Jerome Corsi, a far-right writer linked to President Trump and Roger Stone, is in talks with special counsel Robert Mueller over a possible plea deal.
The negotiations regarding a guilty plea in exchange for leniency, however, could still unravel, the Washington Post reported Friday, as Mueller’s office continues to investigate whether there were any connections between WikiLeaks and Trump associates ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Discussion of a plea deal, which Corsi confirmed to the Associated Press, follows Corsi saying on his radio show this month that he suspected Mueller would indict him for lying to prosecutors or the grand jury as part of the ongoing federal Russia probe. He also said he feared spending the rest of his life in prison.
Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief of Infowars who had direct access to Trump during the 2016 campaign, has spoken to investigators for about 40 hours and appeared before the grand jury twice since being subpoenaed in August.
Mueller’s team has reportedly been looking into whether Corsi had a source who tipped him off that WikiLeaks had emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s then-campaign chairman John Podesta before their staggered release to the public from October 2016. The 50,000 messages, from Podesta’s personal Gmail address, were allegedly first obtained by a group connected to Russian intelligence.
Corsi told the Daily Caller in November that he had said to acquaintances, including Stone, that he believed WikiLeaks would publish emails damaging to Clinton’s campaign ahead of the 2016 election, but that he had made that prediction based on publicly available information. He told the outlet that Mueller’s prosecutors did not seem to accept his explanation. Stone has denied speaking to Corsi about Podesta’s emails.
Stone, a Republican political operative, is also reportedly of interest to Mueller’s inquiry after appearing to allude to a WikiLeaks dump of Podesta’s emails in an Aug. 21 tweet. The self-described political trickster said the missive was predicated on Corsi’s research into work that Podesta and the lobbying firm he founded with his brother, Tony, did involving Russia. During the campaign Stone indicated he knew Assange and WikiLeaks’ plans to publish the emails.
However, Stone and WikiLeaks have denied any collaboration, and Stone has stressed that any comments of his suggesting otherwise were exaggerated.
Corsi, who has indicated he still supports Trump, famously wrote a book in 2011 claiming that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. Obama was born in Hawaii.
