2016 meeting at Trump Tower—a meeting that involved multiple Kremlin agents—Trump’s son on at least two occasions makes calls to or receives calls from blocked numbers.142
Stone’s account of speaking regularly to Trump Sr. during his presidential run is supported by phone and contact logs given to Mueller by the Trump Organization, which show “multiple calls between the then-candidate and Stone in 2016,” though the newspaper adds that “the records are not a complete log of their contacts—Stone [says] … Trump at times called him from other people’s homes.”143 In November 2016, Stone reveals that the two men have been speaking once a week for some time; according to the incomplete records turned over by Trump to the special counsel, “they spoke from ‘time to time’ during 2016.… A handful of calls were lengthy.”144 Since entering the White House, Trump has often lied to his advisers about whether he speaks to Stone, telling many of them that “he no longer talks to Stone” even though “people close to [him]” tell the Post that he does, in fact, “occasionally talk[] to him.”145 Why Trump wants or needs his staff to believe he does not speak to his close friend and adviser is unclear; while investigators do not know what was said in any Trump-Stone phone calls, Trump has supplied written answers to federal investigators claiming that he never spoke with Stone about WikiLeaks releasing harmful information on Clinton or the Democrats.146
What is clear is that in the final months of the presidential campaign, Stone does in fact have information related to WikiLeaks to relay to Trump if he so chooses. On August 2, 2016, a friend of Stone’s, Jerome Corsi, calls him to tell him that “WikiLeaks [is] planning a major release of ‘very damaging’ material [to Clinton].”147 Less than twenty-four hours later, Stone calls Trump; he has since claimed that not only did he not tell Trump that “very damaging” information about Clinton was about to be released, but he never broached the subject of WikiLeaks with his longtime friend at all—despite Trump having just days earlier told his staff that he wanted as much information about any stolen Clinton emails as possible.148
The backstory to the August 2 Stone-Corsi call is a telling one. On July 25, 2016, Stone heard from a Fox News reporter that WikiLeaks was planning “a massive dump of Clinton emails relating to the Clinton Foundation in September.”149 Stone immediately wrote Corsi to issue an order to him: “Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadoran Embassy in London and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails … they deal with the [Clinton] Foundation, allegedly.”150 While Corsi will subsequently tell federal investigators that he did nothing with Stone’s request, it will ultimately be found, and Corsi will eventually admit, that he forwarded Stone’s urgent request—which may or may not have been a by-product of Trump’s contemporaneous and equally urgent request on the same subject—to a Trump adviser in London, Ted Malloch.151 Corsi demanded that Malloch “put [him] in touch with Assange,” simultaneously “suggest[ing] that individuals in the ‘orbit’ of U.K. politician Nigel Farage might be able to contact Assange” and asking Malloch “if [he] knew” those individuals.152
It is eight days after Corsi writes Malloch that he writes Stone back to inform him that “WikiLeaks possesse[s] information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and plan[s] to release it in October.”153 He will later tell the special counsel’s office that he is “convinced that his efforts had caused WikiLeaks to release the emails [of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] when they did.”154 Whether or not this is correct, Mueller will in fact subsequently investigate Malloch over his “frequent appearances on RT, which U.S. intelligence authorities have called Russia’s principal propaganda arm”; per the Guardian, the “Special Counsel’s alleged focus on RT is important because the Russian news channel also has a close relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.”155 The British media outlet reports that court filings in the United States, as well as visitor logs at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where Assange lived for years until his arrest in April 2019, “show that RT staff met and interviewed Assange on the same day—August 2, 2016—that Roger Stone, the self-described ‘dirty trickster’ and longtime Trump associate who had previously bragged about having special access to WikiLeaks, was passed information about Assange’s plans.”156
While the Guardian calls Malloch an “unpaid adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign, Malloch himself will write, in a January 2017 book, that he has known Trump for decades and has given