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Trump surrogate Roger Stone claims ‘devastating’ WikiLeaks bombshells to come

Veteran Republican strategist and Donald Trump surrogate Roger Stone claims he has “backchannel” communications with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, and that the most “devastating” bombshells in a series of leaks from the site are yet to come.

Speaking at a conference for John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists on Sunday in Kenner, Louisiana, Stone indicated that Media Matters for America, a politically progressive media watchdog group, would be exposed next, along with the group’s founder, David Brock, and political commentator Brit Hume. “More about them next week because some of their internal workings are going to be exposed,” Stone said.

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He also said that last week’s email dump containing hacked correspondence from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, was “small potatoes” compared to what’s to come.

“I don’t know exactly what [Assange] has. I don’t know when he intends to drop it,” Stone said. “But what I do know is that it’s devastating.”

Stone’s claim of having an “in” with Assange undermines his earlier denial of allegations from the Clinton camp, which charged that he knew about the hack ahead of time. The allegations stemmed from the fact that Stone had tweeted that Podesta would be exposed weeks before the email leak happened.

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, denies any relationship with Stone. Last week, the group tweeted: “We never communicated with Roger Stone, as we have previously, repeatedly stated.”

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The longtime Republican operative recently wrote an op-ed for The Hill in which he laid out his theory for why the entire election will be rigged against Trump, from voting machines to opinion polls. “We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls,” he wrote. Trump has also been touting a version of this conspiracy theory at his campaign events.

Michael Moynihan contributed additional reporting to this post.