Emails show why some top Trump campaign officials saw Roger Stone as a strong link to WikiLeaks

Roger Stone.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

About a month before the 2016 presidential election, President Trump's campaign chairman Stephen Bannon, and longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, exchanged messages about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and what kinds of hacked documents his website planned on releasing ahead of Election Day, The New York Times reports. Stone quickly posted the email exchange at The Daily Caller. Their early October emails had not been previously reported.

On Oct. 4, Bannon emailed Stone and asked him what Assange was planning. "A load every week going forward," Stone responded. People familiar with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election told the Times that Bannon and two other former senior Trump campaign officials have told Mueller's team that Stone came across as someone with inside information on the WikiLeaks playbook, at least in regard to targeting Hillary Clinton.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.