that my tweet of August 21, 2016, makes no mention, whatsoever, of Mr. Podesta's email, but does accurately predict that the Podesta brothers' business activities in Russia ... would come under public scrutiny." Stone repeatedly acknowledged that he had established a back-channel with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to obtain information on Hillary Clinton and pointed to this intermediary as the source for his advance knowledge about the release of Podesta's e-mails by WikiLeaks. Stone ultimately named Randy Credico, who had interviewed both Assange and Stone for a radio show, as his intermediary with Assange. A January 2019 indictment claimed Stone communicated with additional contacts knowledgeable about WikiLeaks plans. In February 2017, The New York Times reported that as part of its investigation into the Trump campaign, the FBI was looking into any contacts Stone may have had with Russian operatives. The following month The Washington Times reported that Stone had direct-messaged alleged DNC hacker Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter. Stone acknowledged contacts with the mysterious persona and made public excerpts of the messages. Stone said the messages were just innocent praise of the hacking. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Guccifer 2.0 to be a persona created by Russian intelligence to obscure its role in the DNC hack. The Guccifer 2.0 persona was ultimately linked with an IP address associated with the Russian intelligence agency, GRU, in Moscow when a user with a Moscow IP address logged into one of the Guccifer social media accounts without using a VPN. In March 2017, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Stone to preserve all documents related to any Russian contacts. The Committee Vice Chair, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), called on Stone to testify before the committee, saying he "hit the trifecta" of shady dealings with Russia. Stone denied any wrongdoing in an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher on March 31, 2017, and said he was willing to testify before the committee. The Committee's final report of August 2020 found that Stone did have access to Wikileaks and that Trump had spoken to Stone and other associates about it multiple times. Immediately after the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, Stone directed his associate Jerome Corsi to tell Julian Assange to "drop the Podesta emails immediately," which Wikileaks leaked minutes later. However the drop had been announced three days previously and the Mueller investigation was only able to establish Corsi talked to