Roger Stone's career, from his 2000 anti-gambling campaign against the St. Regis Mohawk Nation to his 2016 WikiLeaks connections, reveals a pattern of lies and witness tampering rather than genius. Hosts Evans and Katan detail his $250,000 fine for lobbying violations, his threats to Attorney General Spitzer's father, and his false claims about contacting Guuseifer 2.0. Ultimately, the episode portrays Stone not as a mastermind, but as an insecure "sad, broken boy" whose apocalyptic rhetoric and criminal behavior expose the dangers of unchecked political opportunism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:39
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Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ango Moda.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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It's me, Robert, with the show, Evans, Behind the Bastards.
This is the podcast that this is where we talk about the bad people.
Sophie, you look very confused.
The Dead Hitler Theory00:15:41
They can't all be what's cracking my Pevas.
They're not all going to be perfect.
I am Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
My guest for part two, as with part one, is Tamar Katan.
Tamara, how are you doing, my friend?
Thank you.
I'm doing great.
I'm enjoying the conversation.
Are you ready to learn a little bit more about Roger Stone?
I'm ready to learn more and ready to sleep less easy.
Yeah, well, that is the Roger Stone guarantee.
So, one of the reasons I might believe the claim that Roger Stone was a major influence on Trump's mind is the fact that he and Donald Trump really do have quite a long history of working together.
Despite Donald Trump's 2012 comments that Stone was a stone-cold loser, he was happy to continue to work with the band after his 1999 Reform Party candidacy failed.
In 2000, while he was helping George W. Bush in Florida, Roger Stone also took time to help Donald Trump with a new pet project, a grassroots anti-gambling campaign.
It was targeted at the Mohawk Nation.
The tribe had opened a casino on their land in New York State and planned to open another casino in the Catskills.
At the time, Donald Trump owned three casinos in Atlantic City, the Northeast's traditional gambling hub.
Clearly, the Mohawk Nation represented a threat to this earnings of Donald Trump.
The ad Stone designed are pretty on the edge as far as racism goes.
I've got a clip of one of them here, which we'll have up on the site behindthebastards.com.
It says in big letters, drug dealing at Monticello or Monticello, whatever.
Thomas Jefferson's creepy house, and it's got like a picture of like a needle and lines of cocaine and like a baggie of drugs.
And then it says, quote, The St. Regis Mohawk Indian Tribe proposes to open a gambling casino at the Monticello racetrack in Sullivan County.
How much do you really know about the St. Regis Mohawk Indians?
According to the New York Times, U.S. and Canadian law enforcement officials broke up the biggest cocaine trafficking ring in northern New York operating on the 14,000-acre St. Regis Mohawk Reservation.
26 people were arrested.
Police also confiscated 19 shotguns and handguns, and it goes on like this.
Saying Indians are criminals.
That's the and fear mongering.
Just like the border crossing where they use pictures of people crossing a border in Spain.
Yeah.
And just lies about women being duct taped and stuff.
Now, this ad, which is pretty offensive, is noted on the bottom as a project of the New York Institute for Law and Society.
You ever heard of the New York Institute for Law and Society?
Nope.
Well, it claimed to be a grassroots organization made up of 12,000 pro-family donors who just, you know, they don't like gambling.
They just didn't want any more casinos in their neighborhood.
The reality is that you could probably have counted the actual number of donors using one hand.
Donald Trump put up virtually all of the money, somewhere around $1.5 million.
Trump signed off on the ads and the language used in them and paid the bills for the private eyes Stone hired to surveil the tribe.
The whole operation was Rogers' plan.
Because this organization violated New York laws on lobbying, because you're not allowed to pretend that something has a bunch of funders when it's just one guy who's doing it so that his own casinos don't have competition.
You're not supposed to do that.
So the state investigated.
They wound up sitting down with Roger Stone and interviewing him.
Here's the LA Times.
Quote, Stone told state investigators that he thought the public might pay attention to a pro-family group, but not to Trump, a loud and longtime critic of Native American gambling who was trying to stave off competition for his three casinos in Atlantic City.
You could hide Trump's actions from the public, the investigators grilled Stone.
And you did that over and over again?
Yes, Stone answered each time, finally adding, nothing is wrong with that, by the way.
There actually was something wrong with that.
Trump and Stone were fined $250,000 for breaking the law and required to pay more than $30,000 to run statements in Albany area newspapers.
There's nothing for them.
Yeah, it's just nothing for them.
Yeah.
This is the text of the statement.
Donald Trump, Roger Stone, and Thomas Hunter apologize if anyone was misled concerning the production and funding of the lobbying effort.
They did not apologize for the ad's content.
Now, over the next 15 years, there were dozens and probably hundreds of other stories like that.
Roger Stone developed a special hatred for Elliot Spitzer, Attorney General of New York from 1999 to 2006 and then governor of the state in 2007.
Now, Elliot was born rich, like a shocking number of U.S. politicians, and his father had pumped millions of dollars into his career back in the mid-90s.
Right around the time Elliott was elected governor, he threatened to release records about Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno.
There was basically like a rumor that Bruno had been using state aircraft to aid in his re-election campaign and Spitzer was going to like release records that would prove that or not.
And I think Bruno was eventually found not guilty of that.
I'm not sure.
But he was also later found taking a bribe and then got off on like a technicality, but totally received like $400,000 from some guy.
Anyway, so Joe Bruno, Republican Senate Majority Leader of New York, did not like Elliot Spitzer.
These guys were at each other's throats.
And in order to get back at his political enemy and to distract from his own corruption charges, Joe Bruno called up Roger Stone and offered him $20,000 a month to end Elliot Spitzer's career.
Roger gleefully dove into this effort to destroy another person.
One June morning in 2007, Elliott's 83-year-old father, Bernard, who suffered from Parkinson's, woke up to find this message on his answering machine.
