has exclusively obtained text messages between trump campaign adviser roger stone and his friend randy credico showing once againstone's foreknowledge of those wikileaks e-mail dumps. big news, according to the text messages provided by stone, now pretend you don't know me. you died five years ago, stone replied. create, yesterdhe wrote back. hillary's campaign died a week later. and this was not the only roger stone news today. "the wall street journal" reporting the special counsel's office is now looking into possible witness intimidation by stone of that very witness, randy credico, something stone denies. stone who has already said he expects to be indicted went on laura ingram's radio show to try, once again, to rewrite history. >> to date there is no evidence whatsoever of russian collusion or wikileaks collaboration, or any proof or evidence that i knew in advance the source or the content of allegedly stolen or allegedly hacked e-mails published by wikileaks. i never predicted anything of the kind, nor heard any such thing from jerry corsi who is a great researcher and a writer and a

has exclusively obtained text messages between trump campaign adviser roger stone and his friend randy credico showing once againstone's foreknowledge of those wikileaks e-mail dumps. big news, according to the text messages provided by stone, now pretend you don't know me. you died five years ago, stone replied. create, he wrote back. hillary's campaign died a week later. and this was not the only roger stone news today. "the wall street journal" >>> and the latest on the california wildfires as the trump delegation sidesteps the president's attacks. >> not pointing fingers. >>> when "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. news from the mueller investigation into roger stone on multiple front seat tonight. nbc news has exclusively obtained text messages between trump campaign adviser roger stone and his friend randy onfissrniacaie'sonce gos. againstone's foreknowledge of those wikileaks e-mail dumps. big news, according to the text messages provided by stone, now pretend you don't know me. you died five years ago, stone replied. create, he wrote back. hillary's

and in one of those e-mails, this is a text message sent from randy credico to stone, just days after credico had interviewed julian assange, the head of wikileaks in which credico tells stone wikileaks has kryptonite on hillary and please don't out me as your source. another text message from september 18th in which credico says to stone, just remember, do not name me as your connection to assange. and then on october 1, which is six days before wikileaks does the dump of john podesta's e-mails where credico is saying big news wednesday. now pretend you don't know me. stone replies you died five years ago. and credico responds in the text, great. hillary's campaign will die this week. this is roger stone trying to get ahead of this and saying look, my source in this, my back channel, and here is the sources to prove it is randy credico. he is claiming he had no knowledge of any of the hacked e-mails in advance, and he was making these twitter previews that he said during the campaign as something that he was picking up from credico and that he learned publicly. and we have heard from

that my client, roger stone, has been consistent for the past two years in his assertion that randy credicoon who was providing him with what limited information mr. stone had regarding wikileaks. i don't know, would you agree with that? >> well, when you read the texts, there is -- it is absolutely credible to say that. the real question, though, is whether these are selective communications. they're coming from roger stone, so you have to understand the bias that would come with that. and whether there are other communications between them or between stone and other people. this is, i think, in part, why we have been hearing about all of these witnesses, really, a vast web of associates and people associated with stone who have -- who seem to have been going in front of either the grand jury or meeting with bob mueller, because, you know, randy credico says one thing, stone says another thing, both of them, they're competing stories, and this is how you have to sort out the whole thing. then you get jerome corsi involved and he's now rumored to be making false statements. it's a very diff

but he, roger stone, a guy named randy credico, they're saying yeah, i lied to my friends and the public. the only time i never lied was when i was before the grand jury and now they're coming after me even though i've publicly admitted that i am a liar. i have to believe that robert mueller knows exactly what happened between all these guys and is building a case and now of course he's out there peddling a sob story that he's being unfairly targeted and talking about getting a pardon from his former friend donald trump. ultimately this will sort itself out because you can't believe anything that he, roger stone and now randy credico are telling us when they're trying to save their backsides. >> jonathan, i'll play you an exchange between corsi and ari melber today on this question here at 6:00 p.m. that aired. basically the story is, i was lying and i'm forgetful then, but i'm on it now. truthful now. take a listen. >> you had led them to believe that you did not have contact with someone on behalf of roger stone, when you did. >> the first day, the statement i gave was wrong. >> wrong,

