Roger Stone may have been arrested Friday, but his lawyer says it that doesn't mean he colluded with Russia.
The longtime adviser to President Trump was arrested Friday morning on charges including obstruction of an official proceeding, witness tampering, and making false statements. Some of those false statements were made to Congress, the indictment from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team says. But in what seems to be a concession that Stone did make those misstatements, Stone's alleged lies were actually things he "honestly forgot about," Stone's attorney Grant Smith said in a statement Friday.
Apparently Smith also forgot something: that Stone repeated those supposed misstatements several times outside of congressional testimony. Stone appeared on Meet the Press last May, saying he "received nothing from Wikileaks or from the Russians" and "passed nothing on to Donald Trump or the Trump campaign." He also told C-SPAN last June that he "had no advanced knowledge of the source, content, or the exact disclosure timing of the Wikileaks disclosures."
Those repeated statements directly contradict findings in Mueller's Friday indictment, which say Stone told the Trump campaign he had contacts with WikiLeaks and imply he knew in advance about the publication of stolen Democratic emails ahead of the 2016 election. Read more about what Stone's lawyer contradicted at The Week.