What does the future hold for Roger Stone and Julian Assange?

Even by the standards of the current White House, the commuting of Roger Stone’s sentence by his friend Donald Trump has been viewed as an extraordinary flouting of America’s legal and moral conventions by a sitting president.

Stone, let us remember, was convicted on all counts of an indictment that accused him of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House of Representatives investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. In addition, the judge in the case accused him of “threatening and intimidating” her by posting an image on social media of a gun’s crosshairs next to her head.

There has been the expected outrage about Trump’s conduct from the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, declared it “staggering corruption” and a “ threat to national security”. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, called it “destructive of the criminal justice system and the rule of law”. Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial said it was “unprecedented, historic corruption”.

The former special counsel in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, Robert Mueller, wanted to stress “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so”. Writing in The Washington Post, he pointed out that his investigation “identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping of Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate … identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel – Stone among them...

“The Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. [And] that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

The White House, in a statement, attacked the prosecution as being based on “Russia hoax” charges and maintained Stone had already suffered greatly. “He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in the case”, it said.

Stone is free, but one person whose links to Stone and, allegedly, to Russia, were key aspects of Mueller’s investigation, remains in prison, in London. He is likely to face a very long time behind bars, and, according to his lawyers and supporters, is suffering great privations.

Julian Assange is in the maximum security Belmarsh prison locked up 23 hours a day. He is experiencing acute physical and mental health problems, say his legal team, but attempts at getting bail, the latest one during the coronavirus pandemic, have failed. The founder of WikiLeaks is facing extradition to the US on 17 charges of espionage and computer hacking, carrying a maximum sentence of 150 years.

Assange is part of the seam of connections which runs through so much of “Russiagate”. The US intelligence agencies into Trump’s Kremlin connections had its origins in a conversation over drinks in a Kensington wine bar in London between Alexander Downer and George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser. There was the Trump dossier drawn up by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. And then we had the “hacking and dumping of Clinton campaign emails” Mueller mentions. That is where the founder of WikiLeaks comes in.

Assange’s arrest last year after he lost his refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London was for failing to answer bail in June 2012 on sex assault charges in Sweden. The WikiLeaks founder and his supporters have claimed that it was the fear of being sent to the US from Sweden which had made him seek asylum on Ecuadorian soil. The US extradition case allege that Assange was involved in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to carry out massive scale hacking of Pentagon computers with the highly classified information disseminated through WikiLeaks.

But it is another set of hacks involving Assange and WikiLeaks which brings him into the “Russiagate” inquiries. He has been repeatedly accused of being involved in disseminating the information stolen by Russian hackers from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers. And Roger Stone has been accused of being conduit between the Trump campaign and those connected to Assange.

Assange has not been charged in relation to the Clinton/DNC hacks. But that does not mean that charges will not potentially follow when he gets to the US; especially if the Democrats win in the November election. Assange, while at the Ecuadorian embassy, had requested to Adam Schiff to prove that he was not guilty of Russian collusion. The response was “our committee would be willing to interview Julian Assange when he is in US custody, not before”.

Robert Mueller’s indictment of Stone states that during the election campaign, Stone talked regularly to Trump officials about the information WikiLeaks, called “Organisation 1”, possessed which would supposedly be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“Stone was contacted by senior Trump campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organisation 1 ... On multiple occasions, Stone told senior Trump campaign officials about material possessed by Organisation 1 and the timing of future releases,” it stated.

Stone had spoken of contact with Assange a number of times. At one point he instructed a friend, alleged to be the conservative author Jerome Corsi, to “get to” Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and obtain the pending WikiLeaks emails. He also allegedly told Ted Malloch, a Trump supporter in London, to see Assange. Stone later told a Republican group in Florida: “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise will be.”

Another British name had come up in alleged liaisons between the Trump campaign and Assange, is that of Nigel Farage. The Brexit party leader regularly boasts of his closeness to Trump and recently visited America for an election rally for the president in Oklahoma. The trip, when all but most essential travel from the UK to the US is suspended during the coronavirus pandemic, is itself now a subject of investigation by the Democrats in the House.

Farage had visited Assange at the embassy in 2017 after returning from a trip to the US. The news of the visit broke after a member of the public saw him go into the building. Glenn Simpson, whose Washington-based investigations firm hired Christopher Steele to compile the Trump report, told a US Congressional inquiry that he had heard that Farage was a more frequent visitor to Assange than was known and that he had passed data onto Assange on “a thumb drive”.

Farage has repeatedly denied the claims, but refused to tell a number of news organisations what he had discussed with Assange. He told me: “I met Julian Assange just once. I went there in a journalistic capacity because like you I wanted to find out about the emails, no real answer was forthcoming. It is nonsense to say that I had met him secretly. Do you think one of the best known faces in the country can go into the embassy without people noticing?”

What may happen to Assange if he is extradited to the US was a matter of concern between him and Stone soon after investigations began into Trump and Russia three years ago. FBI documents, released recently after a court case by a number of media organisations, show a series of messages between the two men.

Stone sent Assange a twitter message saying “if the US government moves on you I will bring down the entire house of cards ... I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for – best regards. R”. Assange responded: “Between CIA and DoJ they’re doing quite a lot. On the DoJ side that’s coming most strongly from those obsessed with taking down Trump trying to squeeze us into a deal.”

With Stone now free thanks to his friend Donald Trump, one waits to see whether he is still prepared to “bring down the house of cards” for Assange. The man he appears to passionately feel should never have faced any charges by the US government.