Roger Stone

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Roger Stone is a sleazy political operative with a robust decades-long career behind him, full of every reason in the book to not trust him. For whatever reason, toward the end of 2015 and going into the beginning of 2016, Alex Jones decided that Roger was his new best friend. At the time of this writing, it appears that this was not a good decision.

That said, he has an amazing collection of hats.

Roger’s History In Politics

Though his career began before he was involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, it is very worth noting that he wasn’t there by accident. He has been trying to get Trump to run for president forever. He was profiled in the New York Times in 1999 about how Trump was going to run in the 2000 election (spoiler alert: he did, and Roger was his campaign director, but he quickly withdrew his candidacy because the Reform Party was a mess). Roger even did an interview on C-SPAN about Trump’s 2000 candidacy, which is all just to say that they were making an effort.

Trump pretended he was going to run again in 2012, and went so far as to give a speech at CPAC before endorsing Mitt Romney. Roger, again, was pushing for him to run. Fun fact about that speech, Trump spent a bit of his time shitting on Ron Paul, which is something you’d think Alex wouldn’t like.

Roger got his start in politics in high school Student Government, which is not surprising. Student Government, with very few exceptions, attracts overachievers and sleazy monsters, and occasionally people who are both.

Roger claims that he read Conscience of a Conservative, which led him to volunteer for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 election campaign. That is a great story of political awakening, but also, Roger was born in 1952, so he would have been 11 or 12 years old during that campaign. Though Goldwater was a lunatic, it still seems unlikely his campaign would have allowed a sixth grader to do much more than stay out of the way and maybe hand out some fliers.

Roger Stone hit the ground running after that, scoring a position in Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign. He was allegedly a “scheduler,” but made a name for himself by making a donation to one of Nixon’s potential Democratic rivals pretending he represented the Young Socialist Alliance, then tipping off the press about it to smear the rival. He did a lot of work that might be classified as “pranks” or “being a dick” like “sending 200 Democrats invitations to a non-existent primary campaign breakfast.”

He almost certainly was also involved in orchestrating surveillance on Democrats and acting as a bag-man to pay for some of Richard Nixon’s dirty work. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the 1972 election is when Watergate was going on. Though he denies that he was involved with the break-in and didn’t do anything illegal back then, Roger was involved in the exact same sort of work for the same president at the same time, so it is also entirely possible that Roger is lying about not being involved. He has a long history of lying when it suits him, so it’s conceivable this is just another example of that behavior.

After Nixon got impeached and resigned, Roger went on to form Black, Manafort, and Stone, a high-powered lobbying group. His partners in that were Charlie Black (got his start working on the senatorial campaign of championship racist Jesse Helms) and Paul Manafort (recently charged with Conspiracy Against The United States). The group would go on to include Lee Atwater (the man behind the flagrantly racist Will Horton smear on Michael Dukakis). It was stacked with nothing but the coolest dudes around.

Black, Manafort and Stone (BMS) were the sort of shit-heels one would expect in the world of Washington lobbying. They lobbied on behalf of the tobacco industry, which is kind of par for the course, but their overseas work is really what makes them stick out in the muck of power players. In the 1980’s, they were contracted by:

There are plenty of other examples of clients taken on by the individual partners in the firm, but these examples should highlight the utter cynicism and nihilism toward any sense of morality that someone like Roger Stone operates with. It is not like Seko and Marcos turned bad after Stone stopped working with them, he was there after their atrocities and during them. He is fine supporting dictators, so long as he makes his cut.

Roger would go on to work on the presidential campaign of Bob Dole, in the 1996 election. He would resign the position after Dick Morris revealed that Roger had put out a classified ad in Florida seeking people to swing with him and his wife. At first, Roger denied that he had put out the ad, but eventually admitted he had done it.

This is not pointed out to shame Roger for swinging, that is totally cool; we only include this because it perfectly encapsulates how Roger works:

  1. When bad news comes out, deny it aggressively and blame someone else. After the accusation was made public, Roger went on Good Morning America and said that “a domestic employee who I discharged for substance abuse on the second time that we learned that he had a drug problem is the perpetrator” of posting the swingers’ ads.

  2. Later, when it doesn’t matter, admit that you were lying about your denial. In 2008, Roger admitted that he posted the ads and that the story of a drug addicted domestic employee was bullshit he made up.

  3. Repeat. This is Roger’s pattern, and he just keeps repeating it over and over.

Though Roger initially helped Trump with his 2000 campaign as the Reform Party candidate, when Trump called it quits, Roger went to work as a shady GOP operative and did whatever he could to help George W. Bush win the election. Roger’s primary goal was stopping the recount of votes in Florida, because he knew that if the recount continued, Al Gore would win. And so, he went to work manufacturing the Brooks Brother Riot:

We set up a Winnebago trailer, right over here. I set up my command center there. I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there…Most of the people there were people that we drew to the scene.

Roger Stone, by his own account, was involved in what was categorically a legislative coup that installed George W. Bush as president and led to countless horrors both in this country and abroad. Kind of strange that Alex Jones, who hates Bush so much, is best friends with a guy who worked so hard to subvert the democratic process to make Bush president.

