohen last May.Further research has documented that Viktor Vekselberg arranged for two transfers of unknown amounts to a private Clinton Foundation account in the Bank of America, with the funds passing though a pass-through account at Deutsche Bank and Trust Company Americas in New York City – with the first transfer made on Feb. 10, 2015, and the second on March 15, 2016.
I’m not actually sure what to make of Stone’s post. I have yet to chase down where all these claims come from (if not from Stone’s ripe imagination).
But even aside from these three unsubstantiated claims, I know this.
Corsi originally claimed that all four reports — the August 1 GAI report, his own August 14-31 private report to Stone, his own revival of the GAI report the day before the Podesta emails started coming out on October 7, and then Stone’s own piece after some WikiLeaks documents came out that sort of related to his arguments but not entirely — were part of the same effort.
That’s not right. His own report for Stone is the outlier.
While it’s unsurprising that Manafort’s “boyhood friend” might solicit a report both to protect that boyhood friend and his longtime political mentee, Donald Trump, that report was part of a separate effort than the GAI research — which Stone would ultimately claim without proof WikiLeaks releases supported. It’s unclear which of the three things is most damning: the Stone report which claimed to use WikiLeaks research to elaborate on the GAI research, the report attempting to disprove true facts about Manafort’s ties to Russia, or the tweet.
But they don’t explain each other. And inserted into the timeline — as I’ll do — they become even more problematic.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/22/d ... sta-tweet/