Roger Stone arrest: Trump confidant faces major indictment as president attempts to reopen government
Trump campaign officials were in contact with Stone over Wikileaks and hacked Clinton campaign emails, according to indictment
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser Roger Stone has been arrested by the FBI as part of Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible campaign links to Russia.
The FBI has charged Mr Stone on seven counts, invcluding witness tampering, obstruction and false statements about his interactions related to the release by WikiLeaks of hacked emails during the 2016 presidential election.
Stone disputed the charges while leaving a Florida courthouse on Friday, saying in a statement, "I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated."
"I am a fervent supporter of the president," he added, vowing to never testify against the president or pleading guilty to the charges.
He was released on a $250,000 bond.
The arrest comes as the White House is reportedly preparing a draft emergency declaration that would allow Donald Trump to circumvent Congress if lawmakers do not fund his southern border wall.
The president effectively announced an end to the government shutdown on its 35th day on Friday, agreeing to a temporary resolution that would open shuttered federal agencies for three weeks as negotiations over the border wall remain ongoing.
The move arrived a day after a bill backed by Mr Trump to end the shutdown, which included $5.7 billion he wanted for the wall, and a separate bill supported by Democrats to reopen federal agencies without such funding, did not garner the votes required to advance in the Senate.
“We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shining sea, we never did,” Mr Trump said at one point, walking back vows he made throughout the campaign to build a wall sprawling the entirety of the US-Mexico border.
He added, “We never proposed that. We never wanted that, because we have barriers at the border where natural structures are as good as anything that we can build“.
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