This is a message for Bernard Spitzer.
You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Committee on Investigations on your shady campaign loans.
You will be compelled by the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms.
If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany.
And there's not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho-piece of shit son can do about it.
Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you.
You will be forced to tell the truth.
And the fact that your son's a pathological liar will be known to all.
So, yeah.
By the way, that is when I quoted in the first episode, Donald Trump calling him a loser and saying he's a liar and everything.
That's why.
Because actually, Donald Trump liked Elliot Spitzer's dad and was like, actually, like, Donald Trump was morally offended by this message.
That's a hard line to hit.
It's pretty gnarly to go to an 83-year-old man.
Yeah, an ill 83-year-old man.
Who is the father of the guy you don't like and attack him that way?
Who you got paid to not.
You know what I mean?
Like, yeah, he didn't like him, but it's like his job.
You're getting paid to destroy his son, not his dad.
Like, how does that help you deal with Elliot Spitzer?
He's just a gross person.
Now, Roger claims that that's not him.
We're going to dig into that a lot here.
That's as much him as his suits are him.
That's a pinstripe voice.
I will let you know we'll put in a link to that particular audio clip on the site.
It includes, after the voicemail, several clips of just Roger talking.
So you can hear for yourself.
That's fucking Roger Stone.
So him.
But like Bernard Spitzer hired a PI who traced the call back to Roger's apartment and stuff.
Like it's definitely Roger Stone, unless you're Roger Stone.
Now, Roger has always denied making that call.
He has in some recent interviews coyly said, it does sound a lot like me.
But he blamed it at the time on former stand-up comedian and radio host Randy Credico.
Now, we're going to be talking about Randy Credico a little bit later today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Randy Credico was like a comedian.
He was on like Leno sometimes.
He did like improv.
Stone was basically like, he's so good at doing fake voices.
He pretended to be this guy and this guy.
It's clearly him pretending to be me.
And Credico was like, I haven't even talked to Roger in years.
Why would I do this?
Yeah.
And why would you do something so mean and evil?
Yeah.
A comic.
It would be one thing to be like, maybe this comedian called up the governor of New York to leave him a shitty message is someone else.
Okay, I can imagine that happening.
Like Opie and Anthony did shit.
But his dad?
Yeah.
Like, why?
And there was no value in it at all.
It's just cruelty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Stone and Credico had met back in 2003, and Randy had introduced Roger to Al Sharpton.
Sharpton had hired Stone to help with his 2004 presidential run, probably in the hope that Sharpton's campaign would take votes away from John Kerry.
Roger would later tell the Washington Post, quote, Credico became convinced that he should get paid for introducing me to Sharpton.
He refused to do so, Stone continues, because, well, Credico is a cocaine addict, and Stone knew that any money he gave to the guy would go, quote, up his nose.
So, Roger Stone leaves this really gross message.
It's obviously him.
He blames it on a friend of his that he hasn't talked to in years and also says the guy's a coke addict.
Unbelievable.
Now, this may sound a little bit familiar to Roger.
But also, Roger Stone, when it came out that he'd been putting up sex ads in his magazines, like, no, it's my housekeeper.
Yeah.
And Trump throwing his own son-in-law under the bus.
No one's sacred.
No one is safe.
Yeah.
It's a gross way to live.
It really is.
And the only way you can live that way is if you have more money than God.
You know what kills me is all my life I've grown up watching these Hollywood films and I always just a sense of justice is what kept me happy.
Yeah.
Believing in things like karma, believing that things come around.
This is a movie where the bad guy is winning so far.
I'm like, why is this movie so long?
Why is this movie my entire life?
When's he gonna get it, man?
Like, I've ever seen a guy in the middle of a horror movie.
He's such a jerk.
You're like, I can't wait till he dies because I know it's gonna be something horrific.
The Paul Manafort story has been that for me because just like seeing him denied to wear a suit recently and like ill and clearly not healthy and just like, yeah, die in prison, Paul.
I don't know.
I'm violently angry about Paul Manafort.
I spent time in Ukraine.
Yeah, and I saw a lot like Roger Stone's a piece of shit, but like maybe this makes the episode weaker, but no one will ever match the hate that we do on this show that I have for Paul Manafort.
Well, it's deserved.
I mean, look how many millions.
He's literally responsible for hundreds and millions of deaths.
Yeah, I mean, millions of deaths.
I mean, a civil war go on for a decade longer than it's.
Yeah, yeah, conservatively 500 or 600,000 deaths in that conflict alone.
And for money.
Yeah, for money.
For money he didn't need.
He had all the money he needed already.
I could talk shit about Paul Manafort.
No, no, no.
I mean, I get really worked up when we talk about Manafort.
But it's also worth noting that there's almost a way you could say Roger Stone is even grosser because at least Paul Manafort was getting involved, was in the trenches dealing with those people.
Roger Stone was just cashing their checks.
It's just like, yeah, I don't give a shit where this money comes from.
So you could say that's grosser.
Yeah.
You could say that's grosser.
Maybe it is.
Now, Randy Credico is going to come back into this story a little bit later.
But what's important right now is that Bruno fired Stone after this voicemail came out, you know?
But Elliot Spitzer wound up going down anyway.
It's kind of debatable as to whether or not it was Rogers' dirty tricks that were responsible of it.
There was a federal wiretap in a New York Times report about him that revealed he'd been spending tens of thousands of dollars on high-priced prostitutes.
And his big thing was like he sleeps with prostitutes while wearing his socks.
That's Roger Stone.
That was Roger Stone.
That's a Stone detail.
Roger Stone repeated that detail to every newspaper in the goddamn world for months.
It's very petty.
But it shows that he has a really subtle understanding of how humanity works.
Yeah.