you can watch the friendship devolve, especially in the e-mail where roger stone is threatening randy credico's14-pound thing named bianca. stone seais, you backstab your friends, run your mouth, my lawyers are dying to rip you in strings. credico respond, you don't have a constitutional right to threaten me or my dog. you crossed a red line. roger stone replies, rot in hell. you can see the toll the mueller investigation has taken on their friendship, wolf. >> we have pictures of that, too, some video of the dog as well. he likes to go every place. >> he even went with randy when he testified in front of the grand jury. the special counsel office gave him special permission to bring the dog. he said, he wasn't do anything to the dog, but he was concerned randy was not taking proper care of the dog. >> what could mueller charge stone with and would it be pressure on stone to cooperate? >> the legal issue here, as you know, we are waiting to see if mueller's team brings charges against randy stone and it is possible they could bring something related to collusion if they can pin down he had some

randy credico, let's start with him. one of them is never threaten a man's dog, but you do that in your messages to credico. and one is you were threatening him in a way that would make him not testify, showing the audience now what you said, i'll rip you to shreds and i'll take that dog away from you. there's not a thing you can do about it because you're a weak, broke piece of blank. there's his dog. what did the threat mean, roger? >> well, first of all to take three text messages out of thousands really shows no context. these are the late night ravings between two grumpy old men who have been friends for almost 20 years. and chris, they're friendly, they're vulgar, they're vicious, they're nasty, but they're not serious. and therefore they'd have to be seen in context. for example, you don't see the text where he tells me i should be willing to go to jail rather than reveal his identity as my source. you don't see the text where he says my apartment is likely wired by the fbi. you don't see the text where i urge him

>> these are text messages between roger stone and randy credico, back channel to wikileaks in octoberthem, randy says big news wednesday. he goes on to say "hillary's campaign will die this week." that was the week julian assange was supposed to hold this big press conference and deliver a bunch of dirt. he didn't do that. a couple days later that's when wikileaks started rolling out all these disclosures of john podesta's hacked e-mails, the clinton campaign chairman. roger stone is putting these messages out trying to show, you know, in fact, randy credico was his back channel. >> why release them now? he's had them all this time. >> i think stone and his attorneys are frustrated that he's been out there insisting he was not a back channel, and they feel like people don't believe roger stone. remember, roger stone was out there in 2016 saying he was in touch with assange. seeming to predict that stuff was going to be coming. now he's putting forth these text messages to try show, look, i was telling the truth, i did have a back channel, i was getting some kind of information from ra

it was randy credico. radio host, gadabout in new york politics.e told me credico talked to assange and that's how i got the information, says roger stone in part. however, this never made a lot of sense. why? he interviewed assange after he had supposedly had his exchange with roger stone. so i "x"ed that out because it doesn't make sense that credico was with assange. he denies all of it. that takes us to the big discussion that is coming on information that's new today. jerome corsi, who is he? he's a right-wing conspiracy theorist. he's someone associated with stone. i was being a little playful in the introduction, but not really. i don't know how to describe him vis-a-vis stone. corsi's got trouble. here's why. he told the u.s. government he never did anything with the requests for wikileaks information. what requests? hold there. roger stone says jerome corsi, says the u.s. government more importantly, stone went to corsi and said, go find out what you can about wikileaks over there in the uk. i guess he thought corsi had some kind of access

randy credico also has legal jeopardy and another associate of roger stone's, jerome corsey, who has been told he has been indicted -- he has been told by special counsel he will be indicted. >> an indicted could drop any minute. >> i don't think it's a coincidence that that's why the president is showing his anxiety on twitter, as he often does. the president appeared to have some inside knowledge about the inner workings of the mueller team. that could be because of reports that matt whitaker has given him, if he has been briefed on the mueller investigation. we don't know that he has, or because subjects of the investigation have a joint defense agreement with the president and telling him, jerome corsey expects to be indicted, roger stone expects to be indicted or other associates of the president. >> all the news reports out there this week related to a possible inindictment dropping. >> always possible. media matters take on the tough task of watching fox & friends this morning, which often gives us the answer as to why the president was tweeting this morning. they haven't talk

