WASHINGTON | An associate of Trump confidant Roger Stone said on Monday that he is rejecting a plea offer in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
In an email sent to The Associated Press, Corsi, a conservative author who has peddled conspiracy theories, said he planned to reject a potential plea deal with prosecutors.
He did not elaborate, but in earlier interviews with other news outlets, he said he had been offered a chance to plead guilty to a single count of lying to investigators. He also claimed he planned to reject that offer because it would force him to admit to willfully lying, which he insisted he did not do.
“They can put me in prison the rest of my life,” Corsi told CNN. “I am not going to sign a lie.”
Mueller’s team has questioned Corsi, a former Washington bureau chief of InfoWars, as prosecutors scrutinize Stone’s possible connections to WikiLeaks.
American intelligence agencies have argued that Russia was the source of the hacked material released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential election. Those emails included messages from John Podesta, the chairman of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Mueller is working to determine whether Stone and other associates of President Donald Trump had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans.
ABC News reported that Corsi had provided copies of a draft plea agreement in which he would have admitted to lying about an email about an associate’s “request to get in touch with an organization that he understood to be in possession of stolen emails and other documents pertaining to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Corsi’s lawyer, David Gray, declined to comment, as did Peter Carr, a spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller.
