Just after 1 pm on Friday afternoon, a five-alarm Washington Post headline slashed through what had already been a noisy news day: “Congressional Leaders, Trump Reach Tentative Deal to Temporarily Reopen Government Without Wall Funds, According to Hill Officials.” The gist, later confirmed by Donald Trump himself in a rambling Rose Garden statement, was simple: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wins again.

The deal as struck is virtually identical to the one he was offered 35 days ago, and was essentially the clean continuing resolution defeated Thursday in the Senate (despite earning six Republican votes): Open the government for three weeks, period; no money for Trump’s border wall or anything else. After a day that saw air travel to LaGuardia and other East Coast airports disrupted because of staffing shortages, Trump chose to cut bait on his base and back down, finally.

It was, in no uncertain terms, a historic humiliation both for the president and for the congressional Republicans who empowered and enabled him throughout this debacle. I am looking at you, Mitch McConnell.

The final vote and signature on Friday night served as an exclamation point at the end of an incredible, unprecedented week that began with several White House officials, including the president, trying to commiserate with furloughed federal workers and failing in grisly fashion. An old friend of mine who made a lifelong career as a commercial real estate attorney twigged me to something noteworthy buried within another of Trump’s jousting matches with the English language.

Attempting to defend Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s genuinely awful “I-don’t-geddit” statement about furloughed workers seeking food assistance, Trump said:

Ross, then Lara Trump, then Larry “just-a-glitch” Kudlow and then Trump himself, all lined up to show everyone what it sounds like when someone who has never known anything but wealth and privilege tries to locate the concept of being flat busted. Watching these bent silver spoons vomiting ersatz empathy on us lesser mortals was a bit like listening to a frog trying to explain to a tadpole what it’s like on dry land.

The kicker, though, is that bold couplet noted above: work along. “A ‘work along’ was a term that I remember being used in the commercial real estate development business when a developer was in trouble with the lender,” my lawyer friend told me. “As I recall, a ‘work along’ was the attempt to negotiate a payment plan that would keep the developer out of foreclosure. I’m sure Trump knows this term intimately.”

Indeed. The closest Trump can come to giving financial advice to people living paycheck to paycheck is a.) Ask the grocery store to give you free food, and b.) Ask your creditors for a “work along” like he did whenever one of his real estate projects (see: Atlantic City) failed to prosper. Had Trump gone on in this vein much longer, even money says he would have advised the furloughed workers to just declare bankruptcy and be done with it. After all, it worked for him a whole bunch of times.

Had this been the low point of Trump’s week, we could have written it off merely as more predictable static from a broken radio… but no, oh no, this episode was merely an accent in the symphony of shame and disgrace that is the soundtrack of our lives these days.

Trump’s television-attorney-and-slapstick-quote-machine Rudy Giuliani spent the week warping reality into bold new shapes, to the shuddering dismay of the White House. Giuliani began by stating Trump was neck-deep in talks to build a Trump Tower in Moscow throughout the 2016 election, thus implicating his client in a blizzard of possible crimes before later claiming his words were “hypothetical.” Attempting to swat down the bombshell BuzzFeed report claiming Trump directly instructed his bagman Michael Cohen to mislead Congress, Giuliani said he had “been through all the tapes” and knew the story was false. When the world went “WAIT WHAT TAPES?” Giuliani backtracked again, saying, “I shouldn’t have said ‘tapes.’”

All this led to the following line from Newsweek that deserves to be enshrined in the Surreal Journalism Hall of Fame: “Republicans close to the White House told the AP they believe Giuliani may be appearing on TV after drinking alcohol, so he should be banned from evening appearances on news shows.” All in all, it was not a towering week for the president’s most prominent mouthpiece.

The week was not done with Mr. Trump, however. On Thursday, Speaker Pelosi conclusively reminded the president that sitting down with her at a poker table is a perilous undertaking. It began days before, with Pelosi informing Trump that he should delay the State of the Union speech until the government shutdown was ended, for security reasons. Trump responded by trashing her overseas trip and then flatly stated he was coming anyway.

Then came the fun part. “I am writing to inform you,” wrote Pelosi in a message that was delivered with a bag of rusty razor blades and a live hand grenade, “that the House of Representatives will not consider a concurrent resolution authorizing the President’s State of the Union address in the House Chamber until government has opened.” Trump fed Pelosi’s blunt door-slam through his Reality Transmogrification Machine and coughed up this gibberish onto his own carpet:

Full disclosure: I am one of those who argued, in the run-up to the swearing-in of this new Congress, that the Democratic Party would do well to avail itself of a new generation of leaders who are champing at the proverbial bit to get some serious work done. Not immediately, I said, but soon, and I stand by that assessment.