randy credico, big news wednesday. now pretend you don't know me. roger stone writes, assumingly jokingly, you died five years ago. then writes hillary clinton's campaign will die this week. you spent a lot of time on both prongs of the mueller investigation. where do you see the significance of a potential stone indictment, if it should come this week on the collusion side. >> who are these people that were around him and who was he talking to? i've struggled to get my head around it. but what it really comes down to is one simple thing. was roger stone someone that boasted and bragged about connections to assange that he did not have, and he was simply doing that to increase his profile and give him more currency in trump's world or was he truly talking to assange and working with him. that is where the question of assange -- of stone will rest. where was it that he was. and was this simply him just lying about his contacts, trying to be more important or was there something more significant there. and i do not think we'll have any real clarity on

back channel and he was relying on public information when he was sending out these tweets, and randy credico he has cherry picked these e-mails and he was relying on statements that julian assange was making. now, this all comes as mueller's team has been interviewing numerous people, including credico about roger stone. roger stone himself said he could be indicted but he has done nothing wrong here. >> thank you so much on roger stone here. meantime, this next man, one of america's most polarizing lawyers and personalities, and now michael avenatti, the man representing stormy daniels is arresting on charges of domestic violence. we know avenatti is denying all of these allegations. stormy daniels is speaking up saying what? >> reporter: he's saying they're bogus allegations. there's a lot we don't know right now. we don't know if there was an altercation, we don't know who was involved. there was initially a report that said this was an altercation between michael avenatti and his wife from whom he is currently getting divorced. i spoke with mrs. avenatti on the phone yesterday and she sa

sam nunberg, randy credico, and peter w. smith who is deceased, a gop activist. wikileaks made a series of bold requests to -- including asking for trump's tax returns, urging the train ump campaign to rejece poll results as rigged, and then appointed squuli julian assange ambassador to australia. does it stand out he's not on the list of people reached out to? >> as far as we know. this is all about roger stone and donald trump jr., all of these other people who have been called to the grand jury are about getting stone and about getting trump jr. this news about a sealed indictment in virginia. the court where mueller has brought most of his prosecutions is the federal court in d.c. 678 there's 36 sealed indictments pending right now in that federal court. they may be from mueller's team. they may not be. we don't know. we know 18 sealed indictments have been filed since august. august is the time that the mueller team went on radio silence because of the upcoming midterm elections. it could be everybody knew that after the midterm elections attorney general se

he released texts with randy credico, the man who is his back channel.tone credico that hillary's campaign will die this week six days before wikileaks put out the hacked e-mails of john podesta's hae-mails. if he communicated with trump about the dumps of e-mails. his lawyers are saying this vindicates roger stone. do you think that's true? >> i don't know how they can make that argument, but what this says is further disclosures about the connections between people very close to trump and his team and the russian efforts to interfere with our elections points out how important it is for the mueller investigation to continue and come to conclusion. >> the "new york times" reporting that your leader in the senate, chuck schumer ran interference as the senate investigated the social media giant during the presidential election. the times reports that schumer was encouraging other senate democrats not to vilify facebook. were you encouraged to go easy on facebook? >> not at all. what these new revelations point out is that we, the congress, should think ab

stone is lawyering up and trying to shift blame by releasing text messages between himself and randy credicotrying to claim that credico was the go between with wikileaks. one thing for sure is that this entire case is escalating. the question is are there already indictments out there that may be sealed that we just don't know about. >> heidi, let me ask you about what has transpired on president's twitter feed. we know he's obviously been thinking a lot about it. he's been tweeting nonstop about it. what do you think is behind that? >> clearly anxiety is high. that is the reporting from the white house, that you can draw a direct line between those panicked tweets and the timing of the president's meetings with his lawyers on monday and wednesday in particular. so the question is, do they know something that we don't know? the question is why is it taking so long for this white house to answer those written questions from robert mueller? what is the holdup there? the lawyers certainly have had a lot of time to think this all through and to get mueller those answers. and yet they're not doi

ultimately this will sort itself out because you can't believe anything that he, roger stone and now randy credico are telling us when they're trying to save their backsides. >> jonathan, i'll play youen exchange between corsi and ari melber today on this question here at 6:00 p.m. that aired. basically the story is, i was lying and i'm forgetful then, but i'm on it now. truthful now. take a listen. >> you had led them to believe that you did not have contact with someone on behalf of roger stone, when you did. >> the first day, the statement i gave was wrong. >> wrong, okay. >> okay and it was wrong because i forgot the e-mail that they're referring to. >> the reason i think this is relevant is i think we're going to see a lot more of this as more facts come out. >> you might be right. i mean, corsi's original story was completely preposterous. he said that he only seemed to know that wikileaks had all this information about hillary clinton because he'd been conducting this masterful forensic analysis of computer documents where he studied the entire pattern of the democratic party's computers an

