Roger Stone, the longtime informal political adviser to President Trump and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster,” was arrested by the FBI on Friday as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Stone was indicted on seven criminal counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering, according to the Washington Post.
According to the Associated Press, the indictment details that in the summer of 2016 members of Trump’s presidential campaign had knowledge emails had been stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign and wanted them released. In addition, the indictment says that an unnamed senior Trump campaign official contacted Stone to ask when the stolen emails might be publicly disclosed by WikiLeaks.
Stone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
During the 2016 campaign, the longtime Republican operative and three-decade Trump friend said that he was in contact with “my hero” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and said he exchanged messages with Guccifer 2.0, the Twitter persona that U.S. intelligence officials later said was a front operated by the Russian military.
Last July, a U.S. grand jury indicted 12 Russian military officers on charges that they had directed and overseen the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other groups and leaked the stolen documents to WikiLeaks and other anti-secrecy sites.
Stone has criticized the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt — and repeatedly denied that he was in direct contact with either Russia or WikiLeaks.
But he has been under investigation for months and many observers have called attention to a 2016 tweet that seemed to suggest he was aware of the imminent release of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Stone has previously denied that he knew the contents of those emails or when they would be released.
Watch CNN’s video of Stone’s arrest in Florida above.