Trump Adviser Had Twitter Contact With Figure Tied to Russians
Roger J. Stone Jr., an off-and-on adviser to President Trump for decades, has acknowledged that he had contact on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the mysterious online figure that is believed to be a front for Russian intelligence officials.
It
is the first time that someone associated with Mr. Trump has confirmed
any type of contact with Guccifer 2.0, which claimed to be a Romanian
hacker and took credit for the hacking of the Democratic National
Committee.
But
Mr. Stone insisted in an interview that the contact had been brief and
involved nothing more than the exchange of a few direct messages, well
after the party committee had been hacked. “Even if he is a Russian
agent, my cursory exchange with him happens after he releases the D.N.C.
stuff,” Mr. Stone said on Saturday. “There’s only one exchange with
him. I had no further exchanges.”
Mr.
Stone said the exchange took place after he had published an article on
Aug. 5 on the Breitbart News site about the hacking, which the American
government has tied to a Russian effort to meddle in the election.
After Guccifer 2.0 had been suspended by Twitter, Mr. Stone posted a
message against “censorship,” and he later had what he called an
“innocuous” exchange over direct message.
“You
would need a time machine in order to collude, and, as I said
yesterday, Putin has not yet perfected a time machine,” he said,
referring to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr.
Stone had exchanges about the direct messages with the website The
Smoking Gun in mid-February; at the time, he said he did not recall the
messages. On Friday, two days after the website published an article on
the messages, Mr. Stone released screen grabs from his Twitter account
to publications, including The Washington Times. It was unclear how The
Smoking Gun had become aware of the messages.
American officials have said that Mr. Stone is one of several Trump advisers under scrutiny over their ties to Russia.
In
August, Mr. Stone wrote on Twitter that John D. Podesta, Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chairman, would soon go through his “time in the
barrel.” Weeks later, WikiLeaks began publishing a trove of Mr.
Podesta’s hacked emails, the daily release of which was seen as damaging
to the campaign.
While
Mr. Stone said last summer that he had communicated with Julian
Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, he later clarified that he had been in
contact through an intermediary. WikiLeaks has said it did not receive
the email trove from the Russians
Mr.
Stone, a subject of fascination in Republican politics for decades,
parted company with the Trump campaign in the summer of 2015. He still
advises Mr. Trump at times, and shares the president’s view that
Democrats’ allegations of collusion between the campaign and Russia are a
smear.
He
denied any knowledge of what the hackers were up to before their
attacks. “This is a witch hunt,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s the worst form of
McCarthyism. Seems as if you’re not for nuclear war with the Russians
over Syria, then you must be a traitor.”
American
intelligence agencies believe that Guccifer 2.0 was an online persona
used by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, to spread
emails and other information stolen from the Democratic National
Committee.
In
an assessment of Russian election meddling released in January,
American intelligence agencies said they had “high confidence” that
Guccifer 2.0 was a persona through which Russian intelligence officials
sought “to release U.S. victim data obtained in cyberoperations publicly
and in exclusives to media outlets and related material to WikiLeaks.”
The
report, though strongly worded, offers little direct evidence, allowing
questions to fester about the precise origins of Guccifer 2.0, and what
was known by Mr. Stone and others who dealt with the hackers.
During
the campaign, Guccifer 2.0 used social media to invite individual
reporters and Republican operatives to request specific caches of
documents.
Not
long after, reports began circulating that Russia was behind the hacks,
and that the materials were being spread as part of a campaign to
undercut the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton. Still, that did not stop
journalists and Republican operatives from dealing with Guccifer 2.0,
and Mr. Stone was hardly alone in having contact with the hackers.
Source:- New york Times
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