Wall Street Journal: Mueller Team Looking Into Roger Stone's 2016 Claim That He Met With Julian Assange.
COOPER: "The Wall Street Journal" tonight reports that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating possible links between longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Now, in its report, the newspaper says it has an e-mail dated August 4th, 2016, in which Stone wrote he'd had dinner with Assange. Then as now pretty much confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, an e-mail Stone tells the paper was a joke. I'm joined now by one of the reporters who wrote the story, Shelby Holliday. So, Shelby, Roger Stone says this isn't true, that he never dined with Assange and that, "It's not what you say. It's what you do. This was said in jest." That's not dissuaded Mueller's team it seems based on your reporting from actually looking into it, is that correct?</s>SHELBY HOLLIDAY, REPORTER, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL": Right. So there's an e-mail and it says he dined with Julian Assange. As you said, he tells this as a joke. He did not deny that he actually wrote this e-mail. He simply said it was all just a big joke, claiming that he had been in touch with Julian Assange. We do know that after he wrote this e-mail, he went on to tell a crowd in Florida he had been in contact with Julian Assange, and his statements have shifted over the past year. He told the House Intelligence Committee according to reports that he spoke to Assange through an intermediary, but when we approached him about this story, he said he never talked to Assange in 2016, especially on that day, on August 3rd, 2016. If you pull back and look at the timeline here, this comes a few days -- his e-mail comes a few days after President Trump called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton's missing e-mails. And it also comes after reported contacts between Paul Manafort, who's facing a number of charges, and a man that the Special Counsel's Office said hinted at is linked to Russian intelligence, Konstantin Kilimnik. So that timeline leading up to this e-mail is very curious. And then following the e-mail, Roger Stone went on Twitter and praised Julian Assange. He predicted that it would be the Podesta's time in barrow. He went on to say liberals want WikiLeaks to stand down, but he -- they won't. The payload is coming. So he predicted this e-mail release for months after the e-mail that said he'd dined with Julian Assange.</s>COOPER: Do you know whether Ecuadorian officials in London have been cooperating with Mueller's team? I mean, obviously, Assange is holed up at the embassy there for years. If there actually was a dinner with Roger Stone --</s>HOLLIDAY: Right.</s>COOPER: -- it would have had to have been at the embassy?</s>HOLLIDAY: That's great. That's unclear. And also Julian Assange was not available to respond to comment. They've -- he has not had internet access off and on recently, so it's hard to know. Roger Stone actually sent us a screen grab. We gave him multiple days to show -- to prove to us that he was not in London because that's where he'd have to be. All he sent us with a screen grab of what appeared to be a flight booking with the name Roger. He said he was flying from Los Angeles to Miami on that night and couldn't possibly have been in London. But I've talked to different prosecutors, and some say dining doesn't necessarily have to mean that he was there in person. He could have called him on the phone and caught him during dinner, or maybe they had FaceTimed. Other prosecutors say that's pretty concrete language and dining would mean dining. But at this point, there's no -- beyond the e-mail, beyond the screenshot booking, we don't have any proof that Roger Stone was or was not in London. And he wouldn't -- he didn't provide any other evidence. He scoffed at me when I asked if he could put me in touch with people he had been with on that day. And he sort of just laughed the whole thing off. And even when I asked, is there a 2016 on the screenshot, he said, are you kidding me? So it's hard to know. It's hard to know, and even people close to Roger Stone say they aren't exactly sure when to believe him and when he's telling the truth or when he's not.</s>COOPER: Yes. I mean there is sort of a performance art at times to some of his statements in the past.</s>HOLLIDAY: Right. He calls himself a political trickster. And if you watched the documentary, "Get Me Roger Stone", he actually really loves this reputation, that he's -- he pulls off political tricks, and sometimes he does things -- he says he's never broken the law, but that he does things that sort of raise eyebrows and stir the pot, I guess you could say. What's unclear is --</s>COOPER: Yes.</s>HOLLIDAY: -- if he was communicating with -- if he was communicating with Wikileaks and also Guccifer, some people call him Guccifer, if he's talking to these two groups that spread hacked e-mails, Hillary Clinton's e-mails before the election, did he know that they were working in tandem with Russia as U.S. intelligence agencies have said, and did he know -- did he have knowledge of a hack and still encouraged the release of these e-mails? That would be a crime under the federal election -- I'm sorry -- the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Even if you know of the crime, you didn't commit the crime, but you helped spread it or you helped disseminate the e-mails, you could be in trouble.</s>COOPER: Yes. Shelby Holliday, appreciate the reporting. Thanks very much.</s>HOLLIDAY: Thank you.</s>COOPER: Just ahead, President Trump goes on a weekend tweet storm and declares DACA dead. He's also on the attack once again against the mainstream media. No surprise there. The latest on all of that ahead.