President Donald Trump lashed out Friday at Robert Mueller’s investigation after the indictment of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone.
The president tied the arrest to the ongoing fight over U.S. immigration policy, and accused investigators of colluding with CNN.
CNN said its reporters were not tipped off, they merely made an educated guess because the special counsel’s grand jury does not typically meet on Thursdays, but did this week.
The last time that happened, the meeting of the grand jury was followed by an indictment the following day. CNN said its reporters deduced that there might be one coming on Friday, so they sent cameras to the homes several suspects.
“CNN’s ability to capture the arrest of Roger Stone was the result of determined reporting and interpreting clues revealed in the course of events,” the network replied to Trump’s tweet.
Stone was arrested during a predawn raid Friday at his home in Florida. He faces seven counts, including witness tampering, obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress. He was released on a $250,000 bond.
Stone’s attorney Grant Smith also questioned the FBI’s decision to arrest Stone at his home Friday. “There was no need to have the FBI show up with a SWAT team,” Smith told NBC News.
Smith also emphasized that Friday’s indictment did not explicitly charge Stone with coordinating or colluding with the Russian government.
Stone has “been very public for the last two years about where he was and what he was doing” during the election, Smith said. “If they’d found any collusion they would have charged him with it.”
Stone plans to “fight vigorously” against the charges, Smith said.
The indictment alleges that Stone had been in contact with top-ranking Trump campaign officials about efforts to leak damaging information about Hillary Clinton just before the 2016 election.
In criticizing the actions of law enforcement in Stone’s case, Trump linked his complaints to the fight over a border wall. The refusal of House Democrats to meet Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to build a border wall has resulted in the longest partial government shutdown in modern history.
Trump has repeatedly argued that the United States is not harsh enough in its treatment of people who cross the southern border without papers. The president argues that these migrants bring illegal drugs, traffic in human beings, and mistreat the migrants they smuggle.
Trump’s use of “border coyotes” refers to the English translation of a Spanish slang term for someone who transports migrants across the Mexican border, often on foot.
In the Stone charging documents on Friday, Mueller described repeated contacts between Stone and high-ranking members in Trump’s campaign organization.
During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1.
The indictment does not identify “Organization 1” or its head, but it clearly refers to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, because it says the head of the organization was at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange has been living there since 2012 while avoiding sexual offense charges in Sweden.
The group leaked thousands of Clinton campaign emails during the final month of the 2016 campaign. At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Oct. 10, 2016, Trump praised the group, saying “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks.” In addition, Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr., acknowledged he’d had private communications with WikiLeaks.
