# Roger Stone — "Podesta's time in the barrel" > [!quote] "Trust me, it will soon be Podesta's time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary" > — Roger Stone, tweet, August 21, 2016 ## Context [[Roger Stone]] posted this on August 21, 2016 — roughly seven weeks before [[WikiLeaks]] began publishing emails stolen from [[John Podesta]], Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, by Russian military intelligence. When the emails dropped in October, the earlier tweet read as apparent foreknowledge of the release, and it became a focus of the Mueller investigation and Stone's own prosecution. Stone insisted the tweet referred to forthcoming reporting about Podesta's business dealings, not the hack. ## Why this matters This is the receipt at the center of the Trump-campaign-to-[[WikiLeaks]] question. Stone styled himself the back-channel to [[Julian Assange]], and the "time in the barrel" tweet is the most-cited piece of public evidence that someone in Trump's orbit anticipated the [[Russian Election Interference]] document dumps. The line connects directly to the charges Stone was convicted on in 2019 — lying to Congress and witness tampering about exactly these communications. A primary-source artifact for the collusion timeline. ## Verification - **Source:** Stone's own Twitter account, August 21, 2016, widely archived; documented in the [Mueller Report](https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download) and [Stone's Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed authorship; the *interpretation* (foreknowledge vs. coincidence) is contested, and Stone's defense rested on the innocent reading. ## Related quotes - [[Roger Stone - admit nothing deny everything]] — the playbook Stone ran when this tweet drew scrutiny.