Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi says Stone requested a 'cover story' for 2016 tweet

Conservative author Jerome Corsi revealed Tuesday that he told a federal grand jury he helped Roger Stone come up with a "cover story" for a tweet Stone sent out in August 2016 that predicted WikiLeaks' release of stolen Democratic emails.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and any coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow, including whether any Trump associates knew in advance about the WikiLeaks document dump. On Aug. 21, Stone, one of President Trump's longtime advisers, tweeted: "Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel." John Podesta was Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and his emails were released by WikiLeaks several weeks later.

Corsi, a witness in the Mueller investigation, told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that Stone called him on Aug. 30, 2016, and asked him to come up with an "alternative explanation" for the tweet. Corsi began writing a memo for Stone describing the business dealings of John Podesta and his brother, Tony, and Corsi and Stone would later say this is what Stone's tweet was about, even though the memo was written after the fact.

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"What I construct, and what I testified to the grand jury, was I believed I was creating a cover story for Roger, because Roger wanted to explain this tweet," Corsi told the Journal. "By the way, the special counsel knew this. They can virtually tell my keystrokes on that computer." Stone, who denies knowing about the hacked emails in advance, told the Journal that Corsi is contradicting him because he's being "squeezed" by the special counsel.