Hiding behind his online pseudonym “jrlc,” Corsi was also a virulent
Islamophobe. Posting on the conservative forum FreeRepublic.com, he has
called Islam “a virus” and “a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion” and
has written that “Islam is a peaceful religion as long as the women are
beaten, the boys buggered, and the infidels killed.”
After Corsi provided contact information to Stone, the secret
Israeli agent and Stone connected. Then, on May 17, the agent wrote, “Hi
Roger, I hope all is well. Our dinner tonight for 7PM is confirmed. I
arrive at 4PM. Please suggest a good restaurant that has privacy.” The
original plan was for Stone and the agent to meet alone, but Stone
wanted to bring Corsi along as backup. “I am uncomfortable meeting
without Jerry,” Stone wrote, and then rescheduled the dinner for the
next day.
According to the FBI warrant, the same day that Stone
communicated with the Israeli agent, he began Googling some very strange
terms, including “guccifer” and “dcleaks.” It would be nearly a month
before those same terms would make headlines around the world. On June
14, The Washington Post reported
that the DNC had been hacked by Russian government agents. The next
day, someone calling himself “Guccifer 2.0” took credit for the attack.
He claimed to be an American hacktivist, but according to a Justice
Department indictment
in July 2018, he was actually a Russian GRU employee. Soon afterward,
the website DCLeaks—another front for the GRU—began releasing hacked
Democratic Party documents.
The timing implies that the Israeli agent was Stone’s most likely
source of confirmed details of a Russian cyberattack on the DNC, a
month before it became known to anyone outside of the Kremlin and the
GRU. If that’s the case, there are two critical questions: How did the
Israeli agent know, and why was he revealing the details to a close
associate of Trump rather than to the Obama administration, Israel’s
supposed ally?
![]( "Bamford-Kerry-dinner-getty")
A seat at the table: John Kerry hosts dinner for the Middle East Peace Process Talks at the Department of State with guests including Isaac Molho. (Paul J. Richards / AFP via Getty Images)
On May 18, the day
after Stone’s Google searches, Stone, Corsi, and the Israeli agent met
for dinner at the 21 Club on 52nd Street in New York City. The
restaurant, which features a balcony lined with painted iron lawn
jockeys, was a regular Trump hangout. At the top of the agent’s agenda
was getting Stone to quickly set up a confidential meeting with the
candidate. The next day, the agent pressed Stone in an e-mail: “Did You
Talk To Trump This Morning? Any News?” But Stone was coy. “Contact
made—interrupted—mood good.”
Then, in early June, according to the Senate Intelligence
Committee Report, Stone learned that Julian Assange, the head of
WikiLeaks, was about to release something “big.” Stone relayed the
details to Rick Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and told him
that Assange appeared to have Clinton’s e-mails. Yet it wasn’t until
later, on June 12, that Assange would publicly announce that WikiLeaks
had “emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
These were the first of many tips to Stone that appear to have
come from his new Israeli friend. Two days later, the DNC announced that
it had been hacked by Russia. The day after that, Stone again Googled
“Guccifer” and “dcleaks,” hours before Guccifer 2.0 publicly claimed
responsibility. On June 21, as Guccifer released more documents, the
Israeli agent notified Stone that he was in New York accompanied by a
senior official and would like a meeting with Trump. “RS: Secret,” said
the message, according to the FBI documents. “Cabinet Minister
[redacted] in NYC. Available for DJT meeting.”
Other parts of the message were also redacted, but in the
affidavit the FBI revealed the cabinet minister’s official title:
“According to publicly-available information, during this time
[redacted] was a Minister without portfolio in the [redacted] cabinet
dealing with issues concerning defense and foreign affairs.” At the
time, the only minister without portfolio in the Israeli government was
Tzachi Hanegbi, one of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s oldest and closest
confidants, and Wikipedia (the likely source of the FBI agent’s
“publicly- available information”) uses nearly identical language to
describe him. Israeli press reports at the time indicated that Hanegbi
was in the United States on that date as part of a delegation attending
the unveiling of Israel’s new F-35 stealth fighter jet.
Married to an American from Florida and fluent in English,
Hanegbi previously held a post as minister of intelligence supervising
Mossad and Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. The question
is, why would a high-level confidant of Netanyahu’s, with an
intelligence background and close American links, seek a secret meeting
with a US presidential candidate?
Trump had been busy, hustling from city to city on the campaign
trail and hitting several rallies a day. Taking valuable time to meet a
couple of Israeli contacts was not a high priority, especially without
any idea what the meeting would be about. So, on June 25, Hanegbi
returned to Israel. “Roger, Minister left,” said the Israeli agent.
