Roger Stone Open to 'Testify Honestly' To Mueller

Roger Stone, the longtime confidant of President Donald Trump who was indicted last week in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller's Russian Federation investigation, said he hasn't ruled out cooperating with Mueller's team.

CNN reports that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Mr Stone in a pre-dawn raid on Friday.

President Donald Trump on Friday slammed the arrest of long-time ally and informal adviser Roger Stone, questioning who alerted CNN to be outside his house filming the Federal Bureau of Investigation raid.

Roger Stone, Donald Trump's longtime political ally and self-described "dirty trickster", was arrested this morning in Florida.

Trump's critics noted that the arrest showed Mueller's probe getting closer to the president himself.

Representatives for the heads of the two congressional committees that interviewed Stone could not be immediately reached.

"All I did was take publicly available information and try to hype it to get it as much attention as possible", Stone said.

During the 2016 presidential race in the U.S., Donald Trump and his support team contacted the representatives of Russian government and Wikileaks (or their mediators) at least 100 times. Stone said he learned that WikiLeaks had obtained the stolen Clinton campaign emails after Julian Assange appeared on television, from the embassy in London, and announced that he had possession of them.

After the HPSCI asked Credico to testify in November 2017, the indictment says, Stone urged him to either back him up or exercise his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

Instead, it accuses him of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements about his interactions related to WikiLeaks' release.

After Wikileaks released its second batch of emails, Stone bragged to "senior Trump Campaign officials" that he had correctly predicted the data dump, according to the indictment.

Stone's site also links to a 2008 New Yorker profile, which said he "regularly cross the line between respectability and ignominy".

"There is no circumstance, whatsoever, under which I will bear false witness against the president", Stone said, adding, "I will not testify against the president".

Stone still possessed many of those communications when he gave false testimony about them, prosecutors said in the indictment.

He briefly served on Mr Trump's campaign, but was pushed out amid infighting with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

But most of all, the indictment underscored the Trump campaign's pursuit of damaging information, much like the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between campaign aides and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

Stone was indicted on charges that he lied to the House intelligence panel about conversations he had about the website WikiLeaks and that he obstructed Mueller's probe.

But Richard Nixon still seems to hold special significance for Mr Stone - aside from the tattoo, he has a room of Nixon memorabilia in his office in Oakland Park, Florida.

"Roger is a stone-cold loser", Trump declared.

The indictment states that during the summer of 2016, Stone spoke to senior Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks and information it might have had that would be damaging to Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign.

According to special counsel, Stone had dozens of text messages pertinent to that inquiry when he made that statement.

"I have never discussed a pardon", Stone said. "And if you are trying to connote a certain authority in your business life, I think being well dressed is part of that".