2016 ELECTION/ROBERT MUELLER/ROGER STONE/TRUMP PEOPLE: “When the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, appeared on a video link from Europe a month before the 2016 presidential election and vaguely promised to release a flood of purloined documents related to the race, the head of Donald J. Trump’s campaign, Stephen K. Bannon, was interested…The email exchange, not previously reported, underscores how Mr. Stone presented himself to Trump campaign officials: as a conduit of inside information from WikiLeaks, Russia’s chosen repository for documents hacked from Democratic computers. Mr. Bannon and two other former senior campaign officials have detailed to prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, how Mr. Stone created that impression, according to people familiar with their accounts. One of them told investigators that Mr. Stone not only seemed to predict WikiLeaks’ actions, but that he also took credit afterward for the timing of its disclosures that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. But at the same time, the top tier of Mr. Trump’s campaign was deeply skeptical of Mr. Stone, who has made a career of merging fact and fiction and seems to prize attention over credibility.”
–Sharon LaFraniere, Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman and Danny Hakim, “Roger Stone Sold Himself to Trump’s Campaign as a WikiLeaks Pipeline. Was He?,” The New York Times online, November 1, 2018