That being said, Pelosi’s stewardship of the new House Democratic majority has been nothing short of spectacular. From the government shutdown to her brinksmanship over the State of the Union, Pelosi has made chasing Trump up a tree into an absolute art form. One might argue that the Speaker found the uprising on her left flank to be motivational and has acted accordingly, but this is only supposition. The fact is Pelosi made Trump fold his State of the Union cards so forcefully that he broke the table and spilled his dwindling pile of chips all over the floor right in front of the whole wide world. It was a powerful thing to see.

Then came sunrise on Friday morning in Florida, which shone down gamely on the arrest of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. Many have been waiting for this particular shoe to drop, and when it did, the president of the United States was compelled to do a fair imitation of a panicked Titanic passenger who just realized the last lifeboat was floating away:

Stone, who has been sharing a brain with Trump for years, was indicted by Robert Mueller on one count of obstruction, one count of witness tampering and five counts of making false statements. His apparent dalliance with online Russian front man Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks, combined with his serial denials that he passed illicitly gained information about Hillary Clinton on to the Trump campaign, has come back to land on him with a meaty thud. Of note: The FBI agents who arrested Stone did so without pay.

As the morning turned to afternoon on Friday, we were all left to ponder the next chapter of the Russia investigation. Michael Flynn, then Cohen, then Paul Manafort (who also made a court appearance on Friday) and now Stone have all been laid low by Mr. Mueller, which begs the $64,000 question: Who’s next? Jared Kushner, maybe? Ivanka, Don Jr. and/or Eric Trump, perhaps? Each and every one of them have skin in the game at this point, and there aren’t many non-family members left for Mueller to indict. This ladder, like all ladders, goes up.

In the span of a week, Trump and his people did a fair impression of Marie Antoinette before the guillotine clanged down. The speaker of the House ate Trump’s lunch and denied him the pomp and circumstance of the State of the Union he so desperately craves. His most publicly visible attorney and spokesman dropped their legal defense into a blender and hit “puree,” and yet another of his closest confidants is now facing the choice between flipping for Mueller or going to prison.

Then, on Friday afternoon, Trump abruptly folded on the shutdown fight. Why? The airline crisis may well have been a factor. Ditto his plummeting poll numbers. Perhaps he was motivated by nothing more profound than a desire to give the State of the Union speech and bask in its artificial applause one more time. As of this printing, he didn’t even get that.

After a grueling week of bruising setbacks, this was — despite all his Rose Garden bluster — another Brobdingnagian defeat for Trump. The Republican Party is in shambles. Trump’s hasty retreat has sent much of his base into paroxysms of betrayed rage, and is another shining victory for Speaker Pelosi. Here’s to more of the same hopefully coming in these next three weeks.</s>President Donald Trump on Friday sought a meek end to the government shutdown he famously said he would own, on terms Democrats demanded from the start.

It was a stark acknowledgment of political failure by a president who claims to never back down. The border wall he built his campaign on is all but gone as a realistic prospect now – crumbling along with the façade that Trump’s sheer force of personality could bend Washington to his will.

Appearing in the White House Rose Garden Friday afternoon, Trump said he was celebrating “a deal.” But it was telling that he stood alone, as he surrendered by accepting the same offer Democrats put on the table weeks ago.

Between a postponed State of the Union address and the spending capitulation, Trump twice this week blinked in a showdown with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He managed to unite Democrats and anger portions of his base – Ann Coulter quickly labeled him “the biggest wimp to ever serve as President of the United States” - while keeping open the possibility of doing it all over again in three weeks’ time.

Add in an indictment of longtime Trump political associate Roger Stone, courtesy of special counsel Robert Mueller, plus the economic and human damage from the shutdown, and the week left Trump diminished, hemmed in, and desperate to turn the page.

Trump’s political instincts and his go-to methods of communicating directly with the American people failed him. A new ABC News-Washington Post poll released Friday saw his approval rating drop to 37 percent, with approval of Pelosi and the Democrats’ handling of the shutdown outpacing his own handling by 20 points.

Along the way of this extraordinary 35 days, Trump and his administration appeared out-of-touch with the difficulties faced by 800,000 federal workers who have gone more than a month without paychecks. He singled out for thanks the “many” he claimed “encouraged me to keep going forward,” but that was a Trump-created construct that didn’t fit with the realities the nation saw.

Washington’s realities, meanwhile, have imposed themselves on Trump. Pelosi emerges as a hero to Democrats, barely three weeks into a speakership where she anticipated difficulties in taming new voices on the party’s aggressive left.

