President Donald Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone said he’s “pleased” former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg is now choosing to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller after initially saying he would refuse to comply with a subpoena.
Nunberg told CNN’s Gloria Borger Monday that investigators “want me to testify against Roger. They want me to say that Roger was going around telling people he was colluding with (WikiLeaks founder) Julian Assange. That’s what they want. I’m not going to do it.”
After a media interview blitz on Monday, Nunberg later said he would “cooperate” with all aspects of the subpoena.
Stone said Tuesday that Nunberg was not “speaking at my behest or my direction,” arguing that the former campaign aide “marches to his own drummer.”
“I would certainly have not advised him to ignore or refuse a document-production subpoena,” Stone said in an interview with MSNBC. “I was pleased to read today that he’s changed his mind about that.”
Stone and Nunberg had worked on Trump’s campaign in its early stages, and both left the campaign in August 2015.
“I didn’t ask Sam Nunberg to protect me. I don’t think I require any protection,” Stone said Tuesday. “But look, I’m one of the President’s oldest friends and I remain a staunch supporter. It’s not surprising that the special counsel may want to see emails and memos that I wrote to the campaign and about politics.”
Stone said he has not received a subpoena or a request to be interviewed by the special counsel.
During the 2016 campaign, Stone appeared to predict that WikiLeaks would soon release damaging information about Hillary Clinton, including stating that it would be Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s “time in the barrel” ahead of the WikiLeaks’ release of Podesta’s emails.
The US intelligence community determined in January 2017 that Russian intelligence provided the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, which Assange denies.
As he has before, Stone denied Tuesday any collusion with Russia and said he “never had any advance knowledge of the content, the source, or the exact timing of the WikiLeaks disclosures,” nor discussed the hacked emails with Trump. He also said he never talked about Clinton’s emails with Trump.