That's something that, like, even if I was that sort of a person, I wouldn't think that that detail would matter.
He knew that it totally did.
Yeah, and we don't even know.
Maybe he made that detail up.
Maybe he just knew, oh, that's something that'll stick in their heads.
But I could also see that one being true because Elliot Spitzer undoubtedly was hanging out with a lot of prostitutes.
Sure.
Which I wouldn't have an issue with if he hadn't been an attorney general and thus responsible for prosecuting prostitution in the state of New York.
But it's debatable.
You'll hear people say that Stone dropped a dime on Spitzer to the FBI, and that's why there was the investigation, and that's why everything came out, that he did bust Spitzer this way.
I haven't found hard proof of that.
There was definitely a federal wiretap and a New York Times report about him.
It's entirely possible that Roger Stone, that his main contribution was dropping that story about the socks, and that he just sort of was like, oh, this is a happy accident.
I really don't know.
But it seems pretty likely that he had a significant role in Spitzer's political downfall.
That does seem likely.
For sure.
All the tales of Roger Stone's crapulance over the years prompted the New Yorker to write a profile of him in 2008.
I think that article is the first place, at least the first major outlet, where Roger started talking about what he called Stone's rules.
These include such chunks of political wisdom as, he who speaks first loses.
Attack, attack, attack, never defend.
Admit nothing.
Deny everything.
Launch counterattack.
And when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.
Wow.
So.
There was another one that there's a lot.
I don't know.
There's an endless number of them.
The one that makes my skin crawl is that hate is a greater motivator than love.
And that's the one that makes my skin crawl because that is the Trump campaign.
Yeah.
And every campaign he's been involved with.
I mean, that's fascism, man.
Like, that's the core ideological, not that I don't think Donald Trump is an ideological anything, but that is the core of that political philosophy is that hate and fear are a hell of a lot more powerful than love.
Yeah.
Although Hitler would have said, no, it's the love of the Volk or whatever that is the, I don't know, I'm not going to argue with Dead Hitler here.
Reasonable men and Hitler can disagree.
I'll let you win.
You win, I guess.
Yeah.
Against Dead Hitler.
Against Dead Hitler.
We all win against Dead Hitler.
We do.
He's dead.
We're still here in your face.
Suck on that, Hitler.
Yeah, with your baby mustache, you freak.
Stupid mustache.
I don't know.
Part of me wonders, like, if Hitler hadn't ever been Hitler, would that mustache be around?
Would like we all have a friend with the back in East Hollywood, for sure.
I feel like people dip their toes with the Hitler youth haircuts.
They dip their toes.
I mean, that shaved on the sides look is nice.
It can work.
It looks nice.
It's a nice comeback.
It's baby mustache adjacent.
It's baby mustache adjacent.
I don't know.
It's one of those things where like at the time it was like, we're way off topic, but that was considered like a working man's mustache because you don't have to groom it or anything.
That's right.
It's an honest man's mustache.
And so that's kind of like what Hitler was repping to everyone is like, I'm just a normal working Joe like you.
See, I think that's the thing that he sees.
The way like a great athlete or a great chef or a great artist can see things that normal people can't see.
I think he sees these subtleties.
He sees like a naked man wearing socks and goes, that's not presidential.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
That can hurt him.
No one will take him seriously having this in their mind.
I should shave my mustache so they look at me and say, I'm one of them.
Like he's got that kind of eye.
And if we're looking at what, is there some aspect of what I have to, part of me believes that anyone as prominent as someone like Roger Stone has become, there is an aspect of genius at play.
Just like there is with Alex Jones.
Yeah.
You have to, otherwise they become too powerful.
Yeah.
You have to allow yourself to have a level of respect so you can figure out how to deconstruct them.
And I think you've, I didn't really figure it out when I was writing this, but I think you've nailed what it is that his genius is, is recognizing those.
It's not the actual tricks he plays.
It's knowing how to present things in a way that leave an indelible image in people's heads.
And I think the Spitzer thing, like really focusing on those socks that he's wearing while he's fucking these call girls, I think that nails it.
I think that's like what he's good at.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah.
And we'll actually be talking about some more stuff like that a little bit later.
Deconstructing Alex Jones00:04:14
So yeah, Roger Stone starts in like the early 2000s talking about Stone's rules all the time.
Every interview he does, he'll drop the rules.
You know, this is my rule here.
This is my rule here.
Trying to brand himself.
Here's a quote from the New Yorker.
His outfit comported with two of the rules in his book, Stone's Rules for War, Politics, Food, Fashion, and Living, which he hopes to publish soon.
Never wear a double-breasted suit and a button-down collar and white.
I just love the idea that it's like such a Michael Scott thing to do, is have the name of a book that you haven't written that you talk to an interviewer about.
That's amazing.
That's so great.
Yeah.
Michael Scarn.
It's just like, because I started looking up that book and I was like, oh, he hadn't written that when this came out.
He's just trying to make it a thing.
I am proud to say on behalf of Roger that he did eventually write kind of that book.
It wasn't the same title, but you can buy it.
You know, Stone's Rules, How to Win It Politics, Business, and Style from the Infowar store right now.
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
It currently has 12 reviews.
So you could really be on the ground floor.
Very low.
Ground floor.
This is the copy.
Or the front.
And he's covering his weird bird lips.
Yeah, he's covering his weird bird lips.
He's got like his, he's got like his hand at his lips or something.
Yeah, he really, I think he's trying to cover those jowls or something.
That's an interesting choice that he would cover up half his face.
Such an arrogant man.
It shows you he's simultaneously arrogant and insecure.
Nobody who's that obsessed with fashion can be secure in their place.
Yeah, I agree.
Nobody who fucking worries about what their suspenders are called is secure in their physical form.
He's the opposite of the cat that stares in the mirror that sees a lion.