“No one should ever underestimate the speaker, as Donald Trump has learned,” Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer, Trump’s fellow New Yorker, offered Friday.

For all of this, Trump bought himself just 21 days of spending peace. The president said he sees a “good chance” of striking a deal in the coming three weeks, but added that he doesn’t get what he insists on, “obviously we’ll do the emergency because that’s what it is – it’s a national emergency.”

That’s a fraught and legally dubious path that even many Trump loyalists dismiss as a terrible precedent that would almost certainly be held up by federal courts. Trump, though, spent most of his time in the Rose Garden making the same case he’s been making for weeks – or years, in some cases – about the need for a wall he was not and almost certainly will not be getting.

Virtually all government shutdowns seem rather pointless in retrospect – the product of unrealistic ambitions and expectations colliding with stubborn realities.

Trump once famously declared, in outlining his case for election, “I alone can fix it.” His Washington now stands horribly broken, and he walks away alone from a damaging shutdown’s wreckage, having accomplished nothing.</s>Ex-Trump adviser Roger Stone arrested as part of Mueller probe

Stone blasted the special counsel's investigation as "politically motivated" and said he would plead not guilty to the charges against him after his court appearance.</s>SANTA ANA PUEBLO, NEW MEXICO — On Day 35 of the partial government shutdown and hours after another one of his associates was charged in the ongoing Russia investigation, the Republican National Committee unanimously committed on Friday to give President Donald Trump its "undivided support" — an unusual move party officials could not recall making for other incumbent presidents.



At its first set of meetings of the 2020 election cycle, Republican Party officials rallied around Trump and shared with its members how closely aligned the re-election campaign will be with the party committee in structure, staff, and messaging, members attending the closed-door meetings told BuzzFeed News. The committee also revealed a new program called "Project GROW" that would give state parties incentives for hitting certain metrics such as voter contact, voter registration, volunteer training, and fundraising that would ultimately benefit Trump and down-ballot Republicans ahead of 2020, according to three members.

During the three-day meeting — with most sessions closed to press — at a luxury resort in the Native American Santa Ana Pueblo, members also defended the president's position on the border wall and shrugged off any concerns regarding the special counsel's investigation. Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone was indicted and arrested early Friday morning — just hours before Republican officials fully committed themselves to Trump.

Instead, RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, who was elected to a second term on Friday, repeatedly praised Trump in a speech for nominating conservative judges across the country, and for passing tax cuts and criminal justice reform. Her speech, which also had a “10-year-challenge” comparison between the Obama and Trump administrations, included only a fleeting reference to the government shutdown and no mention of the wall, Trump’s top priority.

“Democrats refuse to work with President Trump,” McDaniel said in her speech. “He has offered them a fair deal to secure our southern border and reopen our government...Nancy Pelosi, it’s not the House of Resistance, it’s the House of Representatives. Do your job."

“It’s not just the Democrats. Look at the way the media attacks the president despite everything he has done for this country.”

Shortly after McDaniel brought RNC members to their feet clapping and cheering with her closing line — “Together we will reelect Donald J. Trump in 2020” — members passed the resolution offering the president “undivided support” for his “effective presidency.” The resolution also called Trump “a bold and innovative communicator” and a “courageous leader.”

Bringing up such a resolution itself was out of the norm for the RNC, several members told BuzzFeed News, and followed a failed effort from Jevon Williams, a delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, to pass a more explicit resolution calling for the party to endorse Trump as its nominee for 2020. Williams began pushing the RNC to take action after Utah Sen. Mitt Romney published an op-ed criticizing the president in The Washington Post.

In an email to members obtained by BuzzFeed News ahead of this week's meeting, Williams said the resolution was "necessary because too many so-called Republicans use our party's name and collaborate with the liberal mainstream media to sow the seeds of disunity."

"We must send the message that we support President Trump for re-nomination," the email said. "Simply stating our support for his presidency, as some would have us do, is not enough. The failure to pass a resolution supporting his re-nomination and re-election will be seen by some as a sign that we would welcome Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan or another Never Trumper challenging President Trump in the primaries, caucuses and conventions."

Williams' resolution was never brought up, and several RNC members told BuzzFeed News they were wary of considering a resolution they thought was unnecessary and legally problematic.

"It was foolishly drafted and not well thought out," said Ron Kaufman, a longtime RNC member from Massachusetts.

Williams declined to comment, but earlier this week, he tweeted a photo of a letter he received from Trump for his efforts.

