WASHINGTON—U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller revealed on Friday the most direct link yet between the Trump campaign’s and WikiLeaks’ parallel efforts to use Democratic Party material stolen by Russians to damage the election campaign of Hillary Clinton.

In an indictment unsealed on Friday, the special counsel disclosed evidence that a top campaign official in 2016 dispatched Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, to get information from WikiLeaks about the thousands of hacked Democratic emails. The effort began well after it was widely reported that Russian intelligence operatives were behind the theft, which was part of Moscow’s broad campaign to sabotage the 2016 president election.

The indictment makes no mention of whether Trump played a role in the coordination, though Mueller did leave a curious clue about how high in the campaign the effort reached: A senior campaign official “was directed” by an unnamed person to contact Stone about additional WikiLeaks releases that might damage the Clinton campaign, according to the court document.

Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering. Mueller did not say that Stone’s interactions with WikiLeaks were illegal, nor that the Trump campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the organization.

FBI agents arrested Stone before dawn, appearing at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home with ballistic vests and guns drawn. Agents typically use those tactics as a precaution to secure possible evidence and protect themselves in case a suspect fights arrest. Prosecutors sealed details of the case because they feared that public disclosure would increase the risk of Stone fleeing or destroying or tampering with evidence, according to court documents.

FBI agents were also seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Stone’s apartment in New York City, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.

Stone appeared briefly in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale on Friday morning, his ankles and waist shackled in front of a packed courtroom. Stone, known for his dapper wardrobe, was dressed simply in a navy blue cotton polo shirt, blue jeans and his trademark round, black-rimmed glasses, his demeanour flat.

He posted a $250,000 bond, was ordered to surrender his passport and agreed to appear in federal court in Washington later. Afterward, outside the courthouse, Stone vowed to beat the investigation, which he called politically motivated.

“There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself,” he told reporters afterward.

“I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated,” he added, then flashed twin V-for-victory hand signs reminiscent of his onetime boss, former president Richard Nixon. People close to Stone have predicted that Trump could pardon him should he be convicted of any of the charges.

In a brief interview later Friday, Stone said he will plead not guilty. “We’re anxious to see” the government’s evidence, he said, adding that Mueller’s team “essentially manufactured process crimes” and showed no proof that WikiLeaks passed material to him for the campaign.

The indictment is the first in months by Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with Trump campaign associates. Citing details in emails and other forms of communications, the indictment suggested that Trump’s campaign knew about additional stolen emails before they were released and asked Stone to find out about them.

According to the indictment, between June and July of 2016, Stone told “senior Trump campaign officials” about the stolen emails in WikiLeaks’ possession that could be damaging to Clinton. On July 22, WikiLeaks released its first batch of Democratic emails. After that, according to the indictment, the Trump campaign sought more.

“A senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton campaign,” the indictment said, referring to WikiLeaks.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sought to broadly distance Trump from the charges. “The charges brought against Mr. Stone have nothing to do with the president,” she told CNN. Asked whether he directed a campaign aide to contact Stone about the WikiLeaks emails, she repeated that the charges did not involve the president.

Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s personal lawyers, dismissed any ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. “The indictment today does not allege Russian collusion by Roger Stone or anyone else. Rather, the indictment focuses on alleged false statements Mr. Stone made to Congress,” he said in a statement.

On Friday, Trump returned to an oft-repeated talking point suggesting that the special counsel’s investigation — and news media coverage of it — was biased. “Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! NO COLLUSION!” he wrote on Twitter. “Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers are treated better. Who alerted CNN to be there?”

The indictment does not mention whether Stone or any other Trump associate knew about the Russian operatives’ plans before they hacked the Democrats. As Mueller’s investigators interviewed witnesses and reviewed documents, they sought to answer that question, according to two people briefed on the inquiry. To make a case that Trump’s associates conspired with the Russians, the investigators indicated, they needed to show that the associates knew about the hacking in advance — knowing about the fruits of what Russia stole was not enough, the people said.

A self-described dirty trickster, Stone began his career as a Nixon campaign aide and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back. He has spent decades plying the political dark arts — including scandal-mongering — to help influence American election campaigns, and has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

He sometimes seemed to taunt U.S. law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian election interference. His brash behaviour made him less of a subject of news media scrutiny than other current and former aides to Trump — like the character in a whodunit whom readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime.

In June 2016, days before Russia was publicly identified as having stolen the emails, senior Trump campaign officials and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney about getting information that could be damaging to Clinton.

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It is illegal for a political campaign to accept foreign aid, and Trump and his son have said they did nothing wrong because they did not receive any damaging materials because of that meeting.

Stone has said publicly that he was in contact with WikiLeaks and suggested on Twitter that additional damaging information would be coming.

But the special counsel’s investigators spent months encircling Stone, renewing scrutiny about his role during the 2016 presidential race. Investigators interviewed former Trump campaign advisers and several of his associates about Stone’s fundraising during the campaign and his contacts with WikiLeaks.

Three senior Trump campaign officials have told Mueller’s team that Stone created the impression that he was a conduit for inside information from WikiLeaks, according to people familiar with their witness interviews. One of them told investigators that Stone not only seemed to predict WikiLeaks’ actions but also that he took credit afterward for the timing of its disclosures that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

In October, Stone exchanged emails with Steve Bannon, then the chief executive of Trump’s campaign. In one exchange, Stone wrote that more WikiLeaks disclosures were forthcoming, “a load every week going forward,” according to the indictment. Bannon appears to be the official described in the court document as “the high-ranking Trump Campaign official,” based on previous disclosures about the email exchange.

A day before Stone and Bannon emailed about WikiLeaks, Donald Trump Jr. exchanged Twitter messages with the WikiLeaks Twitter account and asked, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about.”

At the end of that week, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released more than 6,000 emails related to John Podesta, the chair of the Clinton campaign. The release came 30 minutes after the Washington Post published a recording of Trump bragging on the set of “Access Hollywood” about assaulting women. The timing has raised questions about whether WikiLeaks was trying to distract the public from the tape and redirect negative attention from Trump to the Clinton campaign.

In social media posts and numerous interviews before the 2016 election, Stone indicated that he had advance knowledge that a trove of information damaging to Clinton’s campaign might be about to spill into public view, and even suggested that he had personally spoken to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

Stone has changed his story in the months since, saying that he was not actually speaking to Assange and that he had no direct knowledge that Russians were responsible for the Democratic hacking. Still, it was revealed last year that, in the weeks before the election, Stone was messaging on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, a pseudonym used by one or more operatives in the Russian intelligence scheme to steal the emails and funnel them to WikiLeaks.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Julian Assange, denounced the raid as heavy-handed in an email, while stressing that the underlying charges do not bear on his own client’s conduct.

“The charges against Mr. Stone do not allege that Mr. Stone lied about his contacts with Julian Assange, but rather about his contacts with others and about documents reflecting those communications,” Pollack said, adding that his client has not spoken to Mueller’s investigators.

Pollack also alluded to the government’s inadvertent disclosure in November that Assange has been charged under seal with a crime. The details of that charge — including whether it is linked to the Russia probe or instead to WikiLeaks’ unrelated publication of leaked government secrets — remain murky.

The tumultuous relationship between Stone and Trump goes back decades, with Stone acting as an informal adviser as Trump considered running for president several times. When Trump formally announced during the spring of 2015 that he was running for president, Stone was one of the first to join his campaign, but within months, the two had a public dispute and he left the team.

The two men have remained close, though, speaking often by telephone.

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