As a flamboyant veteran of Washington and New York City politics, the campaign strategist Roger J. Stone Jr. has been in any number of knock-’em-down scrapes over the years, reaching back four decades to his early days as a self-described “dirty trickster” in the Nixon administration.
But now Mr. Stone, a veteran adviser to President Trump who has long cut a piratical figure on the political scene, appears to be engaged in his stiffest fight yet: the one for his own legal future.
On Friday, a stream of developments in the special counsel investigation underscored his peril. An old friend — a former procuress from New York whom Mr. Stone has employed as an administrative worker — testified about him to the federal grand jury hearing evidence in the inquiry. Another old friend, a New York City radio host, has been subpoenaed to appear before the same grand jury. And one of his close aides was held in contempt of court for ignoring his own subpoena, though the order was stayed.
For months now, Mr. Stone, 65, has been a key focus of the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into whether any Trump associates worked with Russian operatives who were secretly trying to tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. Mr. Stone is central to that question because he appeared to have advance knowledge of some of the moves that Russian hackers were making.
Mr. Stone dismissed the latest series of events on Friday afternoon, insisting that none of the three people knew anything about possible collusion with the Russians.
“None my associates have any such knowledge, and the ongoing attempt to interrogate them appears to be an effort to fabricate some other ‘crime’ to pressure me into testifying against the president,” he said. “It really has the smell of a witch hunt.”
Mr. Stone once said in a speech that he had “communicated with” Julian Assange, the founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, and predicted that a trove of information about Hillary Clinton would be published before the 2016 election. And on Twitter, he seemed to correctly predict the release of emails — stolen by Russian hackers — sent and received by John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.
“Trust me,” Mr. Stone wrote, “it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
Mr. Stone has also acknowledged that before the 2016 election, he traded private messages with Guccifer 2.0, the mysterious online figure that was instrumental in helping WikiLeaks release the emails and other political documents that eventually proved damaging…
