Washington, DC, Jan. 25, 2019 – Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released the following statement:
“The indictment of Roger Stone, released today by the Special Counsel, provides new and important detail about the Trump campaign’s effort to acquire dirt on Hillary Clinton, which Wikileaks possessed in the form of thousands of emails stolen from her campaign by agents of the Kremlin. It also details the extent to which Mr. Stone knew about Wikileaks’ future releases of stolen emails, and lied to our committee about it. Most significant is the allegation that a senior campaign official was ‘directed’ in July 2016 to contact Mr. Stone about additional Wikileaks releases. Our Committee will be eager to learn just who directed a senior campaign official to contact Stone about additional damaging information held by Wikileaks, one of the publishing arms of Russian government hackers.
“It is also significant that this outreach took place days before Donald Trump called on Russia to ‘find the 30,000 emails that are missing’ from Hillary Clinton’s email server. That would mean that at the very time that then-candidate Trump was publicly encouraging Russia’s help in acquiring Clinton-related emails, his campaign was privately receiving information about the planned release of stolen Clinton emails.
“This is now the second witness who has been indicted for or plead guilty to making false statements in testimony before our Committee. These prosecutions should make it abundantly clear that those who appear before congressional investigators and attempt to mislead us will be held to account. Neither we nor the Special Counsel will tolerate efforts by any person to impede any investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, nor to pressure a witness to withhold testimony from or mislead Congress. The first order of business for the Committee will be to release all remaining transcripts to the Special Counsel’s Office, and we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead.”