‘I will not be let myself be a punching bag,’ he will say
Roger Stone, a long-time ally and informal campaign adviser to President Donald Trump, denied any collusion with Russia and accused a House panel of “cowardice” in a statement he plans to deliver Tuesday before a closed-door meeting with House Intelligence Committee staffers.
“Multiple members of this committee have made false allegations against me in public session in order to ensure that these bogus charges received maximum media coverage,” he said in a statement obtained by Bloomberg. “Now however, you deny me the opportunity to respond to these charges in the same open forum. This is cowardice.”
He added, “I will not let myself be a punching bag for people with ill intentions or political motives.”
Stone had said he wanted to appear in an open hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
He rejected accusations that he had any improper connections to Russia or any advance knowledge of the plan by Wikileaks to publish hacked emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
"Such assertions are conjecture, supposition, projection, and allegations but none of them are facts," said Stone, a long-time Republican political operative.
Stone’s interview comes as both the House and Senate intelligence panels are looking into whether Russian influence in the campaign included pushing fake news stories or ads on Facebook and other social media. Officials from Twitter are set to appear privately before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.
Regarding Stone, some House Democrats, including Adam Schiff of California, have pointed to his own comments and tweets as evidence of advance knowledge of, or even coordination between Trump campaign operatives with Russians.
For instance, on Aug. 21, 2016, Stone tweeted two months before the mass release by Wikileaks of the Democratic Party emails that, "it will soon (be) Podesta’s time in the barrel. intelligence agencies had concluded earlier this year that Russians or their operatives may have had a hand in feeding the stolen Democratic Party material to Wikileaks.0
Stone has acknowledged communicating with a hacker, Guccifer 2.0, who has taken credit for hacking the DNC email servers.
But in his statement to the committee he questioned whether Guccifer is connected to the hacking and said that Schiff had gotten his facts wrong.
“Imagine my deep disappointment when Mr. Schiff purposefully conflated these dates before this committee, reversing them to create the false impression that I had communicated with Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter prior to publication of the article questioning whether Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian cut-out,” he said, referring to a Breitbart News article he wrote on Aug. “Shame on you Mr.”
Heading into Tuesday’s appearance, Stone has been vocal in insisting he has done nothing improper and in his criticism of the House Intelligence panel’s efforts.
Earlier this year, Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence panel, quipped to a group of reporters that one reason potential witnesses demanded public hearings was because they want to promote books.
Stone has been promoting his book: "The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution."
In an example of Stone’s own dismissive attitude to the committee’s work, he tweeted a photo of himself Monday "preparing" for his testimony by reading the classic 1976 book, "The Russians," by former New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief Hedrick Smith.
0 comments:
Post a Comment