Roget Stone doubled down on the White House's claims that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. | Getty Roger Stone: I haven’t talked to the FBI 
 
 Roger Stone, the longtime Republican strategist and confidant of President Donald Trump, doubled down on claims that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, and said that he had not spoken to the FBI as part of an investigation into communications between Trump allies and Russians during the campaign. 
 
 In an appearance on CBS This Morning on Tuesday, Stone said he assumed he was under investigation, based on news reports. 
 
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 “I have assumed that, because page one of the New York Times on Jan. 20 said that wiretapped information on Trump aides was being used in an inquiry,” Stone said, after being asked by CBS This Morning host Charlie Rose whether he was aware that was under investigation. “I assumed that I had been under surveillance now for some time. What probable cause there is or what evidence that would dictate that, I don’t know.” 
 
 Stone confirmed that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had sent him a letter asking him to preserve documents in the case of an investigation. 
 
 Stone also dug in on the White House’s claims that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, even as FBI director James Comey shot down the allegations at a Senate hearing Monday. He suggested that Comey and the FBI “are the same people who said there were weapons of mass destruction,” and made claims about “the deep state.” 
 
 When asked directly whether he believed Trump Tower was under surveillance and was wiretapped at all, Stone said he thought it was “certainly possible.” 
 
 Stone, who has repeatedly denied contacts with Russians aiming to influence the presidential election, defended his communications with the hacker Guccifer 2.0. He suggested that his conversations with the hacker was linked to a story he wrote for Breitbart News, and characterized his conversations as “entirely benign.” Stone had previously bragged about having been in communication with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange (something WikiLeaks and Assange have denied), and he suggested that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta would “soon be in the barrel” prior to WikiLeaks’ publication of Podesta’s emails. 
 
 Stone asserted that he had not had any contact with Russians nor had he been involved in trying to tamper with the election, and he defended former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. He declined defending the Trump campaign’s former foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who Trump advisers have denied was involved in the campaign, saying only that he “never heard of this guy.” 
 
 “When people say, when there’s smoke, there’s fire, in this particular case, you say what?” co-host Gayle King asked Stone. 
 
 “Let me have my day in court,” Stone said. ||||| (CNN) In the final months of the 2016 campaign, longtime Donald Trump associate Roger Stone repeatedly discussed his backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and claimed knowledge of forthcoming leaks from the group, a CNN KFile review of his public statements shows. 
 
 Stone's comments about WikiLeaks have come under increased scrutiny as the FBI and congressional committees investigate whether Trump associates were involved in Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. 
 
 Stone has repeatedly and publicly denied that he had any contact with Russian officials during the campaign. Stone declined to answer questions from CNN for this story. After this story was published, WikiLeaks tweeted, "WikiLeaks & Assange have repeatedly confirmed that they have never communicated with Stone." 
 
 But Stone's many statements have fueled suspicions that figures in Trump's orbit played a role in releases of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. 
 
 On July 22 of last year, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails, which ultimately sparked the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. 
 
 "Guccifer 2.0," the online persona US intelligence officials believe is a front for Russian intelligence, claimed responsibility for the hacks. 
 
 WikiLeaks began to serially release emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in October. The US intelligence community has attributed those hacks to Russian intelligence. 
 
 Stone began discussing WikiLeaks and Assange in August 2016. Stone told a local Republican Party group in Florida on August 10 that he had "communicated with Julian Assange." In an interview later in August, Stone suggested that Assange had material that included emails deleted by Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. At other times, Stone said the material released would be related to the Clinton Foundation. 
 
 On August 21, Stone tweeted that "it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel." Stone claimed in an October 19 Breitbart post that he did not have advanced knowledge that Podesta's hacked emails would be leaked, claiming his tweet was about Podesta's business dealings. 
 
 In mid-September, Stone said on Boston Herald Radio that he expects, "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server." 
 
 In late October, Stone told a local Florida television station he only knew of the material that would be released in "a broad sense" from a source who was a friend of Assange. 
 
 Here's a timeline of Stone's statements: 
 
 Stone tells a local Republican Party group in Florida "I've actually communicated with Julian Assange." 
 
