Ex-Trump adviser Roger Stone admits to spreading lies online in lawsuit settlement

Former presidential adviser and longtime Republican operative Roger Stone admitted in federal court papers filed Monday that he has spread false information online.

In the settlement, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Stone retracted the information and apologized to Guo Wengui, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government also known as Miles Kwok.

A defamation lawsuit filed by Guo in May said Stone had used the far-right conspiracy theory site InfoWars to accuse Guo of making illegal political donations to Hillary Clinton and financing a presidential run by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

The suit also said Guo had been convicted of financial crimes in the United States.

"This is not true," the suit says.

The suit sought $100 million in damages.

In Monday’s settlement, a statement from Stone said he’d failed to do his own research and “improperly” relied on former Trump campaign advisor Sam Nunberg. The statement 

says Nunberg’s alleged source was Bruno Wu, who the Journal described as a Chinese-American media tycoon whom Guo has accused of being a Chinese government spy.

“Recognizing my errors, I reached out to Mr. Guo and asked him to settle his defamation suit against me,” Stone said. “Mr. Guo graciously agreed to accept my regrets and apology.”

The settlement says that Guo has agreed to drop the suit after Stone publishes the statement on InfoWars, Facebook, Instagram and on his personal site, StoneZone.com.

The settlement also requires that Stone publish it as an advertisement in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

The settlement comes as Stone appears to be under the microscope of special counsel Robert Mueller over his alleged connection to WikiLeaks and hacked Democratic emails released by the site in 2016. Stone has repeatedly denied any collusion with Wikileaks.

Lawyers for Guo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Stone said in a statement to NBC News on Tuesday, "I have retracted one story out of the hundreds I have reported in the two years I have worked as a correspondent at InfoWars."

While the executives who presided over the bankruptcy of Sears and Kmart will ring out 2018 with news of $25.3 million in bonuses, laid-off worker Ondrea Patrick will be using her unemployment check to pay for new brakes on her 2000 Dodge Durango.

Patrick, who lost her job when the Kmart she worked at in Rockford, Illinois, closed in October, had been hoping to use the money to buy her kids — ages 1, 2, 3, 7 and 11 — something new for Christmas.

And it infuriates her that they’ll be getting hand-me-downs and relying on charity this Christmas while the people in charge are handsomely rewarded.

“Those top people and (Sears CEO Eddie) Lampert are having a wonderful Christmas,” Patrick, 36, told NBC News. “They got $25 million in bonuses. Me? I’m late on my bills. The electric company is threatening to shut me off. And I don’t have anything left to spend on the kids this Christmas.”

Patrick, who worked part-time for Kmart for nine years, is one of the thousands of workers whose lives were upended in October when Sears Holdings, more than $5 billion in debt and unable to compete with Walmart and Amazon, declared bankruptcy.

“I was making $10.50 an hour when they closed my store,” 

Patrick said. “I got my pharm tech license and was working at the service desk. All my life we struggled and I finally felt like I was making it.”

On Friday, a U.S. bankruptcy court judge allowed Sears Holdings to hand out the bonuses after the company successfully argued that it would lose its top people if there’s nothing in their stockings this Christmas.

“Under these circumstances, it would be understandable if many key employees are asking themselves whether they should be seeking other opportunities,” Sears said in a court filing last month.

Sears Holdings “cannot afford this uncertainty,” it said.

But the decision was blasted by critics like Carrie Gleason, policy director for Organization United for Respect (OUR) and the Rise Up Retail campaign that is helping the laid-off workers. She said they’re getting Scrooged by Sears Holdings.

“It’s outrageous that the bankruptcy court approved bonuses for Sears’ high paid executives while laid-off employees get their severance pay cut,” said Gleason.

Sears workers like David Braswell who still have jobs say they are revolted that the bosses are getting big bonuses while they are left with uncertainty.