He's a lion that stares in a mirror and sees a cat, a little baby kitten.
He's so weak.
That's what all this peacocking is.
Like an old lady that used to be really sexy and wears a mini skirt, and you're like, that's not you.
This guy's 66 and he still calls himself a quote-unquote tough guy.
Well, and it's like he also needs to be attached to some bigger man.
He doesn't do anything on his own.
Because he's the kitten.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, whether or not it's Alex Jones or Donald Trump, he's always attached to somebody else.
Exactly.
He's the sidekick.
Yeah, he's kind of like a chronic, sleazy sidekick of right-wing firebrands.
Exactly.
Like if Darth Vader had a talk show, he'd be evil Ed McMahon.
Yeah, yeah, he'd, yeah, that's about right.
Yeah.
Now, that 2008 New Yorker interview also revealed that Roger Stone had, in 2007, gotten a photo accurate back tattoo of the head of his hero, Richard Nixon.
The article also noted that Stone tans 12 months a year and drinks four triple espresso every day.
Stone talked about his recent move to Miami, saying it's a sunny place for shady people.
What a quote.
Yeah, that's a good quote.
Wow.
The man could turn a phrase every now and then.
He really can.
That's a good one.
It is a good one.
And you know, he was an actor for a while in high school.
No, I didn't even run across him.
Yeah, he was an actor for a short time in high school.
And when he got into politics, he said this.
He said, I then realized that acting and politics were the same.
Oh, I feel like a lot of people have had that experience.
Now more than ever with the transparency the internet's creating.
I mean, fucking Ronald Reagan.
Yeah, it's very true.
Yeah.
Rode bedtime for Bonzo right to the Oval Office.
Let's just make it stop before the rock.
That's all I want.
You know what?
Again, not the worst case scenario anymore.
Sure.
I've had enough, Robert.
Why not?
Can you smell what the president is cooking?
I can't take that.
Wouldn't it be soothing to just have a nice person in there?
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm sure the climate will continue its unheeded acceleration into unsustainable greenhouse nightmare.
But at least the president could be friendly.
You're right.
I think that should be the minimum requirement.
We should have someone whose character is at a level that we just go, okay, this is a decent human being who is at least trying for the good of the country.
Like Jimmy Carter, and actually like no one else, but like Jimmy Carter.
Well, at least he's a nice person.
Not a great president, but well.
Okay, so we are going to continue talking about Roger Stone and get into his downfall.
Soothing the Nightmare00:04:44
I think it's fair to say downfall.
I agree, which is going to be the most satisfying, cathartic part of this podcast.
Amen.
But first, you know what's even more cathartic than the downfall of a monster.
Tell me, I was just thinking about catharsis.
Wonderful services and products that are provided by the advertisements in front of products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Rejected Presidential Candidate00:14:42
Listeners, while those wonderful ads that you were spending your money on were running, we started to suspect that Roger Stone's greatest crime may in fact have been appropriating the phrase, it's a sunny place for shady people from someone else.
We found a sunglasses line in a book, although the book came out after that interview did.
So it's hard to say.
Roger may have stolen that line from someone.
Yeah.
Sophie's going to do that research and we'll get back to you or not.
If nothing interesting comes up, we won't get back to you and pretend this didn't happen.
Anyway, so in 2008, while he was doing that interview, it was not a great time to be a Republican in politics.
You know, Barack Obama had just kind of bumrushed the McCain campaign.
It didn't look like the Republicans were going to be back in power for a little while.
A black man beat a white war hero.
Beat a white war hero and whatever Sarah Palin is.
And yeah, it was looking like a rough time for a Republican political option.
And so in that interview, Roger Stone noted, quote, the left has done a better job of dominating the new space.
We're weak on the web.
A little foreshadowing there.
Questioned about the McCain campaign.
Roger Stone advised, quote, a Nixonian slash and burn campaign against Barack Obama.
Obama and his wife are elitists and they're weak.
They don't share middle-class values.
Middle-class Americans are proud of their country and they are not.
He thinks he's going to sit down with Iran and Hamas.
How do you know he's not going to shake hands with a suicide bomber?
You can't sit down with people who don't want to sit down.
All he's going to do is raise taxes, which is going to give the government more money, but it's not going to create any jobs.
Remember, Stone said, politics is not about uniting people.
It's about dividing people and getting your 51%.
Wow.
That's Roger Stone and Paul Manafort in a motherfucking nutshell.
You know what?
It might be his own thirst for attention, the attention he never got from his dad that's going to be his downfall.
He can't not speak to the press.
He's underestimating people.
Yeah.
Even though he said, he said this plenty of times, that his target audience is not the elite, it's not the sophisticated, it's not people who study or read up on politics.
But now he's underestimating their ability to read things about him and for them to still be hypnotized.
So here, kind of spinning off of that, I'm not sure if it's him underestimating them or if it's a fundamental, he can't understand politics is not about politics to him.
It's about the same thing a game of monopoly is.
You're really into a game of monopoly.
And so he is incapable of realizing like, no, Roger, the things that you are doing are impacting people's lives in horrible negative ways.
When you get these politicians and they put in these short-sighted policies that fuck up and lead to all the terrible things that these different politicians you've supported over the years have done, like when these things impact people's lives, they get angry.
And then they hear you talking about like dividing people.
And they're like, I can't talk to half my family.
We're all screaming at each other.
You can't understand what it's like to be in that situation because none of this means that to you.
Yeah.
This is where the United States of America and to hear like a campaign manager or a political strategist for the president of the United States of America that his tactic was to divide a country whose foundation was about uniting.
Yeah.
It's just so heartbreaking.
Well, and it's one of those things you couldn't until recently get away with.
Like you remember when Barack Obama was running and he made that comment about people clinging to their guns and their Bibles.