“Sends greetings from PM. When am I meeting DJT? Should I stay or leave
Sunday as planned?” The next day, Stone replied, “I would not leave as
we hope to schedule the meeting mon or tues.”
One possible explanation of the agent’s sense of urgency was
Obama’s and Kerry’s increasing pressure on Netanyahu to resolve the
Palestinian issue. A key element of that solution would be agreeing to
negotiate an equitable division of Jerusalem, since both sides claimed
it as their capital. But if his secret agent could confidentially meet
with Trump and get a commitment that, if elected, he would support
keeping Jerusalem undivided, then Netanyahu could ignore Obama. An
election win for Trump, therefore, would also be a win for Netanyahu.
Especially since the candidate was already fully committed to another
key issue for Netanyahu: canceling the nuclear deal with Iran.
![Trump and Netanyahu]( "Bamford-Bibi&Donald-getty")
A united front: Trump and Netanyahu participate in a joint statement in the East Room of the White House in 2020. (Sarah Silbiger / Getty Images)
Suddenly, there
was a change in plans. According to the FBI documents, the agent was
ordered by Netanyahu to postpone the appointment with Trump and instead
get on the next plane for Rome. In a last-minute effort to find a
solution to Jerusalem and the Palestinian issue, meetings
in the Italian capital were set up between Netanyahu, Kerry, and the
European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini. Netanyahu
wanted his aide, the agent, at his side. At the meeting, the elephant in
the room was a forthcoming report by the Middle East Quartet. It was
expected by all to be extremely critical of Israel for its apartheid
settlement policies and its treatment of the occupied Palestinians.
The night before the meeting, Netanyahu and Kerry met for dinner
at Pierluigi, a popular seafood restaurant in Piazza de Ricci, a block
from the Tiber. “What is your plan for the Palestinians?” Kerry asked as
the prime minister began chain-smoking a batch of thick Cuban cigars.
“What do you want to happen now?” Netanyahu offered a vague response
involving a regional initiative, but Kerry wasn’t buying it. “You have
no path of return to direct talks with the Palestinians, or a channel to
talks with Arab countries,” Kerry told the prime minister, according to
Haaretz.
“You’ve hit the glass ceiling. What’s your plan?” he asked again. But
Netanyahu may well have had one: to use his agent, perhaps sitting with
them at that very table, to help put Trump in the White House.
On June 28, after the meeting in Rome had concluded, the agent
quickly dashed off another message to Stone: “RETURNING TO DC AFTER
URGENT CONSULTATIONS WITH PM IN ROME. MUST MEET WITH YOU WED. EVE AND
WITH DJ TRUMP THURSDAY IN NYC.”
The meeting with Trump was rescheduled for 1 pm on Wednesday,
July 6, before the candidate took off for a rally in Sharonville, Ohio.
The Israeli agent flew to New York the day before and checked into the
St. Regis, the French Beaux Arts–style hotel on East 55th Street. The
next morning, he had planned to rendezvous with Stone in the lobby for a
pre-meeting discussion. “At the St Regis With Lt General. Waiting For
You Thank You,” he wrote.
But there were problems involving secrecy. Stone, at his home in
Florida, had come down with a bad cold and was too ill to travel, so he
arranged for Corsi to make the introduction. That made the Israeli agent
uncomfortable because of the sensitive nature of the discussion. “I
have to meet Trump alone,” he said, and they agreed that Corsi would
leave after the introduction. There was still another problem, however.
The meeting was meant to be secret, but the agent was accompanied by an
Israeli lieutenant general. So once again the meeting had to be
postponed.
Who was this lieutenant general? Unlike in the United States,
where the highest military rank is a four-star general, in Israel it’s a
three-star lieutenant general, and there is only one, the chief of the
General Staff, the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF)—the equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At
the time, that was Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot. But it’s unlikely that
Eizenkot was the person waiting in the lobby of the St. Regis to meet
with Trump. Eizenkot had little to do with the election—and had actually
sided with Obama on the issue of Iran. In January 2016, he said that
the nuclear deal “had actually removed the most serious danger to
Israel’s existence for the foreseeable future, and greatly reduced the
threat over the longer term.”
Instead, it may have been Eizenkot’s predecessor, Benny Gantz,
who had retired as head of the IDF in February 2015 but still held the
rank of lieutenant general in the reserves and was often referred to by
his military title. He was in charge of the IDF during Israel’s war on
Palestinians in Gaza in 2014. It was a war that produced a “vastly
disproportionate” number of civilian deaths: 1,400 of the nearly 2,300
people killed in the conflict, according to Human Rights Watch. Gantz
would later boast that “parts of Gaza were sent back to the Stone Age.”
