A communications adviser to the Trump campaign, Michael Caputo, is slated to testify in a closed-door session of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections on Friday, according to Caputo’s publicist.
Caputo is well known in political circles, with work that stretches back to the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and ran the 2010 New York gubernatorial campaign for Carl Paladino, the Republican nominee.
Thursday morning, Caputo guest-hosted a radio talk show in Buffalo, New York, and interviewed Roger Stone, another Trump adviser who will also testify to the committee.
The pair talked about their own upcoming testimony, but also the week’s controversy over the emails showing Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer in an attempt to acquire damaging information against Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
“To all you ‘Resistance’ aficionados, if you want to go ahead and try to prosecute the son of the president of the United States on a misdemeanor campaign finance violation, I dare you,” Caputo said on WBEN radio.
“First of all, you have to make the case that something of value changed hands,” Stone said back to Caputo. “Clearly nothing of value changed hands,” referring to the theory some have put forward that the Trump Jr. meeting violated campaign finance laws.
Caputo also said he wasn’t sure how much value he could provide to the committee’s work.
“And so while I have a two-hour window for this hearing, I’m not quite sure how long it’s going to go because there’s really not a lot I can add.”
Caputo lived in Moscow for a time, served as an adviser to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and did pro-Putin public relations work for the Russian conglomerate Gazprom Media in the early years of the millennium.
Referencing the publicity work for Putin, Caputo recently was quoted by the Buffalo News as saying, “I’m not proud of the work today. But at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.”
A CNN report from May said Caputo had expressed a desire to testify publicly “to clear his name.”