That was a huge, I was still very much in the right-wing media bubble at that point in time in my life.
And that was a huge issue.
People being like, and he, and there's good reason to be pissed about that.
If you're a Bible-believing Christian, if you're someone who grew up shooting and has done that your whole life and live in a place where like, yeah, that's an offensive thing to hear.
And he had to address that shit.
And any presidential candidate up until 2016 would have had to face consequences for a statement like that.
A guy like Roger Stone has never had to because he's not a candidate ever.
And it's almost never transparent who he's advising.
And so he's never had to be that careful, which I think we're getting to the part of the story where that bites him in the ass.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's worth noting before we move on from the 2008 that during that election, he formed the group Citizens United, Not Timid, to oppose Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Literal acronym, Kunt.
Yeah.
Nice guy, Roger.
Now, in 2010, two years into Elliot Spitzer's political exile, Roger Stone struck again.
After being laid off, he'd apparently found another set of backers, wealthy Republicans, his description, who paid him to make sure Spitzer's political career stayed dead.
And this is where, you know, after Spitzer was already at, this is where he started talking about the socks.
Like, this is where he started spreading that myth.
And he claims that he was at an adult club and met a girl who was friends with a girl who'd worked with Spitzer, and she told him the story.
It's unbelievable.
It's like, I was talking to my prostitute friend.
And she said, this is how silly this is.
And this is two years after Spitzer's out as governor because he's already been disgraced.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
Anyway, Roger Stone seems to have grown less cautious and careful in his golden years.
Maybe it's the corrupting influence of social media, but over the last decade, he's racked up a pretty horrifying compilation of sexist remarks.
Here's Media Matters.
Stone tweeted that New York Times columnist Gail Collins is an elitist cunt.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is Rachel the Muffdiver.
Fox News's Megan Kelly has a nice set of cans.
And Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a Jap acronym for Jewish American Princess.
He thought that was going to be one kind of racist, but it was another.
Who is every man's first wife?
He also tweeted die bitch at former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson and said he would kill himself if he was married to screechy and shill Carly Fiorina.
The Sun Sentinel also reported that Stone called Florida politician Barbara Stern a self-important, nasty cunt on Twitter.
So, lest I leave the impression that Roger's bigotry is limited to women, here's a bunch of racist stuff he said.
Stone's tweets include attacks like stupid negro, fat negro, arrogant know-it-all negro, uncle Tom, Mandingo, and House Negro.
Stone tweeted that commenter Roland Martin is a stupid Negro and a fat Negro commentator Herman Kane is a Mandingo and former Representative Alan West is an arrogant know-it-all Negro.
He also tweeted that commentator Al Sharpton is a professional Negro who likes fried chicken, asked if former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was an Uncle Tom and referred to himself as an N-word with a Nixon tattoo.
He did not use the phrase N-word.
That was an uncomfortable paragraph to state, but this is all stuff Roger Stone said, mostly about Republicans.
Crazy.
He's just a family.
They rejected him.
Yeah.
They rejected him.
The mainstream ones did.
Yeah, mainstream Republicans rejected him, and he's attacking.
He's a hurt man.
Yeah, he's a hurt man.
And in 2014, he got his chance to push some pain back out into the world.
That is the year when Donald Trump began to execute his campaign run for president.
Now, Roger Stone was reportedly Donald Trump's number one consultant for the early stages of his bid.
According to Joshua Green, the author of Devil's Bargain, a book about the election, quote, inside Trump's circle, the power of illegal immigration to manipulate popular sentiment was readily apparent, and his advisors brainstormed methods for keeping their attention-addled boss on message.
They needed a trick, a mnemonic device.
In the summer of 2014, they found one that clicked.
According to Sam Nunberg, who worked with Trump during this period, Roger Stone and I came up with the idea of the wall, and we talked to Steve Bannon about it.
It was to make sure Trump talked about immigration.
Initially, Trump seemed indifferent to the idea, but in January 2015, he tried it out at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a presidential cattle call put on by David Bossy's group, Citizens United.
One of his pledges was, I will build a wall, and the place just went nuts.
Wow.
That's what you're talking about.
It's like with the socks, Roger knows that's something that'll stick in people's heads.
Exactly.
You got to drive that.
And I think that is his major contribution to the pain.
100%.
That's why even when he's fired, people keep him.
So Roger Stone stole his catchphrase about Florida from a 1941 novel.
Oh, M. Somerset Maughan.
Yeah.
Or Maugen.
I don't know how to pronounce it, but I've seen that name before.
Wow.
Yet another crime uncovered.
You shady son of a bitch.
He's so.
And you know what's funny too?
This is almost like when you go to jail and you don't want anybody to mess with you, so you just throw human poop on you.
Yeah.
And everyone's scared to touch you.
I think he plays so dirty and so gross that people are like, I know he's doing something illegal, but I don't want to fight with him because he fights like a homeless person.
Yeah.
He's going to bite and scratch and stab.
It's so bizarre how broken this guy.
I didn't think during this conversation I would actually feel sorry for this guy, but that's what I do.
There's a deep core of sadness to it.
Yeah.
It becomes clear the more you dig into like what he's done his whole life.
I think that's the justice.
He wants us to think he's strong, even calls himself a bodybuilder and tattoos a man's face on his back that he thinks is strong.
And really, he's just this insecure, weak, broken, little broken little boy.
Yeah, yeah.
They all are at some level.
Yeah.
Now, Stone's time with the Trump campaign did not last all that long.
In August of 2015, after a performance in one of the Republican primary debates that was wrongly considered to be disastrous for the Trump campaign, you remember that?
Yep.
Yeah.
Roger quit or was fired.
Roger claims he quit, at least.
Trump says that he fired Roger, and Roger says that he quit and basically fired Trump from anyway.
It's who knows.
