The House Intelligence Committee will subpoena Trump friend Roger Stone if he refuses to identify an intermediary who shared information with him about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Rep. Mike Conway, the Republican leading the committee’s Russia investigation, told CNN yesterday that Stone had today, Friday, to provide the name of the person. ‘Hope we don’t have to,’ he added.
Reached by phone, Stone told DailyMail.com that he’s been huddling with lawyers and was ‘not prepared’ to say quite yet how he would react.
The House Intelligence Committee will subpoena Trump friend Roger Stone if he refuses to identify an intermediary who shared information with him about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
Stone says he had no direct contact with Assange and found out that Wikileaks had copies of hacked Democratic National Committee emails from Twitter like everyone else.
‘I asked a journalist who I knew had interviewed Assange to independently confirm this report, and he subsequently did,’ Stone said in an opening statement for a House Intel hearing last month.
A prediction that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, was about to serve his ‘time in the barrel’ was a coincidence, Stone said. The claim was based on intuition, not advanced knowledge of his email hack.
Lawmakers are demanding to know the name of the person Stone conferred with about Wikileaks. Stone has said it was a journalist and declined to provide a name. The journalist disclosed the information about Wikileaks in an off-the-record conversation with Stone after an interview with Assange.
Stone told reporters after a closed-door session on Capitol Hill in September that he would speak to the journalist and request the permission of that person to illuminate the source of the information.
‘I’m not going to burn somebody I spoke to off the record,’ Stone said, according to CNN. ‘If he releases me, if he allows me to release it, I would be happy to give it to the committee. I’m actually going to try to do that.’
Stone says he had no direct contact with Assange and found out that Wikileaks had copies of hacked Democratic National Committee emails from Twitter like everyone else
Conaway and Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, say that Stone must give up his source today or they’ll get a court order mandating it.
‘We have agreed to subpoena him if he doesn’t provide the information,’ Schiff said according to CNN. ‘We’ll see whether he’s willing to comply or whether we’ll have to use a compulsory process.’
Knowing the identity of the person ‘will help eliminate any questions people might have, and it just helps support the story,’ Conaway said.
‘If we’ve got that name, then we can just evaluate what he said as a result of what he said, I think that will be helpful to the investigation,’ argued the Republican.
Gary Smith, an attorney for Stone, told CNN, ‘We are working to comply by the deadline set by the committee. Everything has been collegial and professional. There has been no threat of a subpoena.’