John Weaver, an adviser to former Republican Gov. John Kasich, who has not ruled out a 2020 bid, responded to the resolution, as Stone was arrested in Florida on Friday. https://twitter.com/jwgop/status/1088777531610877952

The RNC and Trump campaign’s united front is a drastic change from the 2016 election cycle, when the two had a more tumultuous relationship, including some failed efforts from the “Never Trump” members of the party plotting to keep the now-president from sealing the party’s nomination.

"There's been a notable lack of chatter,” said Morton Blackwell, a RNC member from Virginia. “Things tend to just proceed unanimously — that's predictable for the RNC when a Republican controls the White House.”

Both the party committee and RNC have also blessed a new effort called Patriot Pass, which is aimed at boosting small-dollar donations in a more centralized way and competing with Democrats who have been using ActBlue, a digital fundraising platform, to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Members brought up the new program, which was first revealed by Politico, on the sidelines of the meetings as a necessary step for Trump and others to compete in 2020.

Aside from the resolution, RNC members also told BuzzFeed News that they were standing by the president amid the historic government shutdown, indictments, and his plummeting approval ratings.

"This committee understands very well that policy-wise the president has accomplished a great deal and while there may be some differences of opinions on the technique, there are no differences of opinion on the end policy," Kaufman said, adding that there had been little talk of the shutdown at the meeting because they "had no control over it."

"We're a tactical organization," he said. "We reinforce the message from the White House."

Ada Fisher, a committeewoman from North Carolina, called any discussion of concerns regarding the president a "non-issue" — even during the shutdown. "I feel sorry for the people not getting paid," she said. "But sometimes you have to take a hard stance. This also ought to be a good chance to at right sizing the government. Do we really need people in all those jobs?"

Asked by BuzzFeed News about any concerns regarding action from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, a GOP state party leader attending the meetings just yelled: “Fuck no.”

RNC members also pivoted quickly to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when pressed on the president’s position on the shutdown. Their meetings coincided with Trump announcing he would wait until the government reopened to give his State of the Union address after Pelosi blocked his request to do so during the shutdown.

"We would like to see Speaker Pelosi listen to (Trump),” said Henry Barbour, a RNC member from Mississippi, “and not just reject things.”

Barbour and other members also pointed to the increasingly liberal Democratic base and the high number of Democrats jumping into the presidential race in contrast to their united front with an incumbent president.

Some Republican officials were already sporting a new pin: A small, square-shaped one with “TRUMP 2020” emblazoned on it in bright red.</s>SPECIAL REPORT: Roger Stone speaks after being indicted in Mueller probe

Roger Stone, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, makes his first court appearance following his arrest on charges of of obstruction, giving false statements and witness tampering. Despite being indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, Stone has consistently denied collusion.</s>Washington — Roger Stone, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, has been arrested and charged with seven counts, according to a grand jury indictment that was made public by US special counsel Robert Mueller's office on Friday.

Stone, who was indicted in Florida on Thursday, faces one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements and one count of witness tampering, according to the Special Counsel's Office.</s>Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to US President Donald Trump, was arrested Friday under an indictment issued by the special counsel examining possible collusion with Russia.

Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office.

The indictment concerns Stone's communications with with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose group leaked tens of thousands of stolen Democratic Party emails that embarrassed Trump's rival Hillary Clinton in an apparent bid to influence the election.

It was the first indictment in months by the special prosecutor probing Russian efforts to tip the 2016 US election toward Trump and whether he and his people tried to obstruct justice.

FBI agents arrested Stone at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida before dawn, and he is due in federal court there later in the day. His lawyer did not immediately respond to questions for comment.

Stone, who launched his career as a campaign aide to Richard Nixon and has a tattoo on his back of the first US president to resign from office, has spent decades advising various US political campaigns.

He was one of the first members of Trump's team when the billionaire real estate magnate formally announced he was seeking office, but he left months later over a dispute.

The two men, however, remained in close contact, the indictment underlying that Stone "maintained regular contact with and publicly supported the Trump Campaign through the 2016 election."

Stone had previously said he was ready to face possible charges from Mueller's team, and publicly taunted the special counsel, echoing Trump's claims of a "witch hunt."

"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," he told NBC's "Meet The Press" in May.

"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."

Stone has also previously insisted that he would never testify against Trump.

"There's no circumstance under which I would testify against the president, because I'd have to bear false witness against him," he told ABC's "This Week" in December. "I'd have to make things up, and I'm not going to do that."</s>Roger Stone, a long-time associate of US president Donald Trump, was charged with obstruction and witness tampering on Friday, becoming the latest figure to be indicted by special counsel, Robert Mueller.

