Gates said he first heard from Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, about two months before Trump secured the GOP presidential nomination in mid-July. That's when Stone passed along initial, bare bones details about the potential Julian Assange-orchestrated releases that would benefit Trump's White House bid.

“Mr. Stone indicated that WikiLeaks would be submitting or dropping information, but no information on dates or anything of that nature,” Gates said in federal district court, where the trial against Stone entered its second week. Stone is also facing charges charges that he tampered with a witness as Congress investigated Russia’s 2016 election interference.

Federal prosecutors rested their case against Stone before lunch on Tuesday, and Stone's lawyers spent a little more than an hour in the afternoon playing aloud portions of their client’s September 2017 deposition before the House Intelligence Committee, during which prosecutors allege Stone lied.

After that, Stone's team also rested its case without inviting any witnesses to the stand. Closing arguments are scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, with jury deliberations to begin shortly thereafter.

Before the government handed the reins of the trial over to Stone’s defense, it asked Gates detailed questions about his interactions throughout the spring and summer of 2016 with Stone, who is known for his decades-long relationship with Trump and a history dating back to Watergate of orchestrating “dirty tricks.”

Gates testified that Stone requested contact information from him in June for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior member of the 2016 campaign. Also that month, Gates said the Trump campaign became elated as it learned more information from Stone about the WikiLeaks founder’s plans to publish damaging information about Clinton and her campaign.

“It was in a way a gift,” Gates said. He later added, “We were kind of in disbelief. We believed that if information were to come out … there were a number of us that felt that it would give our campaign a leg up.”

Rick Gates, the former Trump deputy campaign chairman. | Susan Walsh, File/AP Photo

Clinton’s campaign and the Democrats actually suffered the first embarrassing email disclosures in June of 2016 at the hands of DCLeaks, a website that Mueller’s investigations later said was affiliated with a Russian military unit behind the cyberattacks. The WikiLeaks document dumps started coming in July, including a tranche just before the start of the Democratic National Convention that resulted in the ouster of the party’s chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

That month, Trump senior aides including Paul Manafort, Gates, Jason Miller and Stephen Miller met to strategize about taking advantage of the WikiLeaks dumps. The brainstorming meetings were based in part on a combination of both Stone’s predictions and Assange’s public comments about forthcoming releases, Gates said.

Trump himself entered the picture that month too. According to Gates, Stone and Trump spoke by phone about the WikiLeaks document dumps while the GOP nominee rode in a roughly 20-minute motorcade from Trump Tower to LaGuardia Airport. While Gates said he couldn’t overhear the exact conversation, Trump signaled aloud what they’d been talking about moments after the call finished.

“He indicated that more information would be coming out,” Gates said.

Gates’ testimony marks a big addition to the timeline about Russia's election-year hacks.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report only recounted the Trump campaign officials talking about the WikiLeaks dumps during the summer of 2016. And even then, the report blacked out any specifics of those conversations, citing a warning that revealing those details would cause a “harm to ongoing matter” — presumably the Stone case.

Additionally, Gates’ testimony puts the onus back on Trump, who in written responses to the special counsel said he didn’t recall “being told during the campaign that Roger Stone or anyone associated with my campaign had discussions” about WikiLeaks or Russian hackers “regarding the content or timing of release of hacked emails.”

While Trump acknowledged in his answers to Mueller that he spoke with Stone “from time to time during the campaign” he also said he had “no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone between June 1, 2016, and November 8, 2016.”

Trump added in that written answer, “I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with him, nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign, although I was aware that WikiLeaks was the subject of media reporting and campaign-related discussion at the time.”

Gates' testimony in the Stone trial is part of a deal he worked out with the government after pleading guilty in February 2018 on charges of conspiracy against the U.S. and making false statements to the FBI. Attorneys for the Justice Department and Gates told a federal judge on Monday that they are ready for Gates to be sentenced in his case.

During cross examinations, Stone’s lawyer Bruce Rogow attempted to discredit Gates by bringing up the crimes he’d admitted to committing in his guilty plea. The attorney also brought up charges against Gates that were dismissed and got the witness to acknowledge that if he lied during his testimony Tuesday he’d be fair game for prosecution.

Rogow then asked Gates to admit to any other crimes he may have committed, without offering specific time frames. “Were there other untruths that you said along the way for which you were not prosecuted?” he asked.

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Gates, clean shaven and wearing a suit, sat blank faced and didn’t answer the question, and federal prosecutors objected. Rogow continued to ask Gates questions to get him to confirm his repeated lies about his finances — lies that he has previously admitted to.

For their part, Stone’s attorneys said Tuesday they had limited plans to mount a public defense of their client in the courtroom.

They said the jurors would be asked to listen to about 50 minutes of audio from Stone’s September 2017 deposition before the House Intelligence Committee, during which the government has said Stone lied. Beyond that, Stone’s lawyer filed a motion for an acquittal on all but the witness tampering charge with U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, arguing the government hadn’t proven its case. Jackson quickly heard oral arguments on Stone’s motion and said she’d issue a ruling later Tuesday.

“The government’s case is built on answers to questions that were not false, but rather answers that were true," his defense lawyers wrote in the 14-page motion.

Prosecutors have accused Stone of concealing his efforts to dispatch a right-wing journalist, Jerome Corsi, to gather emails he thought would damage Clinton from Assange. Stone never mentioned Corsi to lawmakers but instead told them his intermediary to WikiLeaks was the liberal radio talk show host Randy Credico. Stone is accused of threatening Credico to stay silent about the matter, leading to the witness tampering charges he is facing.