Roger Stone’s meeting with man selling ‘dirt on Hillary’ fires up Russiagate

It was no less than “a man with a Make America Great Again hat and a viscous Russian accent” who Donald Trump’s former advisor, Roger Stone, met and nothing happened, a new story by the Washington Post relates.

Stone, who was described as “the political dark sorcerer” in the piece, had met with the man who offered, for a price of $2 million, unspecified “political dirt” on Trump’s Democratic rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton, in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida in late May 2016, the paper reported.

Stone himself shared the information with the paper, saying he declined the offer, saying Donald Trump “doesn’t pay for anything.” In a text message to Trump campaign communications official Michael Caputo, which was seen by the paper, Stone had also described his dealings with the mysterious Russian a “waste of time.”

As expected, the Russiagate floodgates burst.

The role and the motives of the supposed Russian supplier of information about Hillary remain unclear. The Washington Post said that his name was Henry Greenberg, a Russian national who claimed to work for the FBI and who, at that time, used the alias of Henry Oknyansky.

Stone and Caputo told the investigators that Greenberg or Oknyansky –or whatever he is– was actually working for the “US law enforcement officials hostile to Trump” who had tried to set up the Republican candidate. Greenberg himself texted to the paper that he wasn’t with the FBI during the 2016 meeting in Sunny Isles Beach. He also confirmed on the phone that his offer had been declined by Stone, the paper reported.

But the main thing of course, was that he was ‘Russian’.

The so-called ‘Russian meetings’ of the Trump campaign have made headlines on numerous occasions in the US over the last couple of years. The most prominent of them was the negotiations conducted by Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort, with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, in June 2016 in Trump Tower in New York City. It was investigated by Mueller’s probe and sensationalized by the media. However, the transcripts of interviews with its participants, released by the US Senate Judiciary Committee in May, revealed that the meeting had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and had “no focus on Russian activities."

The “Russian” shadow has been hanging over various US officials, from John Bolton, and over some Clinton donors and Russiagate proponents.

US political consultant Roger Stone © Kevin Lamarque © Reuters

While the dust hasn’t yet settled, Trump used the dubious publication to again attack the Washington Post and its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, on Twitter. He recalled an open letter earlier this week, in which more than 400 of the paper’s employees demanded fair wages and benefits and he advised the Washington Post staff to go on a lengthy strike. “We would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time” in this case, the president wrote.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!