Mr Stone was arrested by the FBI shortly before daybreak on Friday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

He later appeared at a federal court where he was released on bail on a $250,000 bond.

Speaking outside the court, Mr Stone protested his innocence: “I will plead not guilty to these charges. I will defeat them in court,” he said to the assembled crowd.

Some shouted “Lock him up”, a reference to Mr Stone’s taunting of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The 66-year-old political operative said there was no evidence of collusion with Russia, adding: “I am a fervent supporter of the president. I think he is doing a great job of making America great again... There’s no circumstance under which I would bear false witness to the president.”

He made a double “v” sign as he addressed the crowd, a symbol that appeared to recall Richard Nixon’s famous gesture as he left the White House for the last time after his resignation in 1974.

Mr Stone worked for Nixon’s campaign in the early days of his career and famously has a tattoo of the former president on his back.

Mr Stone was charged with seven counts, according to the indictment: one count of obstructing an official proceeding, one count of witness tampering and five counts of false statements.

The court documents shed light on a key issue that has dogged Mr Stone in recent months – what he knew about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server by Russian intelligence in 2016, which led to the release of documents by Wikileaks.

The email hack, which contained damaging information about Mrs Clinton, played a central role in the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The documents state that Mr Stone told “senior Trump campaign officials” about the emails between June and July of 2016.

After the first batch of emails were released by Wikileaks on July 22nd, it is claimed that a senior campaign official was directed to ask Mr Stone to find out information about possible further damaging information about Mrs Clinton that might be forthcoming.

The documents show that these interactions continued into the autumn, revealing email exchanges between Mr Stone and former Trump aide Steven Bannon, as well as with Donald Trump jnr in October, just before 6,000 emails relating to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were released.

Prior to the 2016 election, Mr Stone suggested several times in public comments that he had advance knowledge of the email leak.

In a tweet in October 2016, he seemed to suggest that he knew that the Podesta leak was imminent.

“I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon. #LockHerUp” he tweeted.

The emails were released later that week.

Mr Stone’s indictment provides the strongest link yet between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks’ efforts to disrupt the Clinton campaign.

A colourful figure who has been well known in the US political scene since his work for the Nixon administration in the 1970s, Mr Stone’s friendship with Mr Trump stretches back decades.

He worked as a formal adviser to Mr Trump in 2015, continuing to advise him in a more informal capacity during the presidential campaign.

He is the 33rd person to be indicted in relation to the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the sixth Trump associate to be charged.

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Mr Trump, said the indictment showed no evidence of collusion. “The indictment today does not allege Russian collusion by Roger Stone or anyone else. Rather, the indictment focuses on alleged false statements made to Congress.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought to broadly distance Mr Trump from the charges. “The charges brought against Mr Stone have nothing to do with the president,” she said.

In a morning tweet, Mr Trump appeared to lash out at the investigation, questioning how CNN, which aired footage of the FBI raid on Mr Stone’s home, had known in advance of the arrest.

“Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! NO COLLUSION! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers are treated better. Who alerted CNN to be there?”

However, CNN said that, through research, it deduced that Mr Stone’s arrest could be forthcoming and, as a result, the network sent a camera crew to his home on Thursday.</s>The FBI has arrested Roger Stone, the longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, as a part of special counsel Rober Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He was charged with seven counts that include witness tampering, false statements, and obstruction of an official proceeding.

Stone is expected to make an appearance in federal court later on Friday.

You can read the indictment below:

This is a breaking news post. We will update as more information becomes available.</s>Roger Stone has said that Donald Trump was put on earth to be president. Hollis Johnson

Editors note: This article was first published in March 2017. It has been updated in light of Roger Stone being i ndicted by the Mueller probe.

It took nearly 20 years for Roger Stone to realize his dream.

Since the 1980s, the self-described "dirty trickster" who's been in and around Republican politics for half a century, had made it something of a mission to make Donald Trump president.

Despite parting ways with the Trump campaign in August 2015 — Trump says he fired Stone for hogging the media spotlight; Stone says he quit because Trump attacked Megyn Kelly — Stone has remained one of Trump's most loyal true believers.

And now Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted him with one count of obstruction, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, according to a Justice Department filing on Thursday.

Stone was put in the crosshairs of the FBI over communications with a Russian hacker and his alleged communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as the FBI look for connections between Trump's campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Thursday's filing repeatedly referred to Stone's contact with "Organization 1," which had "posted documents stolen by others" from the US government and citizens.

The filing said it "released tens of thousands of documents stolen from" people including the Democratic National Committee and the personal email account of Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta.

"Organization 1" is widely believed to be WikiLeaks.

