WikiLeaks is publicly distancing itself from longtime Donald Trump associate Roger Stone, who for months during the 2016 campaign claimed to have a backchannel communication with the group’s founder, Julian Assange.
In an email exchange with CNN’s KFile, a representative for the group denied that Stone had any such backchannel, and accused the political operative of making the claims to raise his public profile.
“No communications, no channel,” the representative, who did not identify him or herself wrote in an email from an address associated with the group. “Stone is playing slovenly Democrat-aligned journalists like a fiddle, brilliantly inserting himself, as is his habit to raise his profile and market his books.
“He is entirely delighted with inviting scrutiny because of course, he is no-one who knows nothing about anything and was pushed out of the Trump team a long time ago for just this type of opportunism,” the representative added.
WikiLeaks has also taken to Twitter, where it has repeatedly denied any contact with Stone.
Stone repeatedly claimed throughout the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with Assange and that he knew of forthcoming document dumps from the group. Stone at times claimed Assange had emails that Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills deleted. Later, Stone said he only knew of forthcoming document dumps in a “broad sense.”
In an email, Stone told CNN’s KFile in response to charges from WikiLeaks: “Since I never communicated with WikiLeaks, I guess I must be innocent of charges I knew about the hacking of Podesta’s email (speculation and conjecture) and the timing or scope of their subsequent disclosures. So I am clairvoyant or just a good guesser because the limited things I did predict (Oct disclosures) all came true.”
WikiLeaks also accused Stone of leaking his own DM’s that showed interactions with the hacker Guccifer 2.0. Those DM’s appeared in an article on The Smoking Gun, which showed Stone told the hacker he was “delighted” that Twitter had reinstated his account.
“It is also clear from the screenshot there of the DM tweet from Guccifer that Stone (or at least someone who has access to his account/computer/smartphone) is the source, once again, feeding the idiots, who go wild with the idea that they’re Woodward & Bernstein, and they’re taking Stone–and then the President down–when in fact, they’re puffing him up, just like he planned.”