this cnn has learned that mueller's team is pursuing an interview with roger stone's associate randy credicoant do you think this is? >> the question of roger stone's alleged involvement with wikileaks and the cast of characters around it feels like the point around which the mule per's investigation overlaps with the bar scene in "star wars." we are talking about people on the fringe of the political world, kind of being brought in centrally to this. but underlying it is a genuine question, because certainly during the campaign, you know, roger stone signalled some of the releases that were coming. so the fact that the mueller team, and to phil's point, is going back at this yet again is just an indication of just how thorough they are. also, the likelihood that they know things obviously that we don't, but also that they know don't know. the protagonists - that clearly is one of the things i think is weighing very heavily on the president and his legal team as they craft their own answers. they're not sure what others have said about the incidents that they are describing themselves. >> it

roger stone has previously said that randy credico was his channel to get information from wikileaks. and what this tells us, wolf, is that the special counsel is homing in on the big task that they had, which is to answer the question of whether or not there was any collusion. everybody inside or associated with the trump campaign who was getting some of this information beforehand, knowing what wikileaks had, which was damaging information on hillary clinton and her campaign. so, again, what this tells us is that we're getting closer to getting that answer, and that's a big deal. >> you know, laura, some legal experts have suggested this may be an effort to flip corsi right now to get him on a perjury charge and get him to cooperate and go after some bigger fish. >> it's certainly possible. the big fish here is roger stone. it's not jerome corsi. it's not credico, it's roger stone. so we'll have to wait and see whether this is something that's going to actually come to fruition and whether that's what he's edging towards here. we just don't know yet. >> the other development today,

counsel's office is now looking into possible witness intimidation by stone and his former friend randy credico. stone has claimed this man, credico, was a back channel to wikileaks. credico denies that. and nbc news has exclusively obtained text messages from october 2016 between stone and credico in which they discuss wikileaks just six days before the release of john podesta's e-mails. stone, who has already said he expects to be indicted, was on laura ingraham's radio show earlier today. >> there is no evidence whatsoever of russian collusion or wikileaks collaboration or any proof or evidence that i knew in advance the source or the content of allegedly stolen or allegedly hacked e-mails published by wikileaks. i never discussed john podesta's e-mails in my tweets. the allegation that i somehow knew in advance about the theft of his e-mails is patently untrue. >> mueller's team is also continuing to get information from former trump deputy campaign manager rick gates. in court today prosecutors said they were not ready to sentence gates because he is continuing to cooperate with ongoing in

roger stone was involved in writing stories about his alleged back channel randy credico who he says was his confirmed source for the wikileaks information and rural is taking seriously that roger stone is out there telling people like jerome corsi and other associates to write stories about credico being his back channels. now that we have these e-mails nbc revealed, it looks like maybe roger stone had a different back channel. maybe he had somebody telling him what assange would release. >> and all this manafort conspiring, according to mueller's charges, comes at a time where the president has been exposed, been busted, for trying to abuse the justice system to order illegal prosecutions of james comey, of hillary clinton and then he put out an incredibly irresponsible piece of propaganda, blithely accusing multiple doj officials of treason, retweeting this thing and saying when will this trial for treason begin? and you can see there rod rosenstein, mueller who is doing this investigation behind bars. what is your view of that,fall? >> you know, there comes a point where there's

stone has said that radio personality randy credico was his back channel to wikileaks, but credico denied "the journal" reports that e-mails sent to credico say that mr. stone threatened to sue the blank out of him, called him a loser, a liar, and a rat and told him to prepare to die. that's roger stone talk. separately, nbc news is reporting tonight that text messages provided by stone to nbc news show that credico appeared to be providing regular updates to stone on wikileaks founder julian assange's plans in the days before the hacked e-mails were released. for instance, in october, texts shows that credico predicted hillary's campaign will die this week. six days later, wikileaks released its first dump of e-mails stole orphan knn from p. this gets to the belly of the beast. if trump's people, and the person of roger stone and credico knew all about what the russians were planning to dump on wikileaks about hillary and podesta and all the other people in there in that campaign, to humiliate them and mis -- distract the american voter, if that's all part of a deal, then trump knew abou