They each thought he was getting too much airtime for Trump's taste.
Wasn't that the hypothesis?
That might be part of it.
And it might also be that after that Roger also thought that things were going badly with the campaign and didn't want to be attached to it anymore because it looked bad back then for Trump.
Nobody was guessing.
Yeah, Republicans were screaming, get Trump out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of people were angry.
So that may have been why that happened.
He was trying to like, anyway, this was not the end of the Stone-Trump relationship, though.
According to one version of events, at least, Roger Stone was responsible for hooking Donald Trump up with Paul Manafort, who at that point lived in a Trump tower, but did not actually know Donald well.
Some people say that Stone is the guy who pushed Manafort on Trump basically in order to give himself an in with the campaign that he'd probably been fired from.
If true, this would be an appropriate reversal of Roger's agreement to act as Manafort's proxy in the young Republicans so many years before.
It's a nice little bit of symmetry.
And it would be nice if the only person either of them is capable of doing a single altruistic thing for is the other.
If like the one nice thing Paul Manafort ever did was for Roger Stone and vice versa.
It's funny.
You know, I think when Manafort got hired, I think in the documentary, it was Stone who quoted his quote when Manafort got hired was, back in the saddle again.
Yeah.
Like I'm back.
He knew that was his way back into the campaign.
Yeah.
And it does seem like, and we'll see how things go now, but it seems like for a while the two were pretty good at being solid with each other.
You know, they backstab a lot of other people, but they were usually on the same side of things when they were both involved in the same thing.
Some of that may be that Manafort was really more overseas, you know, after like the 80s, particularly.
It's like an episode of Survivor, but in DC.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like form a union and then attack everybody else.
Yeah, just Roger Stone and Paul Manafort against the world.
The only smart member of that group in the long term turned out to be Black, who has just got rich and decided not to commit more crimes.
Oh, boy.
Now, most of what we are going to talk about from here on out, Roger Stone's relationship with WikiLeaks and the possibly criminal behavior he engaged in on behalf of the Trump campaign.
All of this is very controversial.
We don't know exactly what happened yet because obviously the Mueller report's not out.
There are competing versions of events and competing suspicions of how things went down.
One thing that is crystal clear about this time is that Roger Stone was instrumental in bringing Alex Jones and Donald Trump together, which, again, that's why I brought up this stuff about conspiracies earlier.
He's always had that thing.
And starting in about 2013, he and Alex Jones start being buddies.
And he eventually becomes like, he's an Infowars employee for like the last three years.
Wow.
So he's like hosting a show.
He's a reporter there.
He's making probably 20, 25 grand a month.
And I do want to plug quickly here.
Knowledge Fight, the podcast that talks about Alex Jones shows, just did a fantastic episode on all of this.
Yeah, if you go to Knowledge Fight's website at Knowledge Fight, or just look them up on Google, Knowledge Fight, the January 25th, 2019 episode.
They go into a lot more granular detail about this than we're going to because we're kind of covering his whole life.
They focus more on his shadiness with WikiLeaks.
It's great.
I really recommend it.
But yeah, so it's unclear when exactly Alex and Roger became friends, but it's very clear that Roger was the reason that Donald Trump sort of got keyed into the fact that Infowars existed at all.
I don't think Donald Trump was listening to a lot of InfoWars in the 90s or whenever.
Now, in December of 2015, Donald Trump showed up on InfoWars and praised Alex Jones as having an amazing reputation.
As the 2016 election picked up steam, Stone became a more frequent guest on InfoWars.
On August 4th, 2016, he showed up as a guest on the Infowars radio show.
At this point, Alex Jones was telling his listeners that Hillary Clinton was about to resign as a presidential candidate under the shame of a massive criminal indictment.
Now, at this point, a number of hacked DNC emails had already been released via Wikileaks.
Stone claimed on air on August 4th to know about the upcoming release of more hacked DNC emails on WikiLeaks.
He also claimed to have spoken with Donald Trump on August 3rd.
More recent releases as part of the Moeller investigation have shown that on the 4th, the same day Stone was on InfoWars, he emailed Trump advisor Sam Nunberg and told him he'd had dinner with Julian Assange the night before, which, if you're keeping track, would be the same day he claimed to have met with Trump.
So when we talk about evidence of collusion, there is some.
Definitely.
Speaking of collusion, this podcast colludes with a number of fantastic sponsors that help keep the lights on and allow us to do this show.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Colluding with Capitalism00:03:42
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Mary, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ango Mona.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
Communicating the Lie00:14:34
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back and we are talking about Roger Stone in the 2016 election.
Now, over the course of 2016, Roger Stone repeatedly played the role of hype man for WikiLeaks' release of Democratic campaign documents, as well as Clinton advisor John Podesta's emails.
On August 21st, he tweeted, Trust me, it will soon be time in the barrel, hashtag crooked Hillary.
Shortly thereafter, WikiLeaks published a cache of John Podesta's leaked emails.
Roger frequently spoke on InfoWars and wrote articles on Breitbart, poo-pooing the idea that Russia had anything to do with all these hacks and pushing the narrative that Gusifer 2.0, the person behind the DNC hacks, was an independent activist, a hero in Stone's telling, and not an agent of the Russian government.
Now, on election night, 2016, Roger Stone celebrated with his good buddy, Alex Jones.
The two drank champagne and saluted the dawn of a brave new era.
But for Roger, and probably for Alex too, the end of the fun times was finally nigh.
Donald Trump's upset victory got a lot of people to start looking much more closely on whether or not there had been any collusion with Wikileaks or the Russian government within the Trump campaign.
It quickly became apparent that Gusifer 2.0 was in fact a Russian operative.
He fucked up and gave investigators the digital equivalent of DNA evidence that he was a spy.
And of course, later leaked chat logs revealed that Roger Stone had been communicating with him.
