Who ‘Directed’ Roger Stone to Hook Up With WikiLeaks?

Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.

Someone important in the Trump campaign was tasked with staying on top of what Roger Stone was learning from WikiLeaks about its pending released of hacked DNC and Clinton emails. Sure, Friday’s indictment told us that Stone had been allegedly having an extensive back-channel chat with WikiLeaks about its Clinton dirt but we already sort of knew that. What’s more intriguing is that multiple Trump campaign officials were aware of it and “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed” to talk to Stone about it. So who in Trumpworld was itching for WikiLeaks dirt in the summer and fall of 2016?

Several possibilities: It’s important to keep in mind that the indictment alleges Stone had different conversations with different kinds of Trump campaign associates. The first thing we know is that someone obscured by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s use of the passive voice made it a senior campaign official’s job to check with Stone about WikiLeaks releases. But that person wasn’t the only campaign official whom Stone kept in the loop about the pending release of hacked Clinton data. The indictment makes clear that Stone was both “informed” and was “contacted by” a number of “senior Trump Campaign officials”—plural. So let’s take a look at who allegedly sought out info about future WikiLeaks dumps and where they might (or might not) fit in the indictment narrative.