(National Sentinel) Nope: POTUS Trump ally and sometime adviser Roger Stone has told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member that he does not plan to cooperate with the panel.
In a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Stone’s attorney, Grant J. Smith, said his client would invoke his Fifth Amendment right and will refuse to both testify before the committee and share requested documents.
“The requests, as previously stated to staff, are far too overbroad, far too overreaching, far too wide ranging both in their all-embracing list of persons to whom the request could relate with whom Mr. Stone has communicated over the past three years, and the ‘documents concerning’ imprecision of the requests,” wrote Stone’s attorney in the letter dated Monday that was made public Tuesday.
Smith also said that his client has previously testified before the House Intelligence Committee and that those transcripts would be made public in the coming weeks.
Stone had previously requested that the transcript be made public but it was not. As such, Smith noted, “a number of inaccurate leaks and speculation which disserved both my client and the public interest.”
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“Mr. Stone decries secrecy. He will not subject himself to the innuendo of non-public proceedings. Nor will he confirm the existence of, or produce the documents of the request, for the purpose of being used in secret proceedings,” Smith wrote.
Stone has not been indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller but he has reportedly come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks over alleged contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.
Reports have suggested that Stone was aware ahead of time that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was going to release a trove of emails hacked or downloaded from the account of John Podesta, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.
NewsTarget reported last week that Stone did have a backchannel to WikiLeaks through Leftist comedian Randy Credico, a New York talk radio host. Credico has denied being Stone’s contact, but the longtime Trump ally produced text messages and gave them to The Daily Caller that appear to refute Credico’s denial.
As for Mueller, Stone told NewsTarget in a statement, “The text messages released … prove that, as I testified under oath, Randy Credico was the source of both the explosive nature and October release date for the Clinton material that Julian Assange told CNN he had in June of 2016. They also prove that Credico’s repeated claim that he could not have been my source in late July because he did not meet and interview the Wikileaks publisher until late August is irrelevant as Credico says the source of his tip is a Wikileaks lawyer who is ‘one of my closest friends.’”
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