Roger Stone Gets Tricked

Last week we discussed reporter Lauren Windsor’s secret recordings of Justice and Mrs. Alito at a Supreme Court Historical Society dinner. Today, Windsor and a colleague were back. They taped Roger Stone, who, ironically, has called himself a “dirty trickster” and an “agent provocateur,” discussing tactics to return Trump to the White House whether he wins the election or not.

These new tapes consist of two conversations, one between Windsor and Stone and another between her colleague Ally Sammarco and Stone. They were recorded at a Catholic Prayer for Trump event last March at Mar-a-Lago. Stone keynoted the event. 

Rolling Stone, which obtained the tapes and ran a story on them, reached out to Stone for comment. On Tuesday, he told them, “All of the election integrity provisions that I suggested are perfectly legal and should be part of any ballot Security effort.”

Let’s take a look at what he said and you can be the judge.

Key comments Stone is captured making include the following:

• Roger Stone is working on "lawyers, judges, technology" to "use every lever we can" to deliver this election for Trump.

• “At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge — his home phone number standing by — so you can stop it,” Stone says at one point. “We made no preparations last time, none … There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done.” 

• Stone predicts that Judge Aileen Cannon will dismiss the classified documents case against the former president soon. “We are beating them,” Stone tells Sammarco. “[Trump’s] trial in Georgia is falling apart. I think the judge is on the verge of dismissing the charges against him in Florida. They’re delayed in New York City and they’re now delayed in Washington.” Trump has since been convicted in Manhattan.

• Stone also indicates that the MAGA movement is fully prepared to pull a variety of levers to ensure Trump defeats Biden this November. When Sammarco asks Stone what would stop Trump’s opponents from committing “voter fraud” like “ballot harvesting,” Stone replies that “in some states, it’ll be easier to stop. In other places, it won’t.”  

• Stone also tells Sammarco that with the RNC under MAGA control, they can spend “lots more” money on election monitoring. He also points to “changes in state law, real-time voter list monitoring, going to court as we just did to challenge some of the vote laws,” and that “we went into court to sue in Michigan over the hand [written] ballots.” 

• “Don’t think that this is a fight between Republicans and Democrats, liberals, and conservatives. This is nothing less than an epic struggle between good and evil,” Stone says. “A struggle between light and dark, a struggle between the godly and the godless.”

That’s a lot. But could it lend itself to the benign reading Stone offers, that it’s a legitimate tool kit for an election? Some of it makes sense in the abstract—as an election integrity worker, you would want to know who the judge on call in your area, the “duty judge” was, and have an after-hours way of contacting them in case of an emergency. Having good technology is helpful when evaluating election data. And hard fought election challenges are a part of politics.

But there is context for Stone’s comments. For one thing, Stone was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation, making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness. The only reason he didn’t serve his sentence was because Donald Trump pardoned him. The charges were made in connection with election fraud. The dirty trickster has a history of using sharp practices to try to interfere with elections, not to ensure fair outcomes.

The case against Stone goes back to January 2017, when the House Intelligence Committee opened its investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including the publication of documents related to the presidential election by WikiLeaks in 2016. Stone testified in September of 2017 and made a number of false statements relating to the identity of a person he had referred to in August 2016 as his “back-channel” or “intermediary” to the head of WikiLeaks; whether he had asked that person to do anything on his behalf; whether he discussed that person with anyone involved with the Trump campaign; and whether he had written communications with third parties about the head of WikiLeaks. Stone engaged in witness tampering when he urged the person he misidentified as his WikiLeaks contact, Randy Credico, to corroborate the lie, tell the Committee that he could not remember the relevant events, or invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying. Credico ultimately asserted his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid testifying after he received a subpoena. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence days before he was due to report to prison.

None of that imparts confidence that Stone would put the kinds of information and tools he talks about in the taped conversations to good use.

Election lawyers (Stone is not one) often reach out to judges when something goes awry on election day. Here’s an example: everyone who is already in line when the polls close is entitled to vote. But in some instances, poll workers have tried to close the polls. That may require emergency recourse to a judge to correct the situation so people can vote. That’s a legitimate reason for having contact information for judges at hand. But to the extent Stone is insinuating something more sinister, that they have judges in their pocket, that’s entirely different, entirely wrong. Perhaps he’s just making it up when he says Judge Cannon will soon dismiss the case against Donald Trump and that they have other judges available during the election. But given his background and history, it would be foolish not to be concerned.

Stone was in Washington, D.C., on the day of the insurrection, surrounded by a contingent of Oath Keepers, the group whose leaders were later convicted of seditious conspiracy, who acted as his personal security detail. Odd that he needed one. Even stranger that he stayed away from events themselves that day, almost as though he knew what was going to happen and wanted the plausible deniability about them that he later asserted.

You can listen to the full tape here.

In his keynote address at the Mar-a-Lago event where he was taped, Stone told attendees that the Democratic Party has been taken over by “a group of radical, atheist, Marxists, who plan nothing less than the full destruction of this nation and our constitutional freedoms.” That doesn’t sound like the kind of comments someone who cares about free and fair elections would make. Roger Stone is the kind of person who plays democracy back against itself, using the rights and privileges afforded him as a citizen to attack it.

This is how the report in Rolling Stone ends: “‘Everybody is gearing up for full-blown warfare,’ one Republican close to Trump who has worked on ‘election integrity’ efforts told Rolling Stone. ‘The campaign, the RNC, everyone is going to be fighting Biden’s team over every single inch, and each bit of process.’” There are fair fights and then there are unfair ones. Roger Stone is the guy who has already identified himself as a dirty trickster.

No one can afford to sit out this election. The best pushback against efforts to manipulate the system is for people who love democracy to vote in such tremendous numbers that even the dirty trickster can’t pull a win out of a loss.

That’s more realistic than you might think. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote about the rash of laws being adopted that made it more difficult to vote: “The good news is, it remains to be seen whether these laws will achieve their desired ends — because studies have found that Republican attempts to strip people of the franchise can sometimes inspire Democrats to turn out in greater numbers. This isn’t to say the bills won’t flip some elections in favor of Republicans. … Nonetheless, this isn’t a reason to despair. It’s a reason to organize.”

It’s a simple message but one that needs to be repeated over and over. Have a plan to vote. Register. Check the status of your registration ahead of the election. Vote. Make sure your vote gets counted. Rinse and repeat for the people around you. The response to dirty tricks is a steady, persistent commitment to democracy.

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We’re in this together,

Joyce