Special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into President Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone after he wrote in a 2016 email that he met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a report Monday.
Although Stone did not have an official role on Trump’s presidential campaign, newly obtained emails by the Wall Street Journal indicate he was in communication and personally met with Assange around the time WikiLeaks published emails from Democratic National Committee and other party officials to hurt Trump’s then-rival Hillary Clinton.
“I dined with Julian Assange last night,” one email between Stone and and then-adviser Sam Nunberg stated.
Stone was fairly open during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange. He told a group in Florida in August 2016 about contacts with Assange, then later tweeted impending doom for Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
In October, he said he knew of damaging material to Clinton that would soon be made public.
However, in a more recent interview, Stone said he “never dined with Assange” and defended the email as something one would have “said in jest.”
He also said it would have been physically impossible to have met with Assange, who was then in Ecuador’s London embassy, because he was flying from Los Angeles to Miami the night before the alleged dinner.
The thousands of emails hacked from Democratic officials are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have been taken with the help of Russian operatives, which is at the center of Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.