 Stone says on the #MAGA podcast he believes Assange has emails deleted by Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. He adds that he knows he has them and they should be expected to drop in the next three months. 
 
 "In fact I know [Assange] has them," Stone said. "And I believe he will expose the American people to this information in the next 90 days." 
 
 Stone engages in direct messages with DNC hacker Guccifer 2.0, according to direct messages reported by the Washington Times and The Smoking Gun. Stone tells the hacker he was "delighted" Twitter reinstated his account. 
 
 Stone tells World Net Daily he communicated with Assange and forthcoming material will be related to the Clinton Foundation. 
 
 Stone tells radio host Alex Jones he has "backchannel communications" with Assange who has "political dynamite" on the Clintons. 
 
 Stone says in an interview on C-SPAN he's been in touch with Julian Assange "through an intermediary—somebody who is a mutual friend." WikiLeaks would later tweet in response to Stone's appearance, "We are happy to hear true information from everyone. But so far, we have not heard from Mr. Stone." 
 
 Stone says he is not "at liberty to discuss" information he received from Assange. Stone claims he was hacked after speaking with Assange. 
 
 Stone says on The Blaze radio that he had "communicated" with Assange through a "mutual acquaintance." 
 
 Stone tweets that "it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel." Stone later says his tweet was about Podesta's business dealings. 
 
 Stone denies Guccifer 2.0 is connected to the Russians on local Maryland radio. 
 
 "The DNC leaks that nailed Deborah Wasserman Schultz in the heist against Bernie Sanders was not leaked by the Russians, it was leaked by Cruccifer [sic] 2, I should say hacked and leaked first by Cruccifer 2, well known hacker who is not in the employment of the Russians and then Wikileaks. So that whole claim is a canard." 
 
 In an interview with Breitbart Radio, Stone says, "I'm almost confident Mr. Assange has virtually every one of the emails that the Clinton henchwomen, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, thought that they had deleted, and I suspect that he's going to drop them at strategic times in the run up to this race." 
 
 Stone says on local Florida radio of Assange and the Clinton Foundation, "Perhaps he has the smoking gun that will make this handcuff time." 
 
 Stone says on Boston Herald Radio that he expects Assange the WikiLeaks to "drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server." 
 
 Stone adds of Assange, "I am in touch with him through an intermediary." 
 
 Stone tweets, "Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks." 
 
 Stone tells a local Florida radio station that he has "a back-channel communication with Assange, because we have a good mutual friend." 
 
 "That friend travels back and forth from the United States to London and we talk. I had dinner with him last Monday," Stone said. 
 
 Stone writes on Breitbart: "I had no advance notice of WikiLeaks' hacking of Podesta's e-mails." 
 
 Stone says on local Florida television that he had no advanced knowledge of the forthcoming hack of Podesta's emails, but says he has a "backchannel contact" to Assange. 
 
 "We have a mutual friend," Stone says. 
 
 When asked about the content of the information shared, Stone said, "Broad information pertaining to the fact that Wikileaks has information pertaining to massive secret surveillance, war, oil, the U.S. election." 
 
 Stone says he only knew about emails being released "in the broad sense." He says he has never met or spoken to Assange and didn't pass any information about it to Trump. 
 
 Stone calls claims that he colluded with Assange "false" in a blog post and says he only knew of forthcoming material because, "Julian Assange of WikiLeaks on numerous occasions had signaled that he had unspecified political dynamite that would shake up the presidential race." 
 
 Stone explains his WikiLeaks contacts in a Reddit ask me anything. 
 
 "I have been forthright about the fact that Julian Assange of Wikileaks and I share a common friend who has communicated with both of us," he writes. "I was simply told Wikileaks was in possession of 'political dynamite' that would 'rock Hillary's campaign,' and they would release it in late October." 
 
 "I had no previous knowledge of the subject of the disclosures, although I've speculated that it would be related to the Clinton Foundation. I've had no advance knowledge of the hacking of Podesta or anyone else. Nor do I believe that Assange is an agent of the Russians, a charge which is yet undocumented with proof and which he denies." 
 
 Stone tweets -- then deletes -- about communicating with Assange, writing that he "never denied perfectly legal backchannel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary." 
 
