March 12 (UPI) — Roger Stone, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, said he had a “brief exchange” with a hacker called Guccifer 2.0, who has claimed responsibility for hacking information from the Democratic National Committee.
It is the first time that someone associated with Trump has confirmed any type of contact with the online persona, which the U.S. intelligence community believes is a cover for Russian intelligence.
Stone told CNN on Sunday it was innocuous exchange of a few direct messages on Twitter.
“It was so perfunctory, brief and banal I had forgotten it,” Stone told The Washington Times on Friday.
He said the conversations occurred in August after Twitter briefly banned the hacker because of the posting of the DNC information. Stone had published on Twitter his opposition against “censorship.”
“I have this brief exchange with him on Twitter,” he said to CNN. “To collude, I would have to have written him before. … We would need a time machine to collude.”
U.S. federal intelligence agencies have concluded Moscow sought to interfere in last year’s election to help Trump win.
“To reiterate, I myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them,” he posted Friday on his website Stone Cold Truth. “None. Nada. Zilch. I am not in touch with any Russians, don’t have a Russian girlfriend, don’t like Russian dressing and have stopped drinking Russian Vodka.”
He posted screenshots of his Twitter messages.
The direct messages were first reported by The Smoking Gun website and The Washington Times last month. More information on the exchanges was published Wednesday.
In the messages he said he was “delighted” to see Guccifer 2.0 reinstated on Twitter.
Stone also had cryptic tweets last August when he wrote that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton‘s campaign manager, would endure his “time in the barrel” after WikiLeaks began publishing other Democrats’ hacked emails. The website later posted thousands of emails it said were from Podesta’s account.
Stone said he was referring to “my own research” about Podesta and his family. He also said that tweet “does not in any way prove I was foreshadowing” the WikiLeaks release.
In early October, he tweeted, “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks?” He later told CNN the tweet was based on information from a source he would not reveal.
Stone said he has never communicated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “either directly or indirectly.”
