Roger Stone claimed without evidence that “we have to presume” that money funding the recount is from billionaire donor George Soros or from Hillary Clinton. | Getty Roger Stone: Clinton more likely to face prosecution after recount

Roger Stone, the Republican strategist and campaign confidant of Donald Trump, suggested Monday without evidence that Hillary Clinton is more likely to face prosecution under the president-elect’s administration because her campaign is cooperating with Jill Stein’s recount effort.

Again offering no evidence, Stone told Steve Malzberg that “we have to presume” that the money funding the Stein campaign’s call for a recount is from billionaire donor George Soros or from Clinton, who lost the White House to Trump this month in a major upset.


“Now Hillary, I think, increases her chances of prosecution by acting this way,” Stone concluded.

Stein has called for a recount in Wisconsin, has begun the process in Pennsylvania and may do so in Michigan as well, but Clinton's campaign says it has found no evidence to suggest that the election results were compromised. Her lawyers, however, will attend the recount proceedings.

Despite Trump's vow during the campaign to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Clinton, he has signaled since the election that he has no interest in doing so.

During an interview last week with editors and writers for The New York Times, Trump said, "I don’t want to hurt the Clintons."

Asked whether he would be taking the idea of an investigation "off the table," however, Trump demurred.

"No, but the question was asked," he said, adding: "It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about.

It would be a major breach of the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House for the president to order the prosecution of any individual as a means of political retaliation. (The FBI recommended against bringing charges against Clinton for her use of a secret email secretary of state in July and reaffirmed that decision a few days before the election.)

Still, Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, also seemed to draw a connection between the recount effort and the prosecution question during a TV interview on Sunday.

“He’s been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when, for whatever reason, her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70-plus electoral votes that he beat her by,” Conway said to CNN’s Dana Bash.

Stone, a former acolyte of Richard Nixon, has a history of floating conspiracy theories. He is a regular guest on Alex Jones’ radio show, and in a tweet in late October, he seemed to suggest that the Clintons were responsible for a number of deaths.