Same thing happened with WikiLeaks.
It's, again, still a little bit unclear exactly how all of this maps out.
It seems like what happened is Roger Stone was communicating with a guy named Jerome Coursey, who was one of the major origin points for like the birther bullshit myth thing and who also had connections with WikiLeaks.
And that was his go-between, and he was sort of working directly with Wikileaks that way.
And he definitely, there's also been reports that he was sort of selling himself to the Trump campaign since he'd been kicked out as an advisor as a liaison to WikiLeaks and was coordinating with the campaign, probably with Steve Bannon.
That's what it looks like was happening, although again, it's not exactly known.
So it looks like, yeah, Roger Stone was working directly with Jerome Coursey as well as communicating with WikiLeaks one-on-one and communicating with Goosefer 2.0 in order to sort of coordinate the release of leaked documents with the presidential campaign to hurt Hillary Clinton.
Now, when all of this became the biggest news story in the country, which it's been for more or less the last two years, Roger suddenly started claiming that he had not, in fact, had direct contact with WikiLeaks or Assange, which, of course, multiple times during the election he had talked about on like radio shows and podcasts, talking with WikiLeaks and stuff.
But he had not been consistent about this.
But he suddenly started lying once the Mueller investigation kicked up and began claiming that rather than talking directly with WikiLeaks or communicating and colluding through with Jerome Corsi, his contact with WikiLeaks, he hadn't been colluding with him directly.
They just had a friend in common.
And Stone claimed that that friend was Randy Credico.
Now, which again is the exact same thing he did when he got caught the last time he did something similar to it?
It's like pulp fiction, the way these characters come back around.
Now, Stone testified to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that this was the case.
And the recent indictment handed down by Bob Mueller makes it clear that this was yet another lie.
Stone was charged with witness tampering for telling Credico things like Stonewallet, plead the fifth, anything to save the plan.
That's a Richard Nixon quote, by the way.
So when you know, basically, Stone lies and says that Credico is his source to WikiLeaks, and he's telling Credico, keep this lie going when you get in front of the House Intelligence Committee.
And his way to tell him to commit this federal crime is to send him a quote of Nixon telling someone to commit a federal crime.
That was one of the things that Nixon got caught doing and is why he got impeached.
It's really funny because he also always says history is prologue.
Yeah.
Shakespeare.
Past his prologue.
Past his prologue.
Yeah.
And in the Tempest in the Shakespeare speech, when the guy was saying, the character was saying that, I remember the character, but when he was saying that, it was a way to excuse murder.
This freaking guy, like his code words are like so easy to decipher.
Yeah, his coword in this is literally another guy committing the same crime he's committed.
Exactly.
Like he's such a dummy.
Roger, don't use that.
Don't commit crimes through what's this is a different jump that he's made though than the past.
Yeah, and this is a lot dumber in the past.
He also said things like, if you turned over anything to the FBI, you're a fool.
He threatened Credico's service dog, Bianca, saying he would take that dog away from you.
You are a rat, a stoolie.
You backstab your friends, run your mouth.
My lawyers are dying to rip you to shreds.
I'm so ready.
Let's get it on.
Prepare to die.
Expletive.
Now, it's worth noting that when questioned about this by Mother Jones, Roger Stone stated that his words were being taken out of context.
And when he'd said, prepare to die, motherfucker, he admitted that Credico was dealing with cancer.
So you should say, like, these are just really bad lies, Roger.
So he says something that's even worse.
Yeah.
Like, oh, I don't mean I'm going to kill him.
I mean, you guys.
And I'm going to remind him of that because I'm a prick.
But I'll take his dog.
Jesus.
Roger.
It's so funny, too, because at first I went, oh, okay, this guy doesn't even like animals.
He's a dick.
And then the very next week when the FBI raided his home, he's like, they upset my wife.
They upset my dogs.
He's apparently a dog lover, which, you know, a lot of people are.
He didn't say, I'll kill your dog.
So maybe he was just threatening to abduct a man's service animal.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
You know what's different now is the old campaign was I'll lie by any means necessary.
I'll do whatever I need to do to have this side of the country win.
Now he's like, I don't care if it's another country that wants to do it.
As long as I don't get in trouble.
As long as I don't get in trouble.
So before it was like, I'll have the conservative side versus the liberal side.
Now it's like, I'll have an enemy of the nation.
Yeah.
This guy's, he's gone from a corrupt person to a traitor.
Yeah.
And to a traitor who, like in the months leading up to this on Infowars, would regularly urge President Trump to essentially assume dictatorial powers and shut down the FBI investigation and stuff.
And it's like, that's a line, Roger.
It answers the question for a lot of people.
They're like, for an outsider, Trump really knows how to play the game.
Trump doesn't know how to play the game.
He just knows how to find shady people in sunny places who know how to play the game.
He knows when to listen.
And when you're in real estate, nobody cares because everyone in the real estate business is a criminal.
Exactly.
And it's fine.
We're fine with that for some reason.
Not my realtor in Long Beach, Susie.
Thanks, Susie.
Sorry for trying to mustache on your memo notepad that I got for free.
She's strangling a dog right now.
Oh, real estate agents.
Hit us up on Twitter, real estate agents.
Tell us about your favorite crimes that you've committed.
You're all Nazis.
You're all Nazis.
All real estate agents are Nazis.
That is the stance of this podcast.
Now, enough of the claims Roger Stone made before Congress were proven false that he has been charged with at least five counts of making false statements during his testimony.
And this is, in fact, other than witness tampering, like this, that's all of the indictments so far have been like, you lied and you threatened somebody who was going like a federal witness, which you can't do.
Now, it appears that the main downfall for Roger Stone that got him busted by the FBI was his unjustified trust in the program WhatsApp.
Here's a quote from Aris Technica.