 Stone says charges he colluded with Russian hacker Guccifer are "demonstrably false." 
 
 Stone tweets in response to the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 election: "It's only fair that I have a chance to respond 2 any smears or half truths about alleged "Collusion with Russians" from 2day's Intel Hearing." ||||| Longtime GOP operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone on Tuesday doubled down on his assertion that he did not collude with Russia to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election. 
 
 “I have said that repeatedly and I say that again today,” Stone said in an interview on “CBS This Morning.” 
 
 Stone said he’s aware that he’s under investigation by the FBI, but that he has not spoken to the bureau. He said he is following the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to preserve documents. 
 
 “I assume I have been under surveillance now for some time,” Stone said. “What probable cause there is, or what evidence that would dictate that, I don’t know.” 
 
 Stone’s name frequently popped up during a House Intelligence Committee hearing with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers that was focused on Russia’s interference in the election. He had been in contact with Guccifer 2.0, someone involved in hacked the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 race, though he says their exchange was “benign.” 
 
 “The inference that my now completely public exchange with a hacker Guccifer 2.0 -- who may or may not be a Russian agent -- somehow constitutes collusion is not true based either on the facts, on the actual text which I released or on the timing,” he told CBS. 
 
 U.S. officials have said they believe Guccifer 2.0 is linked to Russia. 
 
 Asked if President Trump should say he was wrong when he accused President Obama of ordering a wiretap of Trump Tower, Stone said, “No, actually, I don’t.” Comey said Tuesday neither the FBI nor the Justice Department has evidence to support that claim. 
 
 Stone said it’s “certainly possible” that Trump Tower was under surveillance. ||||| Nigel Farage is a “person of interest” in the US counter-intelligence investigation that is looking into possible collusion between the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the Guardian has been told. 
 
 
 
 Sources with knowledge of the investigation said the former Ukip leader had raised the interest of FBI investigators because of his relationships with individuals connected to both the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whom Farage visited in March. 
 
 
 
 He’s right in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again 
 
 WikiLeaks published troves of hacked emails last year that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign and is suspected of having cooperated with Russia through third parties, according to recent congressional testimony by the former CIA director John Brennan, who also said the adamant denials of collusion by Assange and Russia were disingenuous. 
 
 
 
 Farage has not been accused of wrongdoing and is not a suspect or a target of the US investigation. But being a person of interest means investigators believe he may have information about the acts that are under investigation and he may therefore be subject to their scrutiny. 
 
 Sources who spoke to the Guardian said it was Farage’s proximity to people at the heart of the investigation that was being examined as an element in their broader inquiry into how Russia may have worked with Trump campaign officials to influence the US election. 
 
 
 
 “One of the things the intelligence investigators have been looking at is points of contact and persons involved,” one source said. “If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange and Trump associates the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage. 
 
 “He’s right in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again. There’s a lot of attention being paid to him.” 
 
 The source mentioned Farage’s links with Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time political adviser who has admitted being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom US intelligence agencies believe to be a Kremlin agent. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roger Stone in his office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Photograph: Miami Herald/MCT via Getty Images 
 
 Farage’s spokesman said he had never worked with Russian officials, and described the Guardian’s questions about Farage’s activities as “verging on the hysterical”. 
 
 
 
 “Nigel has never been to Russia, let alone worked with their authorities,” the spokesman said. But he did not respond to questions about whether Farage was aware of the FBI inquiry; had hired a lawyer in connection to the matter; or when Farage first met Trump. 
 
 The spokesman also declined to comment on whether Farage had received compensation from the Russian state-backed media group RT for his media appearances. RT, which has featured Farage about three times over the last 18 months, also declined to comment, citing confidentiality. 
 
 On Thursday Farage dismissed the story as “fake news”. He said he visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in March at the behest of LBC Radio “with a view to conducting an interview”. 
 
 He added: “I consider it extremely doubtful that I could be a person of interest to the FBI as I have no connections to Russia.” 
 
 Farage has said he only met Assange once has but declined to say how long the two have known each other. 
 
 
 
 The FBI’s national press office said it had no comment on Farage. 
 
