Roger Stone met with Russian operative who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton

  Some version of the headline I wrote above about a meeting which took place between Roger Stone and a Russian operative during the 2016 campaign has been splashed all over the internet today, and while technically the headline is accurate, it fails to tell the whole story. This is a good example of what you will likely get in the first couple of paragraphs:

One day in late May 2016, Roger Stone — the political dark sorcerer and longtime confidant of Donald Trump — slipped into his Jaguar and headed out to meet a man with a “Make America Great Again” hat and a viscous Russian accent.

The man, who called himself Henry Greenberg, offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent in the upcoming presidential election, according to Stone, who spoke about the previously unreported incident in interviews with The Washington Post. Greenberg, who did not reveal the information he claimed to possess, wanted Trump to pay $2 million for the political dirt, Stone said.

  Well that looks pretty damning and how many people will jump to conclusions and stop reading at this point because it confirms what they want to believe? But the story continues:

“You don’t understand Donald Trump,” Stone recalled saying before rejecting the offer at a restaurant in the Russian-expat magnet of Sunny Isles, Fla. “He doesn’t pay for anything.”

Later, Stone got a text message from Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign communications official who’d arranged the meeting after Greenberg had approached Caputo’s Russian-immigrant business partner.

“How crazy is the Russian?” Caputo wrote, according to a text message reviewed by The Post. Noting that Greenberg wanted “big” money, Stone replied, “waste of time.”

  The offer was turned down and later on Caputo and Stone talked about what a waste of time the meeting was. But here is another interesting tidbit: it turns out the man going by the name Henry Greenberg has been an FBI informant for 17 years, although it is unknown if he was working with the FBI at the time of this meeting but this is what Michael Caputo and Roger Stone had to say:

“If you believe that [Greenberg] took time off from his long career as an FBI informant to reach out to us in his spare time, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you,” Caputo said in an interview.

In a separate interview, Stone said, “I didn’t realize it was an FBI sting operation at the time, but it sure looks like one now.”

I agree…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium