Conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi predicted earlier this month that he would be charged with perjury. | AP Photo/Seth Wenig Legal ‘I connect the dots’: Mueller target claims Podesta hack knowledge was educated guess Conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is at the center of the probe into whether the Trump campaign had preemptive knowledge of Russian election hacking.

Conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi said Monday that he knew WikiLeaks had obtained a trove of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in the summer of 2016 — but insisted his awareness was simply an educated guess.

That knowledge — which Corsi is under scrutiny for potentially conveying to Donald Trump ally Roger Stone that summer — is now at the center of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into whether the Trump campaign had preemptive knowledge that Russia hacked the Clinton campaign.


Corsi defended himself Monday in an interview with conservative One America News Network.

"I connect the dots,” he said. “I didn't need any source to tell me.”

Corsi said he determined in August that WikiLeaks head Julian Assange had obtained Podesta's emails and was likely to release them in October — and he said several emails he sent in the summer of 2016 would confirm that fact. But he said his awareness was simply a logical deduction, not inside information from WikiLeaks.

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"In August, I knew that the emails remaining — that Julian Assange had — were Podesta's emails,” he said. “I basically figured it out, which is what I do.”

Mueller and his team are examining whether Corsi — who gained fame for stoking the debunked birther conspiracy theory against President Barack Obama — was a conduit for information from WikiLeaks to Stone over the summer of 2016, when Stone was regularly in touch with Trump campaign aides. Stone, a self-described practitioner of the political dark arts, also briefly worked for the Trump campaign.

Both Corsi and Stone deny having connections to Assange or WikiLeaks. But Corsi's description of his interactions with Mueller’s — and what he says has been an effort to coerce him into a plea deal for perjuring himself — suggest prosecutors are homing in on Stone and his associates in their investigation of potential cooperation between the Kremlin and Americans to interfere in the 2016 election.

Corsi, who predicted earlier this month that he would be charged with perjury, said Mueller's team appeared to be pursuing a "predetermined narrative" that he was "the conduit to WikiLeaks and Assange for Roger Stone who in turn [was] a conduit to the campaign."

And Corsi added that Mueller’s prosecutors didn’t seem to buy the notion that he inferred Assange had obtained Podesta's emails and saved them for an October release. He acknowledged sending five or six emails in which he discussed Assage with a colleague, but that he had forgotten about the emails until Mueller's team showed them to him.

According to multiple media reports last week, Corsi has discussed a plea deal with Mueller. But on Monday, the conservative personality proclaimed that he will never plead to willfully lying to Mueller's team. He said he repeatedly told them his memory was "terrible" and spent 40 hours in talks with them, as well as turned over his devices.

Corsi said that he had "sources" who had given him 1,000 pages of information over the summer of 2016 on how the Democratic Party's computers worked. He said he did a "forensic analysis" of those emails to infer that Podesta's were missing from the batch.

"Whoever was in that server, had to have seen Podesta's emails," he said. "It was a guess, but it was a conclusion that Assange had Podesta's emails. ... He was going to release them in October. Assange always releases things strategically."

Corsi said he also tried to convince Mueller's team that Russians weren't behind the release of the Democratic Party's emails that summer, but added "the special counselor wasn't interested."

Mueller and congressional investigators have also pursued questions about Stone's apparent awareness that WikiLeaks had obtained Podesta's emails before their October release, based on several tweets and statements he made in the days and weeks before the Podesta dump. Corsi said he told Mueller's team that "Roger had a different source" — a New York City radio host named Randy Credico, who has also been interviewed by Mueller's team.

"If they didn't want to hear it, suddenly I'm lying after 40 hours when all I'm trying to do is cooperate with them," he said.