Updated on November 27 at 6 p.m. ET.
A far-right conspiracy theorist who landed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s crosshairs over his friendship with the longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone now says that Mueller has offered him a plea deal on one count of perjury related to his conversations with Stone in 2016—but he is not going to take the deal, he told me in an interview on Monday. “I will not sign a statement that says I willfully and knowingly lied, because I did not,” Jerome Corsi said.
Mueller has been interviewing Stone’s associates and senior Trump-campaign officials in recent months—including Corsi, Trump’s former campaign CEO Steve Bannon, and the former campaign chairman Paul Manafort—to determine whether Stone knew in advance that WikiLeaks had obtained hacked emails from a senior Clinton-campaign official, John Podesta, and coordinated the release to distract from the damaging Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. (The emails were dumped on October 7, 2016, just minutes after the tape was released by The Washington Post.)
Corsi was subpoenaed by Mueller’s team in September and has been predicting since last month that he might be indicted for lying. He has said that he told Stone in August 2016 that Podesta would be WikiLeaks’ next victim, but insists it was just a theory that he developed while traveling in Italy with his wife in the summer of 2016—a trip that Mueller has been very interested in, Corsi said. “They wanted me to connect Roger Stone with Assange,” Corsi told me, referring to the WikiLeaks founder who released the hacked Podesta emails in October. “They couldn’t believe how I knew in August that Assange had Podesta’s emails.”