Roger would go on to defend George W. Bush during his reelection campaign when documents came up that showed he may have dodged the draft in Vietnam. Some thought this was a Roger Stone style dirty trick, so Roger took to the TV to clear his name and deflect from the real issue and make accusations about the Kerry campaign being behind the documents. As Roger put it, “I definitely saw the opening to be a good party man.”

After all that, Roger would go on to be a part of a bunch of other failed campaigns, until he finally got Trump to make a “real run” for president in 2016.

Trump Campaign

Roger Stone either quit or was fired from the Trump campaign on August 8, 2015. Trump said he fired Roger, Roger said he quit because he didn’t like the direction of the campaign, what with Trump making crude, sexist comments about Megyn Kelly during the Republican primary debate. Somehow that reasoning doesn’t make sense, considering he went on to work for Alex Jones, who has made a sport of being a sexist asshole about Megyn Kelly:

Given Roger’s track record and set of skills, this “he said-he said” looks a lot like a fake fight that achieves everyone’s objectives. Roger now has the public image of a dust-up, and is now apparently disconnected from the campaign in any official capacity, thus they can deny any involvement in whatever dirty tricks he gets up to. Trump has plausible deniability and Roger has carte blanche to play his game.

Without official connection to the campaign, Roger was free to become a shameless propagandist and turn InfoWars into the media arm of the Trump campaign, which he proceeded to do very easily.

Wikileaks And Guccifer 2.0

As of this writing, it is pretty hard to say exactly what the truth is about Roger Stone’s involvement in the campaign to hack and release Hillary Clinton’s emails in a coordinated fashion. It would be naive to think that, given who he is, who he was working for, and his track record, that he didn’t have some role in things, but until there is more public proof, we prefer to not speculate too wildly.

One thing we do know is that Alex has said, on his own broadcast, that during the 2016 campaign, he enlisted Roger to get him in touch with Assange. Whether Roger succeeded or not, or whether he told Alex he had is anyone’s guess, but Alex definitely solicited Roger to get in touch:

While we can’t say for certain what the reality is behind any of this, there is one interesting wrinkle that sticks out about Roger Stone and his alleged contact with Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and that is how well his denials of his involvement in this affair match his pattern of past denials of things he absolutely did. The aggressive, immediate denials, the slow stream of evidence that points to him lying, the attempts to push attention in other people’s direction, it’s all there. But there’s one element that is of particular interest.

Roger claims that he did not contact Assange, but that he got his information through Randy Credico, a comedian and talk show host from New York. Credico denies this, but also text messages have come out that indicate that they are both probably lying. Whatever the case may be, the news reports about the situation all say that Roger and Credico were friends until they had diverging stories about how Roger got information from Wikileaks, with Roger’s story being “it’s all Randy Credico’s fault.”

What these news reports seem to miss is that Roger Stone loves to blame Randy Credico for things he did.

In 2007, Roger was forced to resign from the campaign of Joseph Bruno, who was running against Eliot Spitzer for Governor of New York. This was the result of Roger leaving a threatening and expletive-laced voicemail on Spitzer’s 83 year-old father’s answering machine.

Just as he did in 1996 in the Dole campaign, he stepped down from his position, and aggressively denied the accusation, claiming the story was false. The tape was fake he said. Then, after Spitzer’s father hired a private investigator who traced the call to Stone’s wife’s phone, Roger played the same card he tried in 1996 when he blamed the “domestic employee.” He told the press “someone could well have broken into his home and made that call.” He insisted that he couldn’t have made the call because he was at the theater seeing Frost/Nixon that night, but was left without an answer when it was pointed out that the play was dark that night.

Roger absolutely made that phone call. Even Trump said, “they caught Roger red-handed, lying. What he did was ridiculous and stupid.” His denials fit his pattern, and his alibi and excuses are paper-thin.

And then, when he was left with nowhere else to turn, he claimed that Randy Credico had impersonated his voice on the tape to frame him. He claimed that Credico was addicted to cocaine and was mad that Roger never paid him a fee for introducing him to Al Sharpton. Credico laughed off the claims and categorically denied them, because of course that was Roger on the tape.

This does not prove that Roger Stone committed any crimes as it relates to Wikileaks, but it should give any right thinking person pause to consider how Roger’s behavior after the accusations almost perfectly fits his pattern of dealing with these sorts of situations in the past. Much like serial killers form patterns, so do liars.

Roger And Alex

Roger Stone and Alex Jones met in 2013 at a JFK Assassination Convention, and were acquaintances until right after Roger left Trump’s campaign.

Roger made his first appearance on InfoWars on November 9, 2015 and their conversation is not one between friends, or even people who know each other well. They are not well acquainted. A month later, Donald Trump would appear on The Alex Jones Show, an interview that was arranged by Roger. Roger has said as much, and he’s even gone on record saying that he convinced Alex to support Trump, and that Alex is a “valuable asset.”

If there is any point to really drive home, it is that no one should, under any circumstances, believe anything Roger says. His record is one of pathological lying, malicious intent, and being surrounded by con-men.