The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee investigating connections between Russia and associates of President Trump is “full of Schiff,” longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone said Sunday.
Stone’s quip, delivered on ABC’s “This Week,” was directed at Rep. Adam Schiff of California.
In his interview, Stone aggressively pushed back against suggestions that he served as a liaison between the Trump campaign and Russian actors, denying any such collusion.
“You have a bunch of congressmen here who I believe have defamed me,” the columnist and Trump confidant said. “I saw demagoguery, fear-mongering, red-baiting and half-truths, in many cases just flat-out lies.”
Stone specifically addressed his previous communications with the hacking entity known as “Guccifer 2,” about which Schiff had raised questions and had connected to an article penned by Stone anticipating trouble for Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Podesta’s emails later were published by WikiLeaks.
Stone said that he does not believe that Guccifer 2 is backed by Russia, that he didn’t communicate with Guccifer 2 anywhere but over Twitter, and that their engagement “most certainly does not constitute collusion.”
Nor did he ever predict that Podesta’s emails would be hacked, Stone said.
As for the intelligence community’s belief that Guccifer 2 was working on behalf of Russia, Stone discounted that conclusion based on the fact that intelligence also wrongly believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion.
Nevertheless, Stone said that he is happy to testify before Congress in a public setting.
If he and other Trump associates do so, he said, “frankly I think the whole Russian meme, which really starts as a Clinton campaign press release, is finally put to bed.”