The filing also said Stone deliberately obstructed investigations by the FBI, House Intelligence Committee, and Senate Intelligence Committee into Russian interference in the election.

Stone has repeatedly said he has nothing to do with Russia, but messages he has sent to the hacker accused of a cyberattack on the DNC, as well as Stone's own provocative statements, continued to raise questions.

"It's rare that I'm accused of something that I'm not guilty of," Stone told the New Yorker in 2008.

Stone said in July it's "a possibility" that he could be indicted over his communications with Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, which experts had warned could implicate him in a conspiracy to defraud the United States by interfering in the 2016 election.

On August 12, nearly a year after he left Trump's campaign and a few weeks after WikiLeaks, a radical-transparency group, published the first set of stolen emails from the DNC, Stone reached out through a private message to a Twitter user named "Guccifer 2.0."

Earlier that August, Stone had written on the alt-right website Breitbart, then controlled by Steve Bannon, that it was "a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0" — and not the Russians — who hacked the DNC and fed the documents to WikiLeaks.

But experts quickly linked Guccifer 2.0 back to Russia and concluded that the so-called hacker was the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. When the special counsel's office indicted 12 Russian security officers for hacking the DNC and the Clinton campaign in July, they said the hacker was a front for Russian military intelligence.

In his messages with Guccifer 2.0, Stone asked if the hacker could retweet his Breitbart column about the 2016 presidential election possibly being "rigged."

Guccifer 2.0 responded: "i'm pleased to say that u r great man. please tell me if i can help u anyhow. it would be a great pleasure to me."

Stone later told Business Insider that the interaction he had with the hacker was so "brief and banal" that he "had forgotten it."

"Not exactly 007 stuff even if Gruccifer [sic] 2.0 was working for the Russkies," Stone said. "Meaningless."

Stone's tweets in the days after his communications with Guccifer 2.0 have raised questions about whether he knew in advance that Podesta's emails would be imminently published by WikiLeaks.

On August 21, Stone sent a series of famously prescient tweets. "Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary." On October 1 Stone tweeted: "Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done."

On October 3 he tweeted: "I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp."

Four days later, WikiLeaks published its first set of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta.

In October, Stone said he had "back-channel communication with Assange," but has denied having any direct contact with WikiLeaks, saying that he had been getting his information from a mutual friend he shares with Assange, later revealed to be radio host Randy Credico, who has since been subpoenaed to testify in the Mueller probe.

But in February, The Atlantic reported that Stone was in direct communication with WikiLeaks via Twitter in the days leading up to the election.

Mike Pompeo, then the director of the CIA, described WikiLeaks as a "hostile, non-state intelligence service" last year.

"Since I was all over national TV, cable and print defending wikileaks and Assange against the claim that you are Russian agents and debunking the false charges of sexual assault as trumped up bs you may want to reexamine the strategy of attacking me- cordially R," Stone wrote to Wikileaks on October 13, 2016, according to The Atlantic.

Wikileaks responded the same day, "We appreciate that. However, the false claims of association are being used by the democrats to undermine the impact of our publications. Don't go there if you don't want us to correct you."

"Ha!" Stone wrote back on October 15. "The more you 'correct' me the more people think you're lying. Your operation leaks like a sieve. You need to figure out who your friends are."

On November 9, the morning after Trump won the presidential election, Wikileaks wrote to Stone, "Happy? We are now more free to communicate."

It is unclear whether Stone and Wikileaks had any other private communications either before October 13 or after November 9, 2016.

Stone told the House Intelligence Committee in a prepared statement last September that his communications with Wikileaks were always conducted through Credico, an associate of Assange who tweeted a selfie outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange lives, two days before WikiLeaks released a trove of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's emails. The email dump came the same day as a damning Access Hollywood tape surfaced in which Trump discussed groping women without their consent.

"I have never said or written that I had any direct communication with Julian Assange and have always clarified in numerous interviews and speeches that my communication with WikiLeaks was through the aforementioned journalist," Stone told the committee.

Meanwhile, NBC News reported in October 2018 that Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist and close friend of Stone who was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury, knew in advance that Clinton campaign emails had been stolen and given to WikiLeaks.

Stone told Business Insider in March 2017 that he "had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them," he said. "None. Nada. Zilch. I am not in touch with any Russians. don't have a Russian girlfriend, don't like Russian dressing and have stopped drinking Russian Vodka."

The New York Times reported in October 2018 that Stone discussed the WikiLeaks document dumps with both Steve Bannon, then the chairman of the Trump campaign, and Matthew Boyle, who at the time was the Washington editor of the far-right website Breitbart, which was previously spearheaded by Bannon.

