But the emails.
If there’s one thing that emerges from the recent releases of emails from Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone during the 2016 election campaign, it’s that they were obsessed with the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
For them, servergate was a tantalizing gift that kept on giving — a venue for moving the media conversation towards a sense of untrustworthiness on the part of the Clintons, while opening up new avenues by which to investigate pet issues like the Clinton Foundation and other allegations of self-dealing.
The holy grail for GOP operatives was somehow gaining access to 30,000 deleted emails on a private server that Clinton used while Secretary of State.
Most famously, Trump himself called on “Russia” to hack the server on July 27 — with Kremlin-backed hackers attempting an intrusion the same day.
In private communications as well, Corsi and Stone expressed a burning desire to use Wikileaks — and the potential Russian contacts therein — to find the missing emails.
The July 25 release of DNC internal emails by Wikileaks only threw fuel on the fire.
“Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [Wikileaks] emails…they deal with Foundation, allegedly,” Stone wrote to Corsi on the same day as the release.
Corsi then forwarded the message to Ted Malloch, a conservative author living in London who was briefly floated to be EU ambassador after Trump’s election, before going down in flames over allegations that he embellished his resume.
It’s not clear what came of the exchange, but six days later, on July 31, Stone emailed Corsi again, saying that Malloch “should see [Assange].”
Corsi replied that he was in Europe, adding that “word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.… Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton]. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”
For the month of August, Corsi and Stone would fantasize about what the emails might contain, at times publicly.
As Corsi wrote in an August 2016 column on conspiracy site World News Daily, “A top Trump adviser says his computer and personal bank accounts were hacked in retaliation for declaring publicly he believes Julian Assange of Wikileaks has a complete set of Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 scrubbed ‘private emails’ and is preparing to release them to derail the Democratic Party nominee’s presidential campaign.”
“Roger Stone, co-author of the bestselling book ‘The Clintons’ War on Women’ and a longtime friend of Trump, told WND in an interview that he has communicated directly with Assange,” Corsi added in the piece.
In an Aug. 31 memo for Stone titled “Podesta,” Corsi outlined various scenarios of what might be found on the then-impending messages. He wrote that he planned on using any messages relevant to the “Podesta brothers” to shatter the then-forming narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
“The entire Democratic Party narrative is thrown into disarray if it turns out the Podesta brothers, via the Podesta Group, have tighter and more easily documentable financial ties to Russia, involving far greater numbers than have ever been suggested to tie Manafort to Russia via Ukraine,” Corsi wrote in the memo.
A little over a month later, Wikileaks dropped a trove of Podesta’s hacked emails.
