WASHINGTON -- Conservative author Jerome Corsi said Monday that he has rejected a deal offered by special counsel Robert Mueller to plead guilty to one count of perjury, saying he would have been forced to untruthfully say that he intentionally lied.
Meanwhile, former Donald Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos began serving his two-week prison sentence at a minimum-security camp in Oxford, Wis., according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Corsi, in interviews with CNN, NBC and other news organizations, has said he was merely forgetful when investigators spent hours pressing him about his contacts with WikiLeaks, which released hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign.
"They want me to say I willfully lied. I'm not going to agree that I lied. I did not. I will not lie to save my life. I'd rather sit in prison and rot for as long as these thugs want me to," Corsi told NBC News.
Corsi provided research during the 2016 White House race to Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Trump. For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone's activities to determine whether he coordinated with WikiLeaks in its release of Democratic emails.
Stone and WikiLeaks have repeatedly denied any such coordination.
A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment, as did David Gray, an attorney for Corsi.
During the 2016 race, Stone made public comments suggesting that he had inside information about material held by WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
Since the election, Stone has said repeatedly that his comments were exaggerations or came from tips from associates and that he had no advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' plans.
Corsi this month said he had never met Assange and had no connection to him "to the best of my recollection."
Corsi, 72, was a leading proponent of the theory that Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore not qualified to serve as president.
Stone has previously told The Washington Post that Corsi developed a relationship with Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign over their shared interest in that theory.
Papadopoulos, whom the White House has described as a low-level volunteer in the campaign, triggered the Russia investigation two years ago, before Mueller's May 2017 appointment. He was sentenced in September for lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russian intermediaries during the campaign.
He had sought a postponement of his prison term until an appeals court ruled in a separate case challenging the constitutionality of Mueller's appointment.
But U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss said Papadopoulos had waited too long to contest his sentence.
Papadopoulos began his prison sentence as Trump speculated about potential flaws in Mueller's final report, which CNN has said is imminent.
"When Mueller does his final report, will he be covering all of his conflicts of interest in a preamble?" the president wrote. "Will he be putting in statements from hundreds of people closely involved with my campaign who never met, saw or spoke to a Russian during this period?"
Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, has argued that Mueller's search for criminal activity in Trump's 2016 campaign is dangerous to democracy and that the final report will be devastating to Trump politically.
"I still don't think it's going to make a criminal case, because collusion is not criminal," Dershowitz said Sunday on ABC News.
But Dershowitz said Monday that he believes the White House will issue a rebuttal arguing that Mueller relied on noncredible witnesses and invented crimes.
"The rebuttal will put a different spin on it. People who support Trump will say the rebuttal seems correct," he said. "I think by 2019, we'll be back to where we are now."
Information for this article was contributed by Rosalind S. Helderman, Manuel Roig-Franzia, John Wagner and Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post; and by Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/27/2018