"I have no idea what it means for my future," said Braswell, a 14-year employee of a store in Midway, Tennessee and a Rise Up Retail leader. "My coworkers and I have dedicated so much to this company, our customers trust us, and yet we don’t know if we’ll still have a job next week. It’s the holidays and I’m not sure if I can afford my kid’s gifts this year, while executives are getting $25 million in bonuses? That’s not right.”

When NBC News reached out to Sears Holdings to see if the company might reconsider the bonuses in light of the criticism and the fact that so many former workers are struggling, a spokesman responded with a terse note: "We'll decline comment."

In a court filing obtained by the Chicago Tribune, Sears Holdings proposed offering a total of $8.4 million in bonuses to 19 executives if the company meets its financial targets in the next six months.

Sears Holdings also got the okay to set aside up to $16.9 million in retention bonuses for 315 senior employees, the paper reported. Each would get a cash award worth 30 to 40 percent of their salary, split into quarterly payments over the next year.

Ron Olbrysh of the National Association of Retired Sears Employees, which represents about 60,000 people, said he understands why Sears Holdings is giving out bonuses while it’s losing money.

“It’s what a lot of bankrupt companies do,” he said. “They want to prevent their key employees from jumping ship.”

Still, Olbrysh said, “this came as a shock to us retirees.”

“What everybody is wondering is how of that money Lampert is getting,” he said. Many NARSE members are also worried about how this will affect their life insurance policies, Olbrysh added.

“Our pensions are secured,” he said. “What concerns most of  our retirees is if Sears goes into liquidation after the holidays would they lose their life insurance. It’s not a lot, maybe the average is $8,000 to $10,000. But it’s something and that could be lost.”

Meanwhile, Patrick’s former co-worker Sheila Brewer, 47, has cancelled Christmas for herself and her husband. She found a job recently at CVS but the first paycheck isn’t coming until after New Year’s and the eight weeks of severance she was supposed to get ended after four weeks when the bankruptcy court stopped the rest of the payments to laid-off Sears Holdings workers.

“I got sick to my stomach when I heard about the bonuses,” 

Brewer told NBC News. “It was a like slap in the face hearing that these people would get all that money while I can’t even get my severance.”

Brewer, who worked full-time at the Rockford store for 17 years, said she’s just glad her kids are grown “so they wouldn’t be disappointed that there is nothing under the tree.”

“I have been playing catchup financially ever since they laid me off,” she said. “I haven’t even gotten my first paycheck yet.”

Patrick said she and her fiancée Chris will “hopefully” take the kids to her grandfather’s for Christmas.

“They have presents for the kids,” she said.

Patrick said the will dress her brood in donated clothes “that will seem new to them.”

“They don’t care,” she said. “Give them a box of pencils and they would be happy just to have something to unwrap.”

It will take more than 200 years before women and men worldwide have economic parity, according to the annual Global Gender Gap Report released Tuesday by the World Economic Forum.

The report found that the economic opportunity gap — based on pay, participation and workplace advancement — has closed by only a small amount since the 2017 survey. On pay alone, women continue to earn about 20 percent lesson average than men, according to International Labour Organization findings cited in the report. One factor holding women back is their being underrepresented in senior positions, the report said."In the workplace, women still encounter significant obstacles in taking on managerial or senior official roles," the report read, stating that it will take 202 years for the economic gap to close.

The United States ranks 19th out of 149 countries on economic parity between women and men. That is behind Iceland, Norway and Finland but ahead of Germany, France and Denmark.

The countries with the greatest economic parity are smaller nations: Laos is number one and Barbados number two. The report also measured gender gaps in other areas — including health, education and political — and found that this year the gap among all areas closed slightly.The United States overall ranked 51st in gender equality. Iceland was ranked number 1 for the 10th year in a row, and war-torn Yemen was last.The area with the widest gap between men and women is in politics, the report said.Only 23% of the political gap — unchanged since last year — has been closed, and no country has yet fully closed political empowerment gaps," according to the report, which compared the number of political offices held by women and men.