Roger Stone Pleads Not Guilty to Lying to Congress, Obstruction
Roger Stone, the notorious Republican political operative and long-time friend of President Donald Trump, pled not guilty on Tuesday to seven criminal counts, including lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors have accused Stone of lying to congressional investigators about his efforts to inform Trump campaign officials of WikiLeaks’s plan to release hacked Democratic National Committee emails that proved damaging to Hillary Clinton.
Sitting in federal court in Washington, D.C., U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson ordered Stone to return Friday afternoon for another hearing.
Stone was arrested early Friday morning at his South Florida home in an FBI raid that Stone and his allies have cast as an unnecessary “abuse of power.”
In the indictment filed Friday, prosecutors alleged that Stone communicated in the summer of 2016 with senior Trump campaign officials about the damaging internal DNC documents then in WikiLeaks’s possession.
Following the July 22 release of a host of Clinton-related emails, “a senior campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton campaign,” the indictment reads. “Stone, thereafter, told the Trump campaign about the potential future releases of damaging material by [WikiLeaks].”
Stone claims that he had no advance knowledge of any document dump and was simply speculating in his communications with Trump campaign officials about what documents were in WikiLeaks’s possession.
While he has not categorically ruled out the possibility of cooperating with Mueller’s team, Stone has repeatedly vowed not to testify against Trump, since in doing so, he claims, he would be “bearing false witness.”