That's great.
Quote, he believed that WhatsApp, which he used as a secure phone line and for messaging, would protect his communications from the eyes of investigators.
Forgetting that the people he was talking to could just show the messages to Mueller's team in a grand jury.
He also left an email trail of his alleged misdeeds seemingly spanning a mile wide.
After WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee on July 22nd, 2016, quote, a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information Wikileaks had regarding the Clinton campaign, the indictment states.
In return, Stone reached out to multiple associates in an attempt to communicate with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and obtain further Clinton-related emails.
On July 25th, 2016, Stone emailed Corsi.
The subject line was get to Julian Assange.
The message read, get to Julian Assange at Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending WikiLeaks emails.
They deal with Foundation, allegedly.
Really, don't leave text evidence of your crimes everywhere, Roger.
I'm glad he did, though.
And then threaten the people who you have an equal copy of all of the evidence of your crimes.
Don't do that.
You know, when I was a kid once, I killed a cockroach and I left his body there for the other cockroaches to see.
Yeah.
And that's what I want him to be.
Yeah.
I want him to be that cockroach.
I want him to be a cautionary tale.
I'm glad he's getting caught.
I want him and mana for it.
I want a lot of cockroaches strung up on a lot of walls.
Because I'm worried about what they're inspiring.
You know what I mean?
That's why they've got to get...
And that's why whenever people, it's the same reason like whenever people are like some 96-year-old Nazi gets found out and they're like trying to extradite him to Germany and people are like, well, he's 96.
I'm like, no, take him to court.
Let him die on a plane.
Make it miserable.
Make everyone else know this is what happens when you do crimes like this.
Exactly.
Like, we'll get you eventually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, this is the point at which I think we finally get an answer to the running question for this whole episode.
Is Roger Stone actually a political mastermind, an evil genius, or did he just associate himself with a successful people and do a good job of hyping up his BS contributions?
His behavior in 2018 was definitely the behavior of a cornered man growing increasingly panicked about coming legal smackdowns.
His appearances on Infowars grew more common.
He would regularly attack the Mueller investigation as being part of a deep state cabal and frequently begged President Trump to make use of extreme executive powers to fire Rod Rosenstein and shut the whole thing down.
It also seems to me at least that Stone's rhetoric grew more apocalyptic as the noose tightened.
Here's a clip from him in late 2018.
You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you've never seen.
You think?
No question.
You think if you go to impeach like the country?
Both sides are heavily armed, my friend.
Yes, absolutely.
This is not 1974.
The people will not stand for impeachment.
A politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life.
There will be violence on both sides.
Yeah.
He's threatening people.
He's threatening an apocalyptic civil war.
And saying any politician who voted for it would have their lives threatened.
Yeah.
Like it's.
He's sending those are dog whistle messages.
He's sending to people.
Threats.
Those are threats.
It's not even done.
It's a fucking pig's ear thrown right at like a bunch of.
I don't know how to finish that analogy, but you get my point.
Most of Stone's media appearances over the last year seem to have been a way for him to advertise his GoFundMe legal defense fund.
This fund has raised, so far, about $78,000 in the month it's been up.
Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign advisor and friend of Roger Stone, actually started the campaign.
He claims that Stone has lost everything in the ongoing legal battle.
Politico noted that the month before, Stone posted an Instagram picture of himself on a beach smoking a cigar and wearing designer sunglasses.
So probably a lie, like everything else Roger Stone's ever said.
One group at least has stuck with Roger Stone in the wake of his indictment and arrest.
The Proud Boys.
Stone started using them as his personal security for events in 2017 and eventually went through what they call their first degree initiation.
He chose Cinco de Mayo as the date to do this, and their whole initiation is around like claiming that I'm not going to apologize for creating the world as a Western man.
I don't know.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he picked Cinco de Mayo.
I think they're just anything they can do to be a little bit more racist.
Just really funny because even the idea of a white race is a lie.
Yeah.
There is no white race.
It was a construct.
There's no such thing.
Hang out with a Russian, hang with an Irishman.
It's not the same thing.
And the Proud Boys are a little smarter than talking about the white race.
They claim Western civilization.
That's their catch-all because then you don't have to all be white, but you can still essentially stand for white diplomacy.
Then embrace your Middle Eastern side because that's what Iran is.
Iran is supposed to be the birthplace of the real white people.
That's why it sounds like Aryan.
It's Iran.
Yeah.
So get your white loafers out and your Capri 100s.
Yeah.
And start calling people my friend if you really want to be the origin of white.
Oh, man, and get way better at cooking lamb.
Way better at cooking lamb.
We cannot cook a goddamn lamb in this country to save our lives.
It's all a trick.
It's when a powerful white man tells a poor white man that he's just like him.
It's hypnotizing.
Well, that's exactly what Roger Stone talks about as a young man being like, I want to be the bridge between working-class white people and rich white people.
That makes sense.
That's exactly what he's always been about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, of course, he would like the Proud Boys.
One prominent Proud Boy is currently selling Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong t-shirts.
When he was arraigned last Monday, several Proud Boys provided an escort and chanted their vocal support of the man.
We haven't talked much about Roger Stone's style obsession in this podcast.
I just, it's not really funny.
Like, I read a bunch of what he wrote.
It's just like pretentious stuff for people who care about suits and whatnot, which, if that's your thing, that's fine.
It's true.
Everybody's got to have a thing.
But there is a way in which that became a source of some schadenfreude for me.
Starting, I think, in the 1990s, Stone became increasingly enamored with ostentatious outfits, generally dressing like someone who lives to fight Batman.
He became the Daily Caller's men's style correspondent and also writes a 10 best and worst dress list every year.
In most of these columns, Stone's header image is a picture of himself dressed as and wielding a gun like James Bond.
He clearly views himself as