 
 
 The former Ukip leader has voiced his support for the Russian president, calling Vladimir Putin the leader he most admired, in a 2014 interview. Ukip also has history with Assange: Gerard Batten, a Ukip member of the European parliament (MEP), defended the Wikileaks founder in a speech in the European parliament in 2011. 
 
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 One source familiar with the US investigation told the Guardian that the examination of Farage’s activities was considered especially delicate given his role as an MEP. 
 
 Neither Farage nor Trump have made a secret of their admiration for one another. They emerged as unlikely winners last year in contests that have reshaped the world order: Britain’s vote to leave the EU and Trump’s surprise ascendency to the White House. 
 
 
 
 Both men credited their ability to tap into the worries of struggling and neglected citizens for their victories. But at the heart of the US investigation lies a deeper question: whether Trump campaign officials and people close to the former reality TV star sought to work with state players in Russia to try to influence the US election result. 
 
 Last July, Farage attended the Republican national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, when Trump became the party’s nominee. 
 
 According to an account by the Ukip donor Arron Banks, Farage first met Trump at a campaign stop in Mississippi in August, where he spoke at a Trump campaign event. 
 
 
 
 But Farage’s relationships with people close to the US president began years earlier. Farage first met Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist and former campaign chief executive, in the summer of 2012, when Bannon, who was interested in rightwing movements in Europe, invited the then Ukip leader to spend a few days in New York and Washington, according to an account in the New Yorker magazine. 
 
 There Farage was introduced to, among others, the staff of the then senator Jeff Sessions, who is now the US attorney general. Speaking of his longtime admiration for Bannon, Farage told the New Yorker last year: “I have got a very, very high regard for that man’s brain.” 
 
 Two years later, in 2014, Breitbart News, of which Bannon was executive chair, opened an office in London. A top editor, Raheem Kassam, later went on to work as Farage’s chief of staff. 
 
 In 2015, Breitbart News arranged a dinner in Farage’s honour at “the embassy”, the nickname for the house the news group rented in Washington. According to a report in Bloomberg, attendees were “blown away” by Farage’s speech at the event, which was also attended by Sessions. 
 
 Then, on 24 June last year, the day after the UK voted to leave the EU, Farage thanked Bannon during an interview for Breitbart News’s coverage of the leave campaign. Bannon, in turn, congratulated Farage on his victory, saying he had led an extraordinary “David v Goliath” campaign. 
 
 Farage’s ties to Stone are also under scrutiny, it is understood. Stone has frequently publicised his relationship with Assange and described him on Twitter as “my hero”. 
 
 
 
 Stone publicly predicted the 2016 release of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign that now lie at the heart of the federal inquiry. Democrats on the House intelligence committee have named Stone in their hearings and, according to the New York Times, he is now under investigation. 
 
 
 
 Last summer, just a few weeks before Farage met Trump in Mississippi, Stone bragged about having a “mutual friend” who served as an intermediary between himself and Assange. He also mentioned in a separate tweet that he had dinner with Farage, though the date of the encounter is unclear. 
 
 
 
 After Trump’s victory, Farage was one of the first foreign politicians to meet and celebrate with the Republican president-elect, and had his picture taken with Trump in front of a golden elevator in Trump Tower just days after the US election. 
 
 
 
 Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) It was a great honour to spend time with @realDonaldTrump. He was relaxed and full of good ideas. I'm confident he will be a good President. pic.twitter.com/kx8cGRHYPQ 
 
 In November, Trump suggested in a tweet Farage should become the UK’s ambassador to the US. 
 
 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job! 
 
 The tweet prompted a curt response from Downing Street, which pointed out that there was “no vacancy”. A spokesman said: “We already have an excellent ambassador.” 
 
 The pair met again in February, when they had dinner together with Trump’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka, and her husband and White House adviser, Jared Kushner. 
 
 
 
 Farage was asked about his relationship with Assange in a recent interview with Die Zeit, the German newspaper, after he was seen on 9 March leaving the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange has lived for years. Farage, who declared he had “never received a penny from Russia”, said he met Assange for “journalistic reasons”. 
 
 Pressed on his meetings with Russian officials in the past, Farage initially denied having had any, but then acknowledged that he had met Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to the UK, in 2013. 
 