In an exchange on Oct. 3, 2016, Boyle reportedly asked Stone, "Assange — what's he got? Hope it's good," to which Stone replied, "It is."

Boyle then reportedly pressed Bannon to contact Stone about the impending WikiLeaks dump, telling Bannon, "clearly he knows what Assange has." Just 4 days after that exchange on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released the trove of John Podesta's emails.

"Mere knowledge alone might not be enough to establish criminal responsibility," Cornell Law School Professor Jens David Ohlin told Business Insider about Stone's potential liability with regard to his contacts with WikiLeaks and Guccifer.

"However, if Stone was not just aware of what WikiLeaks was doing but actually intended for it to happen, then he could be considered a member of the criminal conspiracy and just as guilty as its other members," he added.

Also in October 2018, Mother Jones reported that Stone had pushed the Trump administration to issue a pre-emptive presidential pardon to Assange, who has not been charged with a crime in the United States.

Ohlin told Business Insider at the time that "if someone offered Assange a pardon in exchange for Assange releasing hacked emails to influence the election, this would constitute a criminal conspiracy. If Trump or those close to him were part of these discussions, they would all be part of the same criminal conspiracy."

And then emailed leaked which shows top Trump campaign officials and right-wing media allies said they were convinced Stone was closer to Wikileaks than he let on, and Mueller was reported to have several emails from 2016 between the GOP strategist Roger Stone and Corsi that showed Stone anticipated a WikiLeaks document dump at the height of the 2016 election.

The White House, for its part, has worked to distance itself from Stone. During a press conference on March 20, 2017, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Stone and Trump talk occasionally but that Stone's work for the campaign ended in August 2015.

"I don't know at all when the last time they even spoke was," Spicer said.

In December, Stone invoked his Fifth Amendment right and declined to provide documents requested of him by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Washington Post reported in December that Mueller's office has reached out to the House Intelligence Committee, seeking an official transcript of Roger Stone's testimony to the panel — signalling that proscutors were moving closer to an indictment.

Stone was perhaps the first, and most influential, person to believe in Trump's political potential.

In 1988, Stone tried to persuade him to run for president. Trump decided against it, but 12 years later he launched a presidential exploratory committee, which Stone chaired.

Since the 1980s, Stone and Trump have fostered a close professional and political relationship. Stone has been characterized as Trump's longest-serving adviser.

Stone and Trump share remarkably similar worldviews and approaches to politics. Like Trump, Stone has a penchant for making bold, unsubstantiated claims, promoting conspiracy theories, and being unafraid of controversy. He told The New Yorker in 2008 that "The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring."

Stone encouraged Trump's infamous "birther" conspiracy, which claimed that President Obama wasn't born in the US, and promoted unsubstantiated theories that Bill Clinton was a serial rapist and fathered a son.

Roger Stone, left, with Ed Rollins and Lee Atwater, right, discuss the meeting they had during the president's re-election campaign with former president Richard Nixon in Washington on Nov. 13, 1984. They are looking for advice on strategy for Reagan's second term effort. Nixon advised them to target Ohio as one of their main states. Ira Schwarz/AP

Trump has apparently adopted many of Stone's ideas and methods. Stone told The New Yorker in 2008 that "Politics is not about uniting people. It's about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one per cent." One of his cardinal rules was "Attack, attack, attack—never defend" and "Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack."

"It takes a certain kind of consultant who could work for a candidate like Donald Trump and it takes a certain kind of candidate to hire a consultant like Roger Stone," says Chris Barron, a Washington-based political consultant who has worked with Stone in the past, told the National Review in 2015.

In the 2017 Netflix documentary "Get Me Roger Stone," Trump says of Stone: "He loves the game, he has fun with it, and he's very good at it."

Both Stone and Trump are preoccupied with the news media, and they rail against it as being biased, but also court publicity. Stone is known for being easily accessible, and he seems to relish providing reporters with provocative sound bites. As Stone told The New York Times in 2015 of his life philosophy, "Never miss the opportunity to have sex or be on television, as Gore Vidal said."

The media has, in turn, portrayed Stone as everything from a "state-of-the-art sleazeball" to a dangerous conspirator. But Stone relishes these descriptions — the more unflattering the better.

"I revel in your hatred, because if I weren't effective you wouldn't hate me," Stone says in "Get Me Roger Stone."

Stone, who has been a Republican operative for almost 50 years, has long treated politics and campaigning as a battle to be won at any cost. As a junior in high school and vice president of the student government, he forced the president out and succeeded him.