In May 2020, Gantz would become the second-most-powerful person
in Israel under Netanyahu, as the alternate prime minister. At the time
of the canceled meeting with Trump, however, he was the chairman of
Fifth Dimension, an Israeli private intelligence company run by a former
deputy head of Mossad, with another former Mossad member as CEO.
Fifth Dimension wasn’t the only Israeli spy company with close ties to Israeli intelligence. Another was Psy Group,
a private intelligence firm that operated under the motto “Shape
Reality.” Earlier that year, on behalf of the Ministry of Strategic
Affairs, Psy Group had carried out Project Butterfly, a covert operation
that spied on and attacked Americans who supported the Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In April 2016, it offered
Trump campaign official Rick Gates another secret operation, Project
Rome. The subtitle of the six-page proposal clearly spelled out its
objective to covertly interfere with the US presidential election:
“Campaign Intelligence & Influence Services Proposal.”
Secrecy was
paramount. “We recommend keeping this activity compartmentalized and on
need-to-know basis since secrecy is a key factor in the success of the
activity,” the proposal said. “Due to the sensitivity of some of the
activities and the need for compartmentalization and secrecy, Psy Group
will use code names.” Trump was called “Lion,” Hillary Clinton was
“Forest,” and Ted Cruz was “Bear.” “This document details the services
proposed by Psy Group for the ‘Lion’ project between now and July 2016,”
the proposal noted, referring to the period of the US primaries.
The Project Rome proposal read like an official Ministry of
Strategic Affairs or Mossad operational document, referring to
“multisource intelligence collection,” “covert sources,” “automated
collection and analysis,” and an “intelligence dossier on each target,
including actionable intelligence.” “Once the information has been
uncovered or extracted, it is delivered to the Influence platform for
use in the campaign as needed,” the proposal said.
Project Rome’s “Influence+ process” platform involved targeting
American voters through “authentic-looking 3rd party platforms”—that is,
fake news sites—and also through the use of “tailored avatars,”
thousands of phony social media accounts on platforms such as Facebook.
“The purpose of these platforms is to engage the targets and actively
convince them or sway their opinion towards our goals.” The “targets”
were unwitting American voters. “The team will include over 40
intelligence and influence experts,” the document said. Then there were
what internal company e-mails called “physical world ops like counter
protesters, hecklers, etc.” The techniques were nearly identical to
those used by the Israeli firms Archimedes Group and “Team Jorge” to
secretly throw elections around the world.
The price tag for the operation was $3,210,000, with another
$100,000 for media expenses and $400,000 more for “negative opposition.”
It appears that Gates, wisely, passed on Project Rome. The key players
behind Psy Group later formed a new Israeli company, Percepto
International. Also investigated by the international journalism
collaboration, it was labeled “an Israeli factory for online deception”
by Haaretz.
Despite the Trump campaign’s rejection of Project Rome, covert
high-level approaches to Roger Stone to get directly to Trump continued.
“Hi Roger,” the Israeli agent wrote on July 8. “Have you
rescheduled the meeting with DJT? The PM is putting pressure for a quick
decision.” Stone wrote back that Trump would not be back in New York
until after the Republican National Convention, so the meeting would
have to be postponed until then. He added, “Sorry about the fiasco last
week, however you can’t just bring the General without tell[ing] me.”
As Trump stormed the Midwest for votes, Guccifer 2.0 was making
final preparations for another major release of documents. On July 14,
Guccifer sent WikiLeaks an e-mail titled “big archive,” with a
one-gigabyte encrypted attachment. Four days later, on July 18, the
WikiLeaks Twitter account notified Guccifer the data had been received
and that release of the hacked DNC e-mails was planned for later in the
week.
On or around
the next day, Donald Trump was in his New York office venting at the
press for its criticism of his wife Melania’s Republican convention
address the night before. There were accusations that she had borrowed
passages from a speech by Michelle Obama. At some point, however,
according to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s Senate Intelligence
Committee testimony, Trump took a phone call from Roger Stone.
“Roger, how are you?” said Trump.
“Good,” Stone replied. “Just want to let you know I got off the
telephone a moment ago with Julian Assange. And in a couple of days,
there’s going to be a massive dump of e-mails that’s going to be
extremely damaging to the Clinton campaign.”
Trump was pleased. “Uh, that’s good. Keep me posted,” he said
into a small black speaker box on his desk. Sitting nearby was Michael
Cohen. “Do you believe him? Do you think Roger really spoke to Assange?”
Trump asked.
