Right-wing author, conspiracy theorist and Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi is the latest person in 2018 to beg for the general public’s mercy in an attempt to raise substantial legal defense funds.
Corsi, who said earlier Monday that he would rather go to prison than sign a plea deal purportedly offered by special counsel Robert Mueller, doubled down this evening in a tweet.
https://twitter.com/jerome_corsi/status/1067192396570656774
“I have REJECTED Mueller’s plea deal,” Corsi said. “Thx to all for PRAYERS God Bless.”
Figures like fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe and former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen and former Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos are a sampling of people who have resorted to opening GoFundMe campaigns this year, as legal problems mounted.
Corsi has put three different donation options out there. One on Donorbox, another on PayPal and a third on his website CorsiNation.
All of this is happening exactly two after it was reported that Mueller was going to indict Corsi for perjury. Corsi went to the press on Monday to say that he was turning down the plea deal because he did not lie.
“They can put me in prison the rest of my life,” he would add. “I am not going to sign a lie.”
When news of the Corsi indictment first broke, Corsi quickly responded to multiple news organizations by accusing the special counsel of setting a “perjury trap.”
“When they have your emails and phone records … they’re very good at the perjury trap,” he said.
He also told ABC News, for instance, that he thought his “only crime was that I support Donald Trump. That’s my crime, and now I’m going to go to prison for the rest of my life for cooperating with them.”
Later on Monday, Corsi claimed that the perjury charge stemmed from an email he didn’t remember sending Roger Stone, an email that said “go see [Julian] Assange.”
“I couldn’t remember any of my 2016 emails,” he claimed. “I hadn’t looked at them. So they let me amend my testimony, but now they want to charge me for the initial day when I said I didn’t remember that email. I won’t plead guilty to it.”
Corsi asserted that he didn’t remember sending Stone an email in 2016 telling him to visit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose website posted DNC emails that were allegedly hacked by Russian military officers posing as fictitious persona Guccifer 2.0. He also claimed that Mueller gave him an opportunity to amend his testimony about this email, but said prosecutors are still pursuing false statement charges.
Like Stone, Corsi has called Mueller an agent of the “deep state.”
[Image via Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images]
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