Roger Stone Sought Stolen Clinton and State Department Emails During Campaign

Shelby Holliday and Rob Barry at the Wall Street Journal: Roger Stone Sought Information on Clinton from Assange, Emails Show.

Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone privately sought information he considered damaging to Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The emails could raise new questions about Mr. Stone's testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in September, in which he said he "merely wanted confirmation" from an acquaintance that Mr. Assange had information about Mrs. Clinton, according to a portion of the transcript that was made public.

In a Sept. 18, 2016, message, Mr. Stone urged an acquaintance who knew Mr. Assange to ask the WikiLeaks founder for emails related to Mrs. Clinton's alleged role in disrupting a purported Libyan peace deal in 2011 when she was secretary of state, referring to her by her initials.

"Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30--particularly on August 20, 2011," Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Mr. Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.

So, we'll pause here briefly to note a couple of things:

One, that per Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the email exchange between Stone and Credico was not provided to congressional investigators.

[Schiff] said the emails hadn't been provided to congressional investigators.

"If there is such a document, then it would mean that his testimony was either deliberately incomplete or deliberately false," said Mr. Schiff, who has continued to request documents and conduct interviews with witnesses despite the committee's probe concluding earlier this year.

Two, that as noted by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, "It is a federal crime to knowingly receive stolen material that has crossed a national or international boundary."

And three, that Stone "had no formal role" in Trump's campaign at the time is totally irrelevant to everyone aside from treason apologists.

Which Stone knows as well as anyone and better than most. Hence this:

Mr. Stone, in a text message to the Journal, said that Mr. Credico had "provided nothing" to him and that WikiLeaks never handed anything over.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Roger Stone isn't known for his rigorous honesty. Either way, the very fact that he was soliciting State Department emails, which would have had to be stolen for him to access them, is a problem. And the likelihood that he omitted information during his congressional testimony could be a crime.

Unfortunately, the usual issue is that there still doesn't appear to be anyone in the Republican majority who has even the slightest inclination to hold anyone accountable for any of this.