This Week: The Long-Awaited Roger Stone Indictment Arrives
Roger Stone was arrested and indicted Friday morning as federal agents stormed his homes in Florida and New York. In an indictment, special counsel Robert Mueller laid out communication between Stone and the Trump campaign during the summer and fall of 2016. Stone suggested repeatedly during that time that he was in touch with Wikileaks, and, according to the indictment, was in touch with Steve Bannon and an unidentified “senior campaign official.”
Ahead of a court appearance Friday, Paul Manafort submitted a court filing pushing back on Mueller’s claims that Manafort lied to investigators after entering into a plea agreement. Manafort’s lawyers said that he did not share any “intentional falsehoods.” In court Friday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson scheduled a hearing for February 4 during which she will assess whether Manafort lied.
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Cohen will sit for an interview, presumably before he reports to prison in March.
That sit-down will replace Cohen’s scheduled February 7 public testimony before the House Oversight Committee. Republican lawmakers on that committee complained this week that Cohen’s appearance would essentially be worthless as he would be barred from discussing the multiple federal investigations with which he is cooperating. Instead, they said, Cohen would use the opportunity to share unflattering stories about President Trump. On Wednesday, Cohen called the appearance off, citing threats to his family from Trump and Rudy Giuliani.
The President has for some time been publicly urging investigators to look into Cohen’s father-in-law, Fima Shusterman, a Ukrainian immigrant who pleaded guilty to money laundering in the 1990s and reportedly provided one of the links between Trump and Cohen.
The Senate Intelligence Committee also subpoenaed Jerome Corsi, the Roger Stone ally and conspiracy theorist.
Giuliani has reportedly drawn Trump’s ire for his media appearances about the Russia probe. Over the past week, Giuliani has claimed that Trump personally told him work on Trump Tower Moscow continued until Election Day 2016, then said he had no idea if that was true, but was just speaking in “hypothetical[s].”
Giuliani also divulged that Trump’s lawyers reached out to special counsel Robert Mueller to ask him to publicly discredit a BuzzFeed article reporting that Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. BuzzFeed is standing by their story, saying they remain “100 percent behind it.”
Mueller is probing the Trump campaign’s links to the NRA, according to CNN.
An unknown company owned by a foreign government was granted permission to ask the Supreme Court to consider its appeal of a grand jury subpoena linked to the Mueller probe.
Former GOP fundraiser and ex-Cohen client Elliott Broidy filed a new lawsuit accusing a trio of D.C. operatives of accepting millions of dollars from the Qatari government to extort him after hacking his emails.
And Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, who brokered the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, is cancelling his U.S. tour after his lawyers were unable to negotiate the parameters of his testimony before Mueller and Congress.