WASHINGTON — Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative and ally of President Donald Trump, said Sunday he is “prepared” to be indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation if that’s where the probe leads.
“I am prepared should that be the case,” Stone said on "Meet The Press" after being asked if he was ready for a possible indictment. “But I think it just demonstrates, again, this was supposed to be about Russian collusion, and it appears to be an effort to silence or punish the president’s supporters and his advocates.”
Stone reiterated that he felt Mueller’s team has found “no evidence whatsoever of Russian collusion,” so he speculated that they may work to connect him to other crimes instead.
“It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” Stone said. “I would chalk this up to an effort to silence me.”
Mueller’s team has not yet drawn any public conclusions or filed any charges related to whether there was coordination between associates of the Trump campaign and Russian attempts to try to interfere with the 2016 election.
Stone also added that neither he nor his lawyer have been contacted yet by the special counsel’s office, and he’s unsure whether they consider him "an interesting person or a person of interest."
Associates of Stone's have been subpoenaed by Mueller's team, however. Stone said Sunday that eight of his either current or former associates have been "terrorized" by the investigation.
Stone on Sunday continued to deny any involvement with Russia or Wikileaks, the site that released Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails throughout the 2016 campaign — topics that the president also hammered on in a series of tweets Sunday morning.
Stone said he "had no advance notice of the content, source, or the exact disclosure time of the Wikileaks disclosures," similar to language that he has used before, and he said that his tweets like the one predicting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will deliver "a devastating expose of Hillary" were based on public statements from Assange that were accessible to anyone.
Following Stone’s interview, Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, alleged that Stone has not been forthcoming.
"Roger Stone is known for a lot of things, candor isn’t really one of them," Schiff said during an interview on "Meet The Press." "Either his testimony before our committee was untrue, our his public statements are untrue. Both cannot be fact because they’re inconsistent with each other. We were never allowed to find out which was the case in our committee."
The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee closed its investigation into Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election in April, but the Senate Intelligence Committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller still continue to move forward with their investigations.