A CNN camera crew on Friday captured footage of the FBI’s pre-dawn arrest of GOP operative and longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone at his home in Fort Lauderdale.
Stone was indicted on seven criminal counts as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering, according to the Washington Post.
CNN was the lone network to capture the early-morning raid, which Crime and Justice reporter David Shortell said took place just after 6 a.m. ET. As Shortell told “New Day” co-anchor co-anchor Alisyn Camerota, a dozen officers “wearing tactical vests and with large weapons fanned out across his front lawn” before one knocked on his door.
Stone answered the door, Shortell said, adding that his crew was moved away from the scene before he was physically taken into custody.
Shortell credited “reporter’s instinct” for staking out Stone’s house this morning, noting “unusual grand jury activity in Washington, D.C., yesterday.”
According to the Associated Press, Stone’s indictment details that in the summer of 2016 members of Trump’s presidential campaign had knowledge emails had been stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign and wanted them released. In addition, the indictment says that an unnamed senior Trump campaign official contacted Stone to ask when the stolen emails might be publicly disclosed by WikiLeaks.
Stone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
During the 2016 campaign, the longtime Republican operative and three-decade Trump friend said that he was in contact with “my hero” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and said he exchanged messages with Guccifer 2.0, the Twitter persona that U.S. intelligence officials later said was a front operated by the Russian military.
Last July, a U.S. grand jury indicted 12 Russian military officers on charges that they had directed and overseen the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other groups and leaked the stolen documents to WikiLeaks and other anti-secrecy sites.
Watch video of Stone’s arrest above.