https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/drop-the-podesta-emails-senate-report-sure-seems-like-another-trump-russia-smoking-gun
“Drop the Podesta Emails”: Senate Report Sure Seems Like Another Trump-Russia Smoking Gun
More details of Roger Stone’s interactions with WikiLeaks and Paul Manafort’s Russian ties don’t look great for the Trump campaign.
By Eric Lutz
August 18, 2020
In October 2016, during the fraught final weeks of the showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Roger Stone got word that a damning recording of his candidate was about to drop. That tape would become instantly infamous for Trump’s degrading remarks about women and his apparent boasts about committing sexual assault. “When you’re a star, they let you do it—you can do anything,” Trump told Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush in 2005, in audio published by the Washington Post. “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Apparently sensing the cataclysmic damage the comments would wreak, Stone—self-styled dirty trickster and unofficial Trump adviser—spoke by phone to the conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, directing him to get in touch with Julian Assange, whose organization, WikiLeaks, had obtained Russian-hacked emails from Democratic Party staffers, including Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. “Drop the Podesta emails immediately,” Stone instructed, seeking to “balance the news cycle” after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Thirty-two minutes later, WikiLeaks followed through.
The episode, one of many eye-popping revelations about the Trumpworld’s interactions with Russia catalogued in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday, highlights both the degree to which Stone was involved in Moscow’s election meddling and his efforts to leverage stolen Democratic emails. Much of the story is already known: the Kremlin sought to spread disinformation and stoke division in the United States to hurt Clinton and help Trump, an effort seemingly aided by some in his orbit. But the Intelligence Committee’s report also adds to what was already outlined by special counsel Robert Mueller, finding that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had been working with Russian intelligence official Konstantin Kilimnik, who “may have been connected” to the Kremlin’s interference; that Trump and members of his campaign spoke with Stone about WikiLeaks and sought advance information about their email dumps, despite suggesting to Mueller they hadn’t; that Russia exploited the Trump campaign’s inexperience and possibly even the FBI to its advantage; and that the Kremlin has promoted the baseless narrative that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that tampered with the election.
That narrative has been promoted by Trump and his allies to justify partisan probes into Ukraine, which seem aimed at damaging the president’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. But, the bipartisan report found, there is no evidence to support the notion that Ukraine was behind any interference effort on the scale of the Russian campaign. “There’s been absolutely no validity to this crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine was behind the 2016 intervention,” ranking member Mark Warner said recently. “It muddies the waters,” Independent Senator Angus King told Politico.
= new reply since forum marked as read
