Roger Stone called out conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi this weekend, and accused him of lying about a “cover-story” in the Russia probe.
Corsi gave an interview in which he claimed to give a “cover-story” for an apparently damning tweet by Stone.
“I hate to see Jerry Corsi LIE like this. There was no ‘cover-story’,” said a post published to Stone’s Facebook account on Saturday. “Covering up what? Corsi never told me that anyone had stolen John Podesta emails and had never provided me with anything like that. He has no proof or evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately for him I have both emails and text messages that prove definitively that he is LYING and my testimony before the house intelligence committee is entirely truthful.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s team was reportedly investigating whether they knew anything ahead of time about emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and given to WikiLeaks.
Corsi claimed that he was offered a plea deal, but later sued Mueller’s office, and claimed prosecutors pressured him to lie in the investigation. In his interview with WJLA, he said that Stone reached out to him several days later, asked him to provide a “cover-story” so that the tweet wouldn’t seem like it had anything to do with WikiLeaks.
Here’s the tweet in question, from Stone’s now-defunct Twitter page, on August 21, 2016:
Trust Me, It Will Soon The Podesta’s Time In The Barrel. #CrookedHillary.”
Corsi claimed he drafted a memo that said the tweet referenced research he was doing on Podesta’s and Hillary Clinton‘s alleged relationship with Russian companies.
“Yes, it was a lie,” he said, about the memo.
“Very sad to see Jerry Corsi lie about me on WJLA and Fox Business News,” Stone wrote in another Facebook post on Saturday night. “Seems when it comes to Roger Stone he’ll say whatever Mueller’s minions what him too. Unfortunately for him I have evidence and witnesses to prove his treachery.”
He railed against Corsi again in a Instagram post Sunday morning, saying that the conspiracy theorist “was working with Mueller to sandbag me on a fabricated perjury charge.”
“Jerry Corsi is starting to make Michael Cohen look like a stand up guy!” he wrote.
Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment when Law&Crime reached out for a response. So did Corsi attorney David Gray.
Stone responded to a Law&Crime request for comment on the night of December 31, 2018, and once against denied receiving the WikiLeaks emails from Julian Assange, Corsi, or others.
“I had no advance notice of the source or content of the material published by Wikileaks,” he wrote in an email. “There simply is no evidence or witnesses who can honestly testify to the contrary.”
He once again called Corsi’s claim about the Podesta emails to be false, added that he was referring to both John Podesta and lobbyist brother Tony Podesta in the 2016 tweet, insisted his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee was the truth, and reiterated that his claim that a radio talk show host Randy Credico tipped him off about Dem emails released by WikiLeaks in October 2018. Stone released texts to NBC in November 2018 which he said proved his side of the story about Credico, though Credico told the outlet that these didn’t prove he had knowledge of anything Assange was going to do. The radio show host told Mother Jones later that month that he “bullshitted” Stone about having connections to Assange and other high-ranking members of WikiLeaks.
“My tweet was not the slightest bit controversial until six weeks later when WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails,” he wrote. “There was no social media chatter about it and no media coverage. Since, as I said, I had no knowledge the Podesta’s emails had been stolen and most certainly never received a copy of them from anyone what exactly would I be covering up?”
Note: Updated with the response from Gray, and Stone.
[Image via Alex Wong/Getty Images]
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