no advanced knowledge of exactly what wikileaks was going to do, that he did learn things from randy credico, that he did not collude in any way and his lawyers told me he's not worried about this part of it. >> there's a couple of things to take from anna's interview with corsi. first of all, the baseline on corsi is he is a guy who believes the moon landing was staged, that it was faked, okay.? the second thing is, he's been around for years, as anna alluded to. >> was he behind info wars? >> he was the washington bureau chief of info wars. >> and off of this interview, you could indict him as soon as the lights went off on the interview. that's how limited the guy really is. the guy is totally irrational. but the important point is, he, roger stone and others are the kinds of people around donald trump. that's the most important point, i think. >> great point. >> i think that's an important point. let's not forget. these are con men and -- but -- >> drifters. >> i don't think corsi is irrational. i don't know him, but my sense of him is he pedals in an industry and when you pedal in consp

roger stone releasing those texts in order to try and buffer himself to say no, actually, randy credico was the guy who was the go-between with wikileaks. and the question now is when is mueller going to come forward with whatever his final determination is? certainly he didn't want to find himself in the same position that comey was in, being accused of dumping information right before an election. well, we're past that election now. >> yeah. all right. well, still ahead on "morning joe," we know george conway isn't afraid to speak out and he's not alone. kellyanne conway's husband is a group of conservative lawyers pushing back at the president's worst impulses. we'll talk to two of the members next on "morning joe." but first, bill carin wkarins w check on the forecast. >> the sleet came in about two hours later than expected and snow totals were higher than expected. a lot of people went to work thinking they could get home just fine and it was the opposite. it was a nightmare for millions and millions of people from central jersey through eastern pennsylvania, next in, southern new

randy creditico. mr. stone asserted that credico was his back channel to wikileaks. in terms of why this is an explosive development, "the wall street journal" offers this. mr. mueller's team is examining whether mr. stone, along with several other pro-trump activists, knew in advance about wikileaks' release of democrats' e-mails in the 2016 campaign. at the heart of mr. mueller's inquiry is the question of whether anyone in mr. trump's orbit participated in russia's efforts to hack and release the materials. here to help us unpack today's developments on the mueller front, as well as covering developments in the ongoing controversy surrounding donald trump's new acting ag, some of our favorite reporters and friends. joining us from "the new york times," peter baker, frank figliuzzi, former fbi assistant director for counterintelligence, chuck rosenberg is back, former senior fbi official. and on capitol hill, democratic congressman eric swalwell is here. let me start with you, peter baker and your paper and colleagues have also reported on the potential signif dhac

that matters to him is that what he has been saying so long that randy was his back channel to wikileaks, he just wants to slam credicond discredit him because credico is saying i wasn't his back channel, i didn't even talk to julian assange until august 25. these text messages show that they were talking about it before and every time stone asks credico for information, creditdy company is like i'm see whsee -- i'll see what i can do. but it is not clear if credico actually gave him credible information. he was saying yes, this is coming a few days before the dump came, but he got the day wrong and i've been talking to people who worked with julian assange and it was kind of in the ether of this sort of fringe group of like anarchists and hackers who everybody was talking about. >> so to that point, we're in a fringe group of anarchists and has been e hacker. i don't know who is vindicated, who is cleared. like what does it tell you? they could just be fringe clowns who are smack talkers. >> it could be. and we can't figure it out based on what is in the public records. we don't have all the evidence. mueller does. a

randy. now, cledico is a radio host and activist here in new york. stone once claimed credicoas his back channel to wiki-leaks. this has been denied. here are some of the texts, and one of them stone says that he should tell mueller to go f himself. in a series of emails, stone seems to threaten credico's of -- this was just some trash talk between long-time friends. >> you take three midwest text messages out of thousands that really shows no context. these are the late night ravings between two grumpy old men who have been friends for almost 20 years. chris, they are friendly. they are vulgar. they are vicious. they are nasty. they're ribald, but they're not serious. therefore, they would have to be seen in context. for example, you don't see the texts where you tells me that i should be willing to go to jail rather than reveal his identity as my source. you don't see the text where he says that my apartment is likely wired by the fbi. you don't see the text where i urge him repeatedly to tell the truth. >> roger, please, offer up the text. i'm happy to take them. >> you can