 Asked by Die Zeit what he was doing now, and whether he saw himself as a politician or a journalist, Farage concluded: “Changing public opinion. That’s what I have been doing for 20 years. Using television, media. Shifting public opinion. That’s what I am good at.” 
 
 A spokesman for Farage told the Guardian he had only met Assange on that one occasion. “The meeting was organised by a broadcaster, they could have easily sent another presenter instead.” 
 
 
 
 Key players in Russia-Trump investigation 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Donald Trump 
 
 The US president’s campaign team and people close to him are being investigated for possibly colluding with Russian state actors to influence the outcome of last November’s election. Trump, who has called the investigation “fake news” and recently fired the FBI director leading the case, was a staunch defender of Farage’s Brexit campaign and has met the former Ukip leader, whom he proposed several times as a possible UK ambassador to the US. While Trump recently said he would be OK with the US arresting Assange for leaks of sensitive information, he has previously sided with the Wikileaks founder, repeating Assange’s claim that he did not receive support from Russia. 
 
 Nigel Farage 
 
 The former Ukip leader was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign and attended the 2016 Republican national convention. He also has links with Steve Bannon, Trump’s White House strategist, and Roger Stone, the president’s decades-long political mentor. Farage has praised Vladimir Putin as a strong leader and has appeared several times on RT, Russia’s English-language propaganda channel. Farage has declined to say how much money RT paid him. Sources say Farage is a “person of interest” in the FBI’s investigation into whether Trump’s associates colluded with Russia during the presidential election. 
 
 Steve Bannon 
 
 The president’s chief White House strategist, who served as chief executive of the Trump campaign, has known Farage since 2012, when he was working as a senior editor at Breitbart News, the rightwing news website. The former investment banker – seen as the driving force behind Trump’s “America First” nationalist policies – hosted Farage in the US while he was leading Ukip and introduced him to key US conservatives. Breitbart strongly supported the leave campaign during the EU referendum in the UK and Bannon is seen as the main conduit between Trump and Farage. 
 
 Roger Stone 
 
 The Republican operative, who has known Trump for decades, is at the centre of the FBI investigation. Stone, who reportedly keeps in touch with Trump, boasted last year that he had a “back channel” to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, and predicted the release by Wikileaks of emails that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Last summer, Stone tweeted that he had dinner with Farage – confirming the pair’s relationship – and had contact with Guccifer 2.0, who claimed responsibility for the hacking of Democratic party emails. 
 
 Julian Assange 
 
 The editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks played a key role in the release of hacked Democratic party emails, according to US intelligence agencies. They allege Russian hackers working for two Moscow spy agencies – the GRU and the FSB – gave the emails to Assange in London. WikiLeaks then published the leaked emails in July and October. This damaged Clinton’s campaign and helped Trump’s, US intelligence says. Assange denies the emails came from a state. In March, Farage visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, just days after he had dined with Trump in Washington. ||||| Update, 7/13/2018: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office identified Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian intelligence officer and indicted him along with 11 other officers for crimes related to the alleged hacking of Democrats in 2016. 
 
 Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft. 
 
 That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team. 
 
 While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime. 
 
 Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself. 
 
 “ The attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency brings the investigation closer to the Kremlin’s doorstep—and to Trump himself. ” 
 
 Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter’s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to “Stop Blaming Russia” for the hack. “I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.” 
 
 Five months later, in January 2017, the CIA, NSA, and FBI assessed “with high confidence” that “Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data.” But the assessment did not directly call Guccifer a Russian intelligence officer. Nor did it provide any evidence for its assertions. 
 
 It turns out there is a powerful reason to connect Guccifer to the GRU. 
 
 Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months—conspicuously ending right as Trump took office and not resuming—the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark. As Stone’s Breitbart piece demonstrated, Guccifer provided Moscow with a counter-narrative for the election interference. 
 
 Guccifer famously pretended to be a “lone hacker” who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional. 
 
 “Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.” 
 
 Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke worked on an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia. 
 
 “ Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. ” 
 
 But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter. 
 
 Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.) 
 
 Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running “Fancy Bear,” the 10-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and military and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. 
 
