President Donald Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone — in the crosshairs of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election — refuted any illegal behavior in his pre-election activities, asking “where is the crime?”
In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Stone declared “I engaged in politics.”
“Where is the crime?” he asked. “I engaged in politics. My purpose was to take a tip, which I thought to be solid, and then, after that, to follow the WikiLeaks Twitter feed and send a Google news alert for [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange and use Twitter to hype as much voter and media attention to the disclosure when they came as politics.”
“That's called politics,” he added.
He also said he never communicated with Assange about Hillary Clinton's emails and pushed back at descriptions of him as a “dirty trickster.”
“Assange himself has said, ‘While Roger Stone is a brilliant spin-master, we’ve had no communication with him whatsoever,‘” Stone said.
“I have never done anything in politics that was outside the norms of my colleagues and my contemporaries,” he added. “I have always made it clear that so-called dirty tricks come up to, but do not cross the line into illegality.”
He also reiterated his vows not to testify against Trump — and that he’s never talked to the president about a pardon if he gets indicted by Mueller prosecutors.
“There's no circumstance that I would testify against the president because I would have to bear false witness,” he said. “I would have to make things up. I'm not going to do that. I have had no discussion regarding a pardon.”
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