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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election has zeroed in on connections between President Donald Trump’s associates and WikiLeaks, the organization that published a trove of emails Russian hackers stole from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager ahead of the election.
As Mueller’s team has questioned witnesses around potential links with WikiLeaks, draft court documents emerged this week detailing email exchanges that potentially show Trump’s allies had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to publish the hacked emails. The Guardian also reported Tuesday that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met multiple times with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange prior to the election.
Here is what we know so far about the potential links between Trump’s campaign and WikiLeaks:
Mueller Looks Into Roger Stone’s WikiLeaks Connections
A central focus of Mueller’s investigation concerns whether anyone in the campaign knew ahead of time that WikiLeaks had Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s damaging internal emails and planned to publish them. The key figures in this part of the probe are Roger Stone, a political consultant for the Trump campaign, and his associates ― most notably, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, a prominent birther and former Washington bureau chief for InfoWars.
Mueller’s team began questioning Corsi in early September, as it looked into his role as a possible middleman between Stone and WikiLeaks. But Corsi claimed in a YouTube livestream on Nov. 12 that his cooperation with Mueller had broken down and he expected to be indicted. Corsi said this week that he will reject a proposed plea deal that would involve him pleading guilty to one count of lying to federal investigators.
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The focus on Stone and Corsi intensified Tuesday, when multiple outlets reported on draft court documents from Mueller’s team that say Corsi sent Stone an email alerting him that WikiLeaks planned to release damaging material about Clinton.
“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging,” Corsi emailed Stone in August, according to the draft document, accurately predicting that WikiLeaks would release Podesta’s emails in October.
Another exchange in the draft document involves Stone emailing Corsi to tell him to obtain the WikiLeaks emails from Assange, who has been holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London avoiding extradition charges. Corsi then forwarded Stone’s email to London-based conservative author Ted Malloch, the document alleges. Corsi and Stone both deny having advance knowledge of the emails.
This episode has increased scrutiny on Stone, who repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange and who tweeted in August 2016 that Podesta would soon be facing “time in the barrel.” WikiLeaks denied ever meeting Stone, both publicly and in internal messages obtained by The Intercept.
The investigation into Stone and Corsi’s potential cooperation with WikiLeaks is the source of a major question about what happens next in Mueller’s probe, and it could move further into the spotlight if prosecutors indict Corsi in the coming days.
Unconfirmed Reports Of Manafort Meeting Assange
In another shakeup for the Mueller investigation, The Guardian reported this week that Manafort visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London three times. The meetings, said to have taken place in 2013, 2015 and 2016, would add a new link between Trump’s campaign and WikiLeaks.
The meeting in 2016 is reported to have taken place around March, when Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. Both Manafort and WikiLeaks have denied that the meeting took place, but The Guardian is standing behind its reporting.
“This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place,” a spokesperson from The Guardian told HuffPost.
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The Guardian’s report was published one day after Mueller filed a complaint against Manafort, accusing him of breaching a plea deal by lying to investigators. It’s unclear exactly what Manafort, who pleaded guilty in September to two criminal charges that covered a wide range of illegal activity, is accused of misleading prosecutors about. Trump said Wednesday that giving his former campaign chairman a presidential pardon was “not off the table.”
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told HuffPost on Tuesday that the president has no knowledge of Manafort ever meeting the WikiLeaks founder.
WikiLeaks Slides Into Trump Jr.’s DMs
In one of the more bizarre connections between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, the organization sent Donald Trump Jr. a series of direct messages on Twitter in late September 2016. WikiLeaks told Trump Jr. that an anti-Trump political action committee was set to launch and that WikiLeaks had “guessed the password” for the site. It told the president’s son to read the PAC’s “About” section see who was running it. Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks hours later, thanking it for the information and saying, “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around.”
Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks would talk several times in the future, including when WikiLeaks asked the president’s son to push out or comment on an October 2016 story about Clinton saying she wanted to “just drone” Assange. Trump Jr. responded that the campaign had already done that earlier in the day, then followed up by asking what was behind talk of a forthcoming leak.
The correspondence between Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks continued for months, although it mostly involved WikiLeaks sending comments and requests but receiving no reply.
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