What Do The Washington Post and the U.S. Justice Department Have in Common?

THE POST & EMAIL!

by Sharon Rondeau

(Apr. 3, 2018) — On Tuesday afternoon, The Post & Email’s readers’ log showed that a reader from The Washington Post had opened a story from August 2016 summarizing a public conference call on which former Trump advisor Roger Stone provided his view of the progress of the Trump campaign, billing himself as “the ultimate political insider.”

Stone has been a political strategist since his days in the Nixon administration.  He has written books on the Bush political family, Nixon’s presidency, Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Stone was reportedly an informal adviser to the Trump campaign for a time.

On his website stonezone.com, Stone summarized his March 6, 2018 interview with Infowars’ David Knight in which Stone opined that “the entire Mueller investigation is a distraction from the fact that the Obama FBI and DOJ colluded with Hillary Clinton and used fabricated evidence to spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

“The Mueller investigation” refers to former FBI and now-Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, who has been leading parallel probes into whether or not the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russian operatives and the alleged extent to which the Kremlin interfered in the U.S. 2016 election.

Approximately eight hours after The Post’s reader accessed The Post & Email’s summary of Stone’s 2016 conference call, the United States Justice Department opened the same article outside of normal business hours.

The Post & Email has redacted the IP numbers of both readers’ workstations.

Stone’s name has been in the news over the last 24 hours, in particular, with The Post opining on Monday, “Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone is in an increasing amount of trouble in the Russia investigation, it would seem.  What is less clear is how much his trouble might ensnare President Trump.”

Of particular interest is whether or not Stone met in person with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a claim Stone denies.  Stone now says, according to The Post on March 13, that former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg’s claim that Stone had said he met with Assange in 2016 was intended only as “a joke.”

In the same article, The Post reported, “Potential contacts with WikiLeaks have been probed by federal investigators examining whether allies of President Trump coordinated with Russians seeking to tilt the 2016 race.”

Assange is portrayed by some in the American media as favorably-disposed toward the Russian government.

Trump has called Mueller’s “Russian collusion” portion of his investigation a “witch hunt” and denied any inappropriate communications with Russian-government figures of any stripe.