WikiLeaks: No Assange-Roger Stone back channel

WikiLeaks is denying that longtime President Trump associate Roger Stone had a back-channel means to communicate with its founder, Julian Assange.

A spokesperson for WikiLeaks denied the existence of a back channel between Stone and Assange when asked by CNN.

“No communications, no channel,” the spokesperson wrote to CNN.

{mosads}The representative suggested Stone made false claims because he wanted the press and attention.

“Stone is playing slovenly Democrat-aligned journalists like a fiddle, brilliantly inserting himself, as is his habit to raise his profile and market his books. He is entirely delighted with inviting scrutiny because of course, he is no one who knows nothing about anything and was pushed out of the Trump team a long time ago for just this type of opportunism,” the WikiLeaks representative wrote.

Assange publicly denied Stone’s claims in January during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

“No, that’s false,” Assange told Hannity.

Assange said Stone talked to a mutual friend of his about setting up a radio show, which could’ve led to the confusion. But Stone then claimed their mutual friend leaked the information to him about having “political dynamite.”

“Assange told my friend, not me, he had unspecified political dynamite,” Stone said.

WikiLeaks continued to deny having any contact with Stone in a series of tweets.

@kyletblaine WikiLeaks & Assange have repeatedly confirmed that they have never communicated with Stone. Why did CNN not include this fact?

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 20, 2017

Roger Stone continues to troll media into increasing his profile by feeding false claims of contact with WikiLeaks. https://t.co/koG3zNBOB5

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 24, 2017

Stone responded to WikiLeaks’ dismissal of his claims by saying this clears him of charges for knowing about hackings beforehand.

“Since I never communicated with WikiLeaks, I guess I must be innocent of charges I knew about the hacking of Podesta’s email (speculation and conjecture) and the timing or scope of their subsequent disclosures. So I am clairvoyant or just a good guesser because the limited things I did predict (Oct disclosures) all came true,” Stone wrote to CNN.

WikiLeaks also said Stone leaked his own direct messages that revealed his communication with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom experts believe is connected to Russia and who supplied WikiLeaks with hacked emails.