 Timestamps in Guccifer 2.0’s first leaks show they were packaged for release over the course of a single day in June 2016, beginning just hours after the DNC intrusion and its attribution to Russia were made public. The moniker was an homage to Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel, who as “Guccifer” achieved notoriety in 2013 for a string of hacks against celebrities and politicians. 
 
 In his inaugural blog post, Guccifer 2.0 disputed Russia’s involvement and claimed credit personally for the DNC breach, positioning himself as a one-man hacking operation working to expose “the Illuminati.” The post included the world’s first glimpse of the enormous cache of documents siphoned from the DNC’s network, including the Democrats’ opposition research report on Trump. Presaging the leaks that would roil the election, Guccifer 2.0 declared that he’d already sent the bulk of the stolen material to WikiLeaks—which has spent the time since obfuscating whether Guccifer was its source. 
 
 On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing its cache of approximately 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments stolen in the hack. While Trump promoted the leak on Twitter and in rallies, his surrogate Roger Stone pushed back against the Kremlin attribution. In his August 2016 article for Breitbart, he argued that Guccifer 2.0 was the Romanian hacktivist he claimed to be. “Guccifer 2.0 is the real deal,” he wrote. 
 
 Last May, Stone admitted that he’d also exchanged direct messages with the Guccifer 2.0 persona, and he released what he claimed was a complete transcript of his communications with the account. The transcript is brief and banal, showing Stone congratulating Guccifer 2.0 on returning to Twitter after a brief suspension, and then mostly ignoring him. Then and since, Stone has consistently denied that Guccifer was connected to the Kremlin. 
 
 “I myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them,” he wrote. 
 
 “ I myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them. ” — Roger Stone 
 
 Guccifer 2.0 maintained a sporadic online presence throughout the election, posting to his dedicated WordPress blog and on Twitter, and spilling more DNC documents, sometimes in private emails to journalists. 
 
 While the national election clearly interested him (“Democrats prepare new provocation against Trump,” he thundered in October 2016), Guccifer 2.0 reached down the ballot as well, posting documents from the Democrats’ national campaign committee on his WordPress blog. There, readers could find internal Democratic candidate assessments relevant to battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida; internal assessments of key congressional districts, with granular analyses of their demographics; and campaign recruitment material. 
 
 The GRU officer was eager to share this trove, as well. A GOP political operative in Florida, Aaron Nevins, DM’d Guccifer 2.0 a request for “any Florida based information” and received 2.5 gigabytes’ worth, according to The Wall Street Journal. The data, he enthused to Guccifer 2.0, was “probably worth millions of dollars.” A consultant for a successful Florida Republican congressional candidate told the paper, “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.” 
 
 Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0’s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English than the persona’s earlier efforts. 
 
 “It’s obvious that the intelligence agencies are deliberately falsifying evidence,” the post read. “In my opinion, they’re playing into the hands of the Democrats who are trying to blame foreign actors for their failure.” 
 
 (Contrast that with the language from a June 2016 post: “I made some conclusions from the Marcel’s story and decided not to put all eggs in one basket. Moreover, other cases weren’t so successful and didn’t bring me the glory.”) 
 
 Today the most popular counter-narrative surrounding Guccifer 2.0 concedes that the account was a fake persona but posits that it was created by the DNC to support a false-flag operation implicating Russia. In this theory, advanced in two widely cited anonymous blogs, Guccifer 2.0 was the DNC posing as Russia posing as a Romanian hacker. ||||| Wednesday night, CNN dropped what seemed like a bombshell of a story: “The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign,” reported CNN’s Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, and Shimon Prokupecz. 
 
 The FBI’s evidence reportedly includes “human intelligence, travel, business and phone records, and accounts of in-person meetings.” 
 
 The notion that the Trump team may have coordinated its strategy with Russian intelligence has been alleged for a while now, but so far any actual evidence of this has been circumstantial at best. We already knew that members of Trump’s campaign had spoken to Russian intelligence officials, for example, but we didn’t know what they had talked about. 
 
 This is why CNN’s report seems so stunning: It is the first such report suggesting that the FBI may have credible information — say, an account of a meeting where collusion was discussed, to give one wholly hypothetical example — of a possible Trump campaign–Russia plot against Hillary Clinton. 
 
