Roger Stone suspiciously predicted the Podesta emails. Now investigators think they know how.

How did Roger Stone know about the Podesta emails before they were published?

(Image credit: Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images for Politicon)

published 30 November 2017

On Aug. 21, 2016, President Trump's adviser Roger Stone published a cryptic tweet: "It will soon [be John] Podesta's time in the barrel," he wrote, referring to Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman. By September, Stone was telling Boston Herald Radio that "Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people [are ready] to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will answer the question of exactly what was erased on [Clinton's] email server."

Then, on Oct. 7, 2016, Stone's predictions came true: WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of emails hacked from Podesta's Gmail account.

Now the mystery of how Stone knew about the WikiLeaks emails in advance may finally be coming to a close. On Tuesday, comedian and "longtime outsider in New York state politics" Randy Credico posted a photo of a subpoena he received that will require him to appear before the House Intelligence Committee, apparently as part of the ongoing probe into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, The New York Times reports. "A person familiar with the House efforts said that Mr. Credico had been identified as the intermediary between Mr. Stone and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks," the Times adds.

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Credico met with Assange in April for an interview on his radio program. Stone had also been on Credico's show, noting in 2016 that "we both dislike Hillary. We're both fans of Julian Assange." While Stone declined to comment on the most recent developments, he had told ABC News earlier this year that "I read on Twitter that [Assange] had a cache of information on Hillary and that he would release it, I did ask a source to confirm that before I put it in my column." Stone bragged to CNN that he had a "backchannel contact" to Assange.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.