The latest revelations in the Trump-Russia investigation, which tie former campaign boss Paul Manafort and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone to Wikileaks, involve a man named Jerome Corsi.
Corsi is a conspiracy theorist who has been involved in everything from the swift-boating of John Kerry to 9/11 Trutherism to Obama-era Birtherism.
Corsi was subpoenaed by Robert Mueller's team to answer questions about his contacts with Stone and his possible knowledge of WikiLeaks' plans to releases stolen Clinton emails and testified before the grand jury between September 6 and November 2, 2018.
On Tuesday night, Corsi shared a draft legal document he says was prepared by Mueller but never filed, laying out charges that he lied to investigators about Wikileaks and Stone.
Corsi’s lawyer, David Gray, claimed in a Washington Post interview that he was asked by Stone to contact Wikileaks about the emails but declined.
"My client didn’t act further that would give rise to any criminal liability," the lawyer said.
Blogger and intelligence analyst Marcy Wheeler examined comments by Corsi's lawyers and on-the-record facts and says that his lawyer's comments will blow up Corsi's possible defense.
"Corsi claims that he told those lies because he didn’t remember what really happened, and because he had deleted all his emails (in a very curiously specific period, January 13 to March 1 [and] couldn’t refresh his memory until the FBI obtained the deleted emails from his computer," Wheeler writes.
Corsi could have claimed that as a journalist he had reason to contact Wikileaks about stolen emails.
However, his lawyer seemed to admit that he knew participating in Stone's scheme might "give rise to any criminal liability.”
"This seems to suggest that Corsi prepared the lie he told prosecutors, believing that telling the truth would expose him to criminal liability," she writes. "That’s going to make it a lot harder to claim this was all an accident brought on by poor memory once he does get charged."
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