NBC news senior investigations producer Anna Schecter talked with Ali Velshi earlier Tuesday about her interview with Jerome Corsi. She explained some of the circumstances around the interview that was called off at the last minute because Corsi claimed his lawyers said "Nope, we are not talking."
Schecter explains:
"He was offered a plea and he has rejected it. So this is actually going to make his life a lot more complicated. He's in hot water. But big picture, we actually got all of the court documents, everything the government gave to his lawyers and it shows that he had -- there were emails between him and [Roger] Stone leading up to the John Podesta e-mail dump and they couldn't wait to find out what was happening. Stone suggests he actually goes to see Assange or their friend in London, another far-righter, go to see him and Corsi actually passed on that e-mail to the London writer. We don't know if he actually went or not."
NBC News has published excerpts of some of these emails. There is an email trail showing that Corsi knew ahead of the dump what was in the hacked cache.
"Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps," Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. "One shortly after I'm back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging."
Schecter asked Corsi about this in her interview with him:
SCHECTER: When he said "time to let more than Podesta be exposed in bed with enemy, if they're not ready to drop HRC." What does that mean?
CORSI: Well, I was saying to Stone that I thought these were going to be so damaging to Hillary, as they had been to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, that the Democrats might want to say Hillary's sick and old and get rid of her because I believe these Podesta e-mails would destroy Hillary. Why did I think they were coming out in October? Because I said to myself, if I had these e-mails, I'd use them as the October surprise and if I had them why would they come out drip by drip? It''s because Assange is very strategic, he understands the news cycle.
SCHECTER: But you didn't know that at the time. Did you?
CORSI: It was speculation.
SCHECTER: You didn't exactly write to him it would be drip by drip?
CORIS: No, I did though explain that to him. There are phone conversations I had with him.
SCHECTER: But you essentially told Stone exactly what was going to happen.
CORSI: Yes.
NBC News explains the timeline:
The interviews began on Sept. 6 when Corsi told investigators that an associate, identified by Corsi as Stone, asked him in the summer of 2016 to get in touch with an organization, identified by Corsi as WikiLeaks, about unreleased materials relevant to the presidential campaign, the draft court papers say.
"Get to (Assange) [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending (WikiLeaks) emails," read the email to Corsi dated July 25, 2016, according to the draft court documents.
Corsi said he declined the request and made clear to Stone that an attempt to contact WikiLeaks could put them in investigators' crosshairs, according to the draft court documents.
But Mueller's team said that was a lie.
Instead of turning down the request, Corsi in fact passed it along to a person in London, according to the draft court documents. Corsi said that person was conservative author Ted Malloch.
Eight days later, Corsi sent the email to Stone saying that WikiLeaks possessed information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign and planned to release it in October.
The Velshi clip ends with Schecter explaining how Corsi described his interviews with the Special Counsel (hint, he did not enjoy it).