 To be clear, none of this has been confirmed. All the sources CNN quotes in the story are anonymous US officials. We don’t know who these people are or whether they have accurate information. The officials, according to CNN, even cautioned that “the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.” 
 
 Here, then, is a brief guide to what we know — and what we still don’t know — to help you catch up to where we are in this whole saga. 
 
 Why these allegations are plausible: the extensive ties between Trumpworld and the Kremlin 
 
 We’ve known for a while that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and top Clinton ally John Podesta. We’ve also known for a while that Russia leaked this information, using WikiLeaks and other proxies, in order to damage Clinton and strengthen Trump. The US intelligence community released a declassified report summarizing many of these findings. 
 
 We’ve also been steadily learning, for some time, about shady connections between Trumpworld and the Kremlin. This, combined with the knowledge about the hack, is what gave rise to suspicions of coordination in the first place. This means there are any number of potential individuals who could have been responsible for the alleged coordination, if any did indeed take place. 
 
 Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager at the time the first emails went public, has longstanding ties to the Russian state. He resigned in late August 2016 — right in the middle of the campaign — after a secret ledger was discovered with his name in it, suggesting he had quietly received $12.7 million between 2007 and 2012 from Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovych. 
 
 Just this week, evidence emerged that Manafort had, as recently as 2009, been paid by a Russian oligarch to lobby on behalf of the Kremlin in Washington. 
 
 Also in August, longtime conservative political operative and close Trump confidant Roger Stone said he was in touch with WikiLeaks, the source through which Russia released the hacked emails to the public. On October 2, Stone sent a tweet hinting he had inside knowledge that WikiLeaks was about to torpedo Clinton’s campaign: 
 
 Stone, we learned in early March, had been in direct contact with an entity named Guccifer 2.0, a pseudonym that the Russians who hacked Clinton’s allies had used. But the messages that had been uncovered so far did not reveal any direct coordination on campaign strategy or knowledge, on Stone’s part, that Guccifer 2.0 was Russian intelligence. 
 
 Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whose dissembling about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak got him fired, was a Trump foreign policy surrogate during the campaign. Before that, he had been a paid contributor to the Russian propaganda channel RT; in 2015, he had been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Russian companies for speeches, a fact he never disclosed and that was only revealed by congressional oversight documents released in March. 
 
 Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a foreign policy adviser to Trump during the election, had also met with Ambassador Kislyak twice during the 2016 campaign. This is despite the fact that Sessions said in his confirmation hearing, “I did not have communications with the Russians” — while under oath. The disclosure forced Sessions to recuse himself from any involvement in the FBI’s Russia investigation. 
 
 Another loose Trump campaign associate, Carter Page, had been in and out of Russia for nearly two decades. He had repeatedly and publicly defended Russian foreign policy and was under FBI investigation for suspicious links to the Kremlin as early as September 2016. 
 
 The new CNN report didn’t name any names, so we don’t know which of these men (if any) are the ones potentially implicated by the FBI’s information. (Though Sessions, then a sitting senator with no formal campaign strategy responsibilities, is certainly an unlikely candidate.) 
 
 But the broader, and more important, point is that Trump’s inner circle over the campaign was made up, in large part, of people with suspicious ties to the Russian state. The notion that one of them might be in contact with Russian intelligence and the Russian state, and might have used the information they got from their contacts to shape campaign strategy, isn’t totally far-fetched. 
 
 Trump himself didn’t do much to dispel the notion that his campaign might be connected to Russia, with his effusive praise of Vladimir Putin and expressed willingness to work with Russia in Syria. And he actually seemed to encourage Russian involvement in the election. In a July 2016 press conference, Trump’s final presser of the campaign, he publicly called on Russia to hack Clinton and publish emails from her private server. 
 
 "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press." 
 
 Finally, there was at least one allegation of collaboration prior to CNN’s report. A dubious dossier put together by a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, claims there was an “extensive conspiracy” between Trump and the Russians to weaken the Clinton campaign. The evidence comes entirely from testimony from anonymous sources, with little identifiable corroboration, and thus was seen as very far from conclusive by US intelligence. 
 
