Political ‘dirty trickster’ makes combative appearance before House intelligence committee: ‘There is one “trick” that is not in my bag and that is treason’

Roger Stone, a longstanding adviser to Donald Trump, made a combative appearance at a closed session of the House intelligence committee on Tuesday to reject allegations of collusion.

He told journalists later that his former business partner, Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman, expected to be indicted soon. Stone said he expected Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating links between the Trump campaign and Moscow, to “manufacture” a charge against Manafort in an effort to force him to “bear false witness against the president”.

As for his own hearing, Stone said that nothing he was asked made him “uncomfortable” and that he had answered all the questions put him but one.

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He refused to tell the committee the identity of a journalist who was his intermediary with the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange – and who Stone says was the source of his advance knowledge of what WikiLeaks was planning to publish during the campaign on the Democratic presidential contender, Hillary Clinton, and a senior Democratic official, John Podesta.

The ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, Adam Schiff, confirmed that Stone had refused to answer one important question, though he declined to elaborate, adding that the committee would consider subpoenaing him if he did not return of his own accord.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roger Stone speaks to the media after answering questions from the House intelligence committee. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Before his appearance, Stone made clear he would deny all allegations of collusion with Russia during the presidential election.

“While some may label me a dirty trickster, the members of this committee could not point to any tactic that is outside the accepted norms of what political strategists and consultants do today. I do not engage in any illegal activities on behalf of my clients or the causes in which I support,” Stone said in a prepared statement. “There is one ‘trick’ that is not in my bag and that is treason.”

After the hearing, he dismissed the committee’s inquiry as a political witchhunt.

“It’s entirely a political exercise,” he said. “They make the charges against you in a public forum to maximize coverage for their Senate campaign or their re-election but then they only allow you to respond behind closed doors and they won’t even allow the release of the transcript. It really puts you at an extraordinarily unfair [dis]advantage.”

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The intelligence committee discourages witnesses from making public statements about its hearings, but Stone clearly relished his time in the spotlight, drawing the attention of journalists to his clothes, noting: “English tailoring is always better than Italian tailoring, at least for my body shape.”

On the eve of his appearance, he told New York magazine: “I elected not to go with one of my gangster suits.”

He said his last appearance before Congress had been in 1973, when he was 19 and testified to the Senate Watergate committee about what he had done for the Nixon re-election campaign.

He admitted then to “trafficking in the black arts” of politics but denied doing anything illegal.

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