Stone, 66, is facing seven counts: one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Stone will make an initial appearance at 11 a.m. Friday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Lurana S. Snow at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, according to the special counsel’s office. White House officials didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the indictment.

According to the indictment, by June or July 2016, Stone told “senior Trump campaign officials’’ that he knew that WikiLeaks had damaging information about the Clinton campaign. After the release by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, a senior Trump campaign official “was directed’’ to contact Stone about other damaging material, and he later told the Trump campaign about potential future releases, according to the indictment.

At the time of his false testimony, Stone was still in possession of many of the emails and text messages, including some from October 4, 2016, according to Friday’s filing. Stone and a high-ranking member of the Trump Campaign exchanged communications, and Stone said the group that had access to the stolen emails would release “a load every week going forward.”

A self-described political showman and dirty trickster whose career dates to the Nixon administration, Stone was a Trump campaign aide until his abrupt departure in August 2015, but he remained an informal adviser.

Stone has given varying accounts about whether he had advance knowledge that WikiLeaks would post a cache of private emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, some of which embarrassed Democratic leaders and led to the resignation of the party chairwoman in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Even so, he has acknowledged exchanging private Twitter messages with an account claiming to be Guccifer 2.0, a hacker persona linked to the Russian government. A U.S. indictment of 12 Russian hackers thought to be responsible for the DNC email theft referred to an unnamed American close to senior members of the Trump campaign who was in contact with the hackers. Stone told CNN just after the July indictment that he was “probably” that person.

Before the emails were made public in October of 2016, Stone gave a speech and posted a series of tweets that seemed to foreshadow their disclosure and acknowledge that he served as a “backchannel to Assange,” referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Since then he has denied any prior knowledge of the stolen emails. U.S. prosecutors and intelligence agencies say that hackers commissioned by the Russian government were responsible for the theft.

CNBC, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, reported on May 3 that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian election interference, was focusing on interactions between Stone and Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty in February to two counts stemming from the Russia probe and is cooperating with Mueller.

Gates had a longtime business relationship with the campaign’s chairman, Paul Manafort, who once ran a Washington lobbying firm with Stone. Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller after pleading guilty in September to conspiring against the U.S. The Special Counsel said he wasn’t always truthful with them in their conversations after the plea deal was reached, and there’s a hearing today in Washington to determine whether that’s the case. DM