Former Infowars D.C. bureau chief Jerome Corsi has amended his complaint against special counsel Robert Mueller to include Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his newspaper the Washington Post, accusing them of attempting to coerce him into giving false testimony.
On December 3, Corsi filed a criminal complaint against Mueller, accusing him and his investigators of attempting to coerce him into providing “false testimony” as part of their investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 presidential election.
Filed by Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman, the complaint calls on the Department of Justice to launch a criminal and ethics probe into Mueller and investigators’ tactics and methods. According to the amended complaint, Mueller’s team, Justice Department officials, along with Bezos and Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia are accused of attempting to “coerce, extort and blackmail” the conservative author into providing false testimony, under oath, the special counsel with the “design to indict and/or remove President Donald J. Trump from his duly elected office.”
The amended complaint seeks 800 million dollars and total damages — including punitive, against all defendants named — in excess of $1.6 billion.
“There is a coordinated effort by the Defendants to indict and/or remove the president from office. Dr. Corsi, my brave client, has been coerced, threatened and blackmailed into providing false testimony which Special Counsel Mueller intended to use to accomplish this design,” Klayman said in a statement Tuesday. “But rather than caving in to the threat to indict Dr. Corsi if he did not ‘play ball’ with the Special Counsel or be indicted himself, Dr. Corsi refused and would not accept a so-called ‘sweet heart’ plea deal, which would have allowed him to plead guilty to one count of perjury, a felony, with a recommendation for no prison time.”
The Freedom Watch founder continued: “Now, ratcheting up the coercion and blackmail, the Special Counsel in this coordinated effort with the new Defendants Jeff Bezos and his WaPo reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia, have ‘upped the ante.’ They too, along with Mueller and the other Defendants, will be held legally accountable for their despicable and illegal acts.”
Special counsel investigators are trying to determine whether Corsi, a witness to their investigation, and longtime political operative Roger Stone had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked material damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential effort. U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia was the source of that hacked material.
Documents drafted by Mueller’s team as part of a potential plea deal with Corsi — which he has rejected — contained portions of emails he exchanged with Stone in the summer of 2016 about WikiLeaks.
In late July 2016, Stone emailed Corsi, asking him to get in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living in Ecuador’s embassy in London since 2012, according to the documents. Stone said he wanted Corsi to try to obtain emails the group possessed about Clinton.
Both Stone and Corsi have denied any wrongdoing, and Stone has denied knowing Assange or being a conduit for WikiLeaks. He told The Associated Press last month that he had “no advanced notice of the source or content or the exact timing of the release of the WikiLeaks disclosures.”
On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Corsi as part of its investigation into Russian meddling during the 2016 election. Earlier last week, Corsi revealed that his stepson was subpoenaed to provide grand jury testimony as part of the Russia probe. He claimed investigators have zeroed in text messages sent between him and his stepson Andrew Stettner, who wrote that a computer on the journalist’s desk had been scrubbed. “I think they think that Andrew was conspiring with me, as my computer expert, to destroy evidence,” Corsi told the Fox Business Network. “They’re looking for anything they can find.”
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