d. WikiLeaks’s October 7, 2016 Release of Stolen Podesta Emails

On October 7, 2016, four days after the Assange press conference that Stone had discussed with Trump Campaign officials, the Washington Post published an Access Hollywood video that captured comments by candidate Trump some years earlier and that was expected to adversely affect the Campaign.²³⁹ Less than an hour after the video’s publication, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen by the GRU from the account of Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta.

The Office investigated whether Roger Stone played any role in WikiLeaks’s dissemination of the Podesta emails at that time. During his first September 2018 interview, Corsi stated that he had refused Stone’s July 25, 2016 request to contact Assange, and that had been the last time they had talked about contacting Assange.²⁴⁰ Email and text communications between Stone and Corsi show that was false. During a later September 2018 interview, Corsi told the Office that one of his WikiLeaks-related communications with Stone had occurred on October 7, 2016, just prior to WikiLeaks’s release.²⁴¹ Corsi told the Office that he spoke with Stone before publication of the Access Hollywood video and that Stone knew about the tape’s content and its imminent release, both of which he relayed to Corsi.²⁴²

Corsi gave conflicting accounts of what happened after Stone purportedly informed him about the video.²⁴³ Initially, Corsi told investigators that he had instructed Stone to have WikiLeaks release information to counteract the expected reaction to the video’s release, and that Stone said that was a good idea and would get it done. Later during the same interview, Corsi stated that Stone had told Corsi to have WikiLeaks drop the Podesta emails immediately, and Corsi told Stone he would do it. Corsi said that, because he had no direct means of communicating with WikiLeaks, he told members of the news site WND—who were participating on a conference call with him that day—to reach Assange immediately.²⁴⁴