 “Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy between them and the Russian leadership,” Steele writes in the dossier. “This was managed of the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT.” 
 
 If it all checks out, the implications literally couldn’t be bigger 
 
 It’s important not to jump to conclusions here. 
 
 The information that we’re getting is thirdhand at best: CNN’s summary of unnamed US intelligence officials’ summary of evidence they had acquired from unnamed sources. We don’t know nearly enough to evaluate the quality of CNN’s sources or the quality of the intelligence they’re basing their conclusions on. 
 
 But CNN’s report does seem to dovetail with comments made earlier in the day by Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, that the evidence of Trump-Russia collusion had become more direct than was publicly known. 
 
 "I can't go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” Schiff said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball. 
 
 If this all turns out to be true, and someone associated with the Trump campaign was in league with the Russians, this would turn the already serious scandal swirling around Trump’s Russia ties into a national crisis. 
 
 “If [there’s] coordination, then this scandal becomes Watergate-like,” Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, tweeted. 
 
 In Watergate, individuals connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign attempted to steal sensitive information from the Democratic National Committee headquarters, presumably to find compromising information that could be used to help Nixon’s campaign. This would be basically the same thing, only done digitally and with the help of a hostile foreign power. 
 
 The debate would then turn, as it did in Watergate, to two basic questions: What did the president know, and when did he know it? 
 
 The CNN report gives us no indication whatsoever about Trump’s personal involvement. It carefully refers to the “Trump campaign” without naming specific individuals who are suspected of coordinating with the Russians. But even if Trump wasn’t involved in the coordination itself, it would still be in an issue if he found out about it later and covered it up, as Nixon did in the Watergate scandal. 
 
 Right now, we honestly don’t know which of the three possible scenarios is most likely: no collusion with Russia, collusion without Trump’s knowledge, or collusion with Trump’s knowledge. And that, in and of itself, is worrying. 
 
 The notion that a US president could be involved in something like this should seem preposterous. The fact that the FBI may have evidence that it could be true speaks volumes about where America is as a country right now. ||||| Story highlights Stone said it's "naive" to think the intelligence community isn't politicized 
 
 Stone has long assumed that he's under surveillance 
 
 (CNN) A longtime Donald Trump associate who has became a recurring topic in conversations about the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian officials said that the US intelligence community has become "politicized." 
 
 Political adviser Roger Stone was asked Tuesday if he thought Americans should stop trusting recommendations from the intelligence community. 
 
 "To think that our intelligence community has not been politicized would be naive," he said on CBS "This Morning." 
 
 Stone said he does not think Trump should apologize or admit that he was wrong for making unsubstantiated claims that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the presidential election. FBI Director James Comey said Monday he had "no information" to support the President's accusations. 
 
 "The people you are referring to are the same people that said there were weapons of mass destruction and (Saddam) Hussein had them, who lied about rendition, who lied about torture at Abu Ghraib," Stone said. 
 
 Read More
– With Monday's news the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign, it's a good time to get the know the man who stands a good chance of being at the center of the investigation. Roger Stone, a Republican strategist who's championed a Trump presidency for three decades, has been accused of colluding with Russian agents to make that happen. Here's what you need to know: To start with, the New York Times has a profile of the man who calls himself a "dirty trickster," has a massive Nixon back tattoo, claims he's survived a recent assassination attempt, and says he's playing a character. CBS News reports Stone denies any sort of collusion with Russia regarding the 2016 election. And Stone says he hasn't spoken to the FBI as part of its investigation into communication between Trump camp and Russians, though he's long assumed he himself has been under investigation, according to Politico. Heavy has a list of five facts about Stone, including that he acknowledges being in communication with Gufficer 2.0, the hacker who took credit for data breaches within the DNC ahead of the election. Stone also claims to have a direct line of communication with Julian Assange and has repeatedly said he knows about WikiLeaks releases before they happen, CNN reports. Also according to CNN, Stone accuses the US intelligence community of being "politicized" and says Americans shouldn't trust it, especially when it claims there's no evidence Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. Finally, New York wonders what's up with Stone's bizarre sartorial choices—such as this outfit, or this one—that have been keeping Twitter busy in recent days.