''I built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket," Stone told The New York Times in 1999. "Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that's mean? No, it's smart.''

Notably, Stone has remained an unapologetic Nixon supporter to this day. After working for Nixon's campaign in the 1970s, he maintained a close relationship with the president and regularly dined with him at his home in the years following the president's resignation. Stone has a tattoo of Nixon's face across his back and a large photograph of the former president over his bed.

Among many, Stone is better known for his eccentricities than his political work.

Throughout his career, Stone has cultivated what he calls his "extraordinary wardrobe," which includes a taste for seersucker suits and top hats, a style that The New Yorker has said makes Stone look "like a Prohibition-era mobster."

"If life is a stage, then you should always be in costume," Stone told The Times.

Stone told The New Yorker in 2008 that “Politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people." Joe Raedle/Getty Images

'He always tries taking credit for things he never did'

Stone and Trump have had a rocky relationship. In 2008, Trump called Stone a "stone-cold loser," telling The New Yorker that "he always tries taking credit for things he never did."

In August 2015, Stone parted ways with Trump's campaign. While Trump announced that he had fired Stone, accusing him of attempting "to use the campaign for his own personal publicity," Stone said that he resigned, making public a letter he said he had sent to Trump arguing that the campaign was being derailed by "controversies involving personalities and provocative media fights."

Stone's departure came as Trump faced scrutiny surrounding his controversial comments about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

Some conservatives believed Trump's campaign would suffer without Stone to guide it.

"It's hard to overstate just how close Trump and Stone have been over the years," the National Review wrote after Stone had left the campaign. "Trump without Stone is akin to George W. Bush without Karl Rove or Barack Obama without David Axelrod."

But even after Stone left the campaign, he remained a strong supporter, calling himself "the ultimate Trump loyalist." In January, Stone published a book, "The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution," in which he says Trump was "put on Earth" to be president.

Stone was raised in Lewisboro, New York, in a white working-class family. He told The New Yorker that while growing up adjacent to New Canaan, a wealthy Connecticut suburb, he saw himself as "living in kind of a bridge between two cultures, the white working class and the white upper class."

Stone remains convinced that both groups of white Americans should be politically united against what he sees as an overreaching government.

After high school Stone moved to DC to attend George Washington University. He never graduated.

Stone made his debut in national politics at 19, when he sent campaign contributions in the name of a socialist organization to Richard Nixon's rival in the 1972 Republican presidential primary. He then sent a letter to The New Hampshire Union-Leader with the donation receipt, in an attempt to undermine Nixon's competitor.

In a 2008 New Yorker article, Stone told reporter Jeffrey Toobin that Nixon started the "exodus of working-class people from the Democratic Party" and realigned the Republican Party's platform to one founded on antielitism.

"We were the party of the workingman! We wanted lower taxes for everyone, across the board," Stone said. "The point that the Democrats missed was that the people who weren't rich wanted to be rich."

As Toobin wrote, "Stone represents the less discussed but still vigorous legacy of Richard Nixon."

In 1976, Stone joined Ronald Reagan's first, unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination as national youth director. Four years later, Stone took on the role of political director of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, helping pave Reagan's path to the White House.

But Stone, ever the campaigner, didn't take a position in the Reagan administration and instead started a political consulting and lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater, along with Paul Manafort, who, decades later, would become Trump's 2016 presidential campaign chairman.

Stone's corporate clients included Trump businesses and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., on whose behalf Stone lobbied his former campaign colleagues in the administration, and more controversial characters, including dictators in Zaire and the Philippines, and rebels in Angola.

Stone and his firm were on the forefront of a new era of political operatives lobbying their former campaign colleagues, now in powerful positions in the administration, to serve their private-sector ends.

But Stone was drawn back into campaigning when George H.W. Bush ran for president in 1988, serving as a senior consultant to Bush. Stone continued jumping between the campaign trails — for Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter and Kansas Republican Bob Dole — until he was kicked off Dole's presidential campaign after Stone and his wife were caught soliciting "similar couples or exceptional muscular" men for group sex. (Stone denied the accusations at the time but later admitted they were accurate.)

After Stone left Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater in the mid-1990s, he ran various campaigns, including a billionaire's bid for New York governor, and then moved down to Miami. In 2000, he was instrumental in orchestrating the so-called Brooks Brothers riot — a chaotic pro-Bush protest outside the Miami recount center — which helped shut down the Florida recount in the presidential election, securing George W. Bush's victory over Al Gore.
Roger Stone, a former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, is indicted by a federal grand jury and arrested on charges of obstruction, giving false statements, and witness tampering as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.