“I don’t know,” Cohen said. “Roger is Roger, and for all you
know, he was looking on his Twitter account. I don’t know the answer.”
In the end, neither Mueller’s team nor the FBI could ever find
any substantive or conspiratorial communications between Stone and
WikiLeaks. He had exchanged a few innocuous messages with Guccifer,
later reviewed by the FBI, but there was no indication of how Stone
could have known what he knew—which left only one apparent explanation:
that the information had been passed to him by Netanyahu’s agent. As in
the case of the DNC hack, the information was 100 percent accurate.
There was never any evidence that Stone learned of the releases from
either WikiLeaks or the Russians, but during that period both he and
Jerome Corsi were in contact with the Israeli agent. Israel’s version of
the NSA, Unit 8200, which employs some of the most highly trained
signals intelligence specialists in the world and is equipped with
advanced intercept capabilities, may well have been surveilling Russia
and WikiLeaks.
Three days later, on July 22, as Hillary Clinton was preparing to
announce her choice of a running mate on the eve of the Democratic
National Convention, WikiLeaks released approximately 20,000 e-mails
stolen from the DNC. “I guess Roger was right,” Trump told Cohen. Paul
Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, agreed. Sitting on the tarmac in his
plane, about to take off for his next rally, Trump delayed the flight
for half an hour to work the messages into his speech. Hungry for more,
he later told Manafort to keep in touch with Stone about future
WikiLeaks releases.
On Wednesday,
July 29, the Israeli agent was back in touch with Stone and Corsi and
eager to connect with Trump now that the convention was over and he was
the Republican nominee. “HI ROGER,” the agent wrote. “HAVE YOU SET UP A
NEW MEETING WITH TRUMP? I PLAN TO BE BACK IN THE US NEXT WEEK. PLEASE
ADVISE. THANK YOU.” Stone sent a message to Manafort about finding a
time to communicate, writing that there was “good shit happening.” The
next day, the two spoke on the phone for 68 minutes. The following day,
July 31, Stone had two phone calls with Trump that lasted over 10
minutes.
Then on Tuesday, August 2, despite previous failed attempts to
connect with Assange, Corsi was nevertheless able to send a detailed
message to Stone about WikiLeaks’ future plans:
Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One
shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging….
Time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they
are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now
about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has
stroke—neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus,
setting stage for Foundation debacle.
Corsi later told Stone that there was “more to come than anyone
realizes. Won’t really get started until after Labor Day.” The details,
including the first indication that Clinton campaign chairman John
Podesta was a target, were coming from somewhere other than Assange.
“Roger—As per PM we have one last shot before moving on,” the
Israeli agent wrote to Stone on August 9. “Can you deliver? History will
not forgive us. TRUMP IN FREE FALL. OCTOBER SURPRISE COMING!” What the
“October Surprise” consisted of was left unexplained, but the
implication was that there would be a spectacular new release of stolen
e-mails, possibly centering on Podesta.
Three days later, the agent was even more frantic. He sent Stone
his “hello from Jerusalem” message, promising that his government was
prepared to “intervene” in the US election to help Trump win the
presidency and offering to share critical intelligence to make it
happen. Stone replied cryptically: “Matters complicated. Pondering.”
Then, the following week, on August 20, Corsi suggested a meeting with
the secret agent to determine “what if anything Israel plans to do in
Oct.”
From the messages, it appears that Israel either had its own
October Surprise planned or was aware of Guccifer’s planned release of
the Podesta e-mails before the election. The day after Corsi suggested
meeting with Netanyahu’s agent, Stone for the first time publicly
indicated that Podesta would soon become a target of WikiLeaks—thereby
predicting the event six weeks before it happened. “Trust me, it will
soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary,” said his
tweet. Since neither Assange nor Guccifer was a source for either Corsi
or Stone, the tweet once again points to the Israeli agent who was in
communication with both of them about the October Surprise.
The prospect of an October Surprise, along with the offer of
critical intelligence, apparently got Trump’s attention. On September
25, he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met privately with Netanyahu
and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer in his Trump Tower penthouse. Later
that day, he publicly announced that if he was elected, his
administration would finally “recognize Jerusalem as the undivided
capital of the State of Israel.” Since 1947, there has been virtual
unanimity within the international community—and among US
presidents—that the future of Jerusalem must be the subject of
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Now Trump was vowing
to trash that consensus, along with the Palestinians, and support
Netanyahu’s agenda. Whether Trump and the Israeli agent ever met in
person is unclear. By late summer, Stone and Corsi were becoming
increasingly concerned about potential charges, and to eliminate a paper
trail they began meeting only in private with the agent. What is very
clear, however, is that in the end Netanyahu got what he wanted—and so
did Trump.
