WaPo: Stone Met During Campaign With Russian National Offering Clinton Dirt

Despite his past claims to the contrary, Trump confidant Roger Stone did in fact meet with a Russian national during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

The man, Henry Greenberg — though he has used other names in the past, the Post reported, including as an apparent information source for the FBI — asked Stone for $2 million from Trump in exchange for damaging information about Hillary Clinton during a May 2016 meeting at a Miami area restaurant.

Stone told the Post he rejected the offer, saying that Trump “doesn’t pay for anything.” The paper also reviewed a text message exchange between Stone and Michael Caputo following the meeting; the Trump campaign communications staffer had arranged the meeting between Greenberg and Stone, the Post reported, after Greenberg first met with Caputo’s business partner.

Caputo told the Post prosecutors on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team brought up the meeting in an interview last month. Caputo remembered Mueller’s team seeming to have “intense interest” in the meeting, the paper said. 

“How crazy is the Russian?” Caputo texted Stone following the 2016 meeting, according to text messages reviewed by the Post.

“Wants big &$ for the info- waste of time” Stone responded.

“The Russian way,” Caputo said. “Anything at all interesting?”

“No” Stone said.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said he “certainly” did not have any knowledge of the 2016 meeting, nor did he believe Trump had been aware of it.

Though the Post reported there’s no evidence that Greenberg was working on the FBI’s behalf in the meeting, the paper said it had reviewed a 2015 immigration filing for the same man using a different name, Henry Oknyansky, in which he claimed to have provided information to the FBI for 17 years. Greenberg told the Post he stopped cooperating with the FBI “sometime after 2013,” in the paper’s words.

After initially denying the story, the Post said, Greenberg essentially confirmed Stone’s version of it with one exception: Greenberg claimed to have been accompanied by a man named Alexei who he claimed had once worked for the Clinton Foundation, though the foundation told the Post that it had never employed a man with that first name. Greenberg also denied having personally asked Stone for money. 

Caputo’s attorney, the Post said, sent a letter to the House Intelligence Committee Friday correcting earlier testimony about whether he was ever offered information about Clinton by a Russian. He also told the paper he would tell the DOJ inspector general about the meeting, as well. Stone’s attorney, Stone told the Post, “has done the same.”

The May 2016 meeting, the Post noted, came before Wikileaks began publishing stolen Democratic emails, before the acknowledged start of the FBI counterintelligence investigation, and before the Trump Tower meeting between several top Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer similarly promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Read the Post’s full report here.