Now that Donald Trump is reportedly claiming in written responses to special counsel Robert Mueller that, "to the best of his recollection," his longtime pal Roger Stone never told him about WikiLeaks, it's worth recalling that Stone once claimed he had an exclusive line of communication with Trump during the campaign.
My contact with the campaign in 2016 was Donald Trump. I was not in regular contact with campaign officials.
That's what Stone told CNN on July 13, just after a Robert Mueller indictment dropped implicating an unnamed individual who was in contact with both the Russian intelligence front Guccifer 2.0 in 2016 and "senior members" of the Trump campaign.
So Stone's immediate response was to separate himself from being bandied about as the unnamed person in Mueller's extensive GRU indictment who was described as being "in regular contact" with senior campaign officials. In the same interview, Stone also framed his communication with Guccifer 2.0 as "benign."
But here’s the little hiccup with that approach: If Stone was in fact the unnamed person in the indictment, he was publicly establishing both a direct link and an exclusive line of communication between himself and Donald Trump. Hmm. Someone must have thought better of that. In a primetime interview with CNN later that day, Stone reversed himself and claimed that actually, upon review, he "probably" was the unnamed person.
“I certainly acknowledge that I was in touch with Trump campaign officials, and I have testified under oath to the House Intelligence Committee that I certainly had a 24-word exchange with the persona Guccifer 2.0 over Twitter direct messages,” Stone said in an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo.
Ah, so not just Trump but also various Trump "campaign officials." The White House must have breathed a sigh of relief.
As national security journalist Marcy Wheeler reminds us, Mueller was definitely interested in Trump's correspondence with Stone and, according the New York Times recitation of Mueller's questions, asked:
What did you know about communication between Roger Stone, his associates, Julian Assange or Wikileaks?
Now, Trump is reportedly claiming that Stone told him nothing about his communications with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks (never mind Trump’s 100-plus shout outs to WikiLeaks during the campaign), “to the best of his knowledge.”
That last part is sort of a nod to the fact that Mueller has already caught several high-level Trump associates and officials in high-octane lies. They all seem to forget quite readily what happened in 2016, until Mueller helpfully reminds them otherwise.