© Joe Raedle/Getty Images/Max WilsonRoger Stone • Michael Caputo
At least seven people associated with longtime Trump friend Roger Stone have been contacted by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to interviews with witnesses and others who say they've been contacted.
The contacts suggest Mueller appears to still be aggressively pursuing evidence that would tell him whether associates of president Trump colluded with
Russia.
Mueller's team appears increasingly focused on whether any associates of Trump knew that the Russian government had hacked emails from the DNC and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta and provided them to Wikileaks during the last presidential election, according to those sources.A self-described "dirty trickster" in American politics, Stone has taken credit for persuading President Trump to get into politics. He initially served as an adviser to Trump's 2016 campaign but left amid controversy in 2015. While Trump told the
Washington Post at the time that he "terminated Roger Stone...because he no longer serves a useful function for my campaign," Stone told a different story, explaining on Twitter their falling out was about political messaging.
Stone has been under scrutiny in part because of statements in August of 2016 which
political opponents allege suggested he knew that Wikileaks was going to leak damaging information on Clinton before it was released. Stone has been targeted because he communicated with Guccifer, the hacker the U.S. intelligence community believes broke into DNC computers, sources told ABC News.
Comment: The political tug-a-war never produces momentum. Its goal is to render the opposer impotent, unable to win - therefore the center (the country as the pawn in the middle) has no place to go and little is achieved.