Around the
same time, Stone had a conversation with Paul Manafort, who by then had
left the campaign but stayed in communication with Trump’s political
circles. According to Manafort’s later Senate Intelligence Committee
testimony, Stone told him that “John Podesta was going to be in the
barrel,” repeating the claim he made by tweet on August 21, and that
“there were going to be leaks of John Podesta’s emails.” A few days
later, on September 29, Stone called Trump, who was on the way to New
York’s LaGuardia Airport in his black bulletproof limo. After concluding
the call, Trump told Rick Gates, who was sitting next to him, that
“more releases of damaging information would be coming.”
On October 7, WikiLeaks unleashed 2,050 Podesta e-mails that were
damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign—just as Stone had
predicted a month and a half earlier. But Stone’s concern about
potential criminal charges seems to have turned into outright paranoia.
Given that he had no close links to Assange or the Russians, the likely
focus of his concerns were his numerous communications with the Israeli
secret agent. After all, Stone had discussed clandestine foreign
intervention in a presidential election, had made arrangements for Trump
to meet a foreign agent, and had predicted the October Surprise. The
prospect that authorities might look into any of these actions could
certainly have been sufficient to rattle his nerves.
By secretly assisting Netanyahu’s agent in an attempt to make
contact with a presidential candidate—aware that he intended to
interfere in the US election on behalf of his country—both Stone and
Corsi could have faced serious charges as agents of a foreign power
under Section 951 of the criminal code, which makes it a crime to
covertly assist a foreign government without registering.
Even before WikiLeaks released the Podesta e-mails in October,
Stone and Corsi seemed to become nervous that someone would discover
their back channel. Soon after the “Podesta’s time in the barrel” tweet
in August, Stone and Corsi tried to find a way to somehow account for
that unique insight. On August 30, Corsi said in his 2019 book Silent No More,
“I suggested Stone could use me as an excuse, claiming my research on
Podesta and Russia was the basis for Stone’s prediction that Podesta
would soon be in the pickle barrel.” He added, “I knew this was a
cover-story, in effect not true, since I recalled telling Stone earlier
in August that Assange had Podesta e-mails that he planned to drop as
the ‘October Surprise.’” The next day, Corsi said, he e-mailed to Stone
“a nine-page background memorandum on John Podesta that I had written
that day at Stone’s request.”
Following the Podesta dump, the cover-up became more frantic.
Stone ordered Corsi to delete e-mails related to Podesta and hid his own
communications with Corsi about WikiLeaks. Stone also pointed a finger
at Randy Credico, a onetime friend who had a radio program in New York,
as his back channel to WikiLeaks. Credico had interviewed Assange on his
program, but that was four days after Stone’s tweet about Podesta’s
upcoming time in the barrel. Credico denied under oath that he had acted
as a back channel for Stone, and there was never any evidence to show
he had.
In a predawn raid on January 25, 2019, heavily armed FBI agents
stormed Roger Stone’s Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home and placed him under
arrest. He was charged with seven criminal offenses, including one count
of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false
statements, and one count of witness tampering. Later that day, Stone
was released on a $250,000 signature bond. Defiant, he said he would
refuse to “bear false witness” against Trump. Finally, on November 15,
2019, after a weeklong trial and two days of deliberations, Stone was
convicted on all counts and sentenced to 40 months in federal prison.
But on July 10, 2020, a few days before Stone was to turn himself in,
Trump commuted his sentence, personally calling him with the news.
Throughout this chain of events—including the trial, the Mueller
Report, and the nearly 1,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee
Report—no hint of the involvement of Israel was made public. Despite the
clear violations of US law and months of clandestine, high-level
attempted interference in the presidential election, no details were
released, and no congressional hearings or investigations took place.
Nor was there ever a hint in the press, which remained transfixed by
Russia.
The evidence, however, suggests that
throughout the summer and into the fall of 2016, Israel illegally
interfered in the US presidential election. A top agent of Netanyahu was
secretly offering intelligence and other covert assistance to Trump to
get him elected—all with virtually no oversight or scrutiny by the FBI
or the US media, though both had numerous personnel in Israel at the
time. Now Netanyahu is back in office as prime minister, and Trump is
once again running for president. All the ingredients are there for
history to repeat itself, unless the Justice Department and Congress
conduct long-overdue investigations into the real source of secret
foreign collaboration and interference in the 2016 election, and both
the FBI and the media remove their self-imposed blinders when it comes
to Israel.
James BamfordJames
Bamford is a best-selling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker,
award-winning investigative producer, and winner of the National
Magazine Award for Reporting.
