Roger Stone, an ally and occasional adviser to President Trump, is refusing to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a letter sent to Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., attorney Grant J. Smith said his client will be invoking his Fifth Amendment right and neither testifying to the committee nor sharing requested documents.
“The requests, as previously stated to staff, are far too overbroad, far too overreaching, far too wide ranging both in their all-embracing list of persons to whom the request could relate with whom Mr. Stone has communicated over the past three years, and the ‘documents concerning’ imprecision of the requests,” wrote Stone’s attorney in the letter dated Monday and made public Tuesday.
Smith also noted that Stone previously testified to the House Intelligence Committee and that transcripts from that testimony will be made public in the coming weeks.
Despite a request by Stone that the transcripts be made public, they were not — and because of that, there were “a number of inaccurate leaks and speculation which disserved both my client and the public interest,” wrote Smith.
“Mr. Stone decries secrecy. He will not subject himself to the innuendo of non-public proceedings. Nor will he confirm the existence of, or produce the documents of the request, for the purpose of being used in secret proceedings,” the attorney added.
Stone has not been indicted, but he is facing mounting scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team over his possible contacts with Wikileaks during the 2016 election.
Stone appeared on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday and said there’s “no circumstance in which I would testify against the president.”
Stone has continually denied that he knew WikiLeaks was going to release hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
However, a document made public late last month shows that Mueller’s team believes conservative author and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi tipped off Stone months before the WikiLeaks release in the summer of 2016. Corsi has also said he will not cooperate with Mueller.
Trump praised Stone for refusing to testify to Mueller’s team.
“‘I will never testify against Trump.’ This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about ‘President Trump,'” Trump wrote on Twitter early Monday, adding: “”Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’”
