Roger Stone, Trump associate, indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (WABC) -- Roger Stone, a veteran political operative and longtime associate of President Donald Trump, was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller and arrested in Florida Friday.
FBI agents also carried out a raid at Stone's Harlem apartment, seizing hard drives and other evidence.
Stone is charged in a seven-count indictment with witness tampering, obstruction and false statements about his interactions related to the release by WikiLeaks of hacked emails during the 2016 presidential election. Some of those false statements were made to the House intelligence committee, according to the indictment.
The indictment brought by Mueller does not accuse Stone of coordinating with the Russian government's election interference in 2016, the key matter under investigation in the probe. But the indictment lays out in detail Stone's conversations about stolen Democratic emails posted by WikiLeaks in the weeks before the Republican beat Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Mueller's office has said those emails, belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were hacked by Russian intelligence officers.
At a court appearance on Friday, a judge released Stone on $250,000 bond with restricted travel.
After his release, Stone appeared by phone on Alex Jones' InfoWars, maintaining he did nothing wrong and calling his arrest "politically motivated."
"I can say I've had greater -- better moments," he said. "Better mornings, shall we say."
Stone later told reporters that he would plead not guilty to the charges.
"There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president, nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself," he said. "I intend to tell the truth. I have told the truth through this entire proceeding, and I will prove that in a court of law."
President Trump weighed into Stone's arrest on Twitter, again calling the Mueller investigation the "Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country!"
"Look my first reaction is really simple, this has nothing to do with the president and certainly nothing to do with the White House," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said. "This is something that has to do solely with that individual and not something that affects us here in this building."
Stone has been under scrutiny for months but has maintained his innocence.
RELATED: Who is Roger Stone?
The youngest person to testify in the Senate Watergate hearings at the age of 20, Stone -- who is known for, among other things, a tattoo of Nixon's face on his back -- was profiled in a 2016 Netflix documentary, "Get Me Roger Stone," which focused on his eccentric political career and painted him as the original architect of Trump's political career.
The special counsel's indictment comes amid scrutiny about the self-described "dirty trickster" and his alleged contact with WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the summer of 2016. Stone has told ABC News multiple times that he had never met or spoken with Assange and had no intermediary providing a back channel to communicate with the controversial Wikileaks founder.
In October, ABC News reported that special counsel prosecutors had been asking Paul Manafort - their newest cooperating witness - about Stone, who was Manafort's friend and had also been his partner at the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly in the 1980s, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Stone told ABC News in November, "There's no circumstance under which I bear false witness against President Trump."
READ FULL INDICTMENT OF ROGER STONE
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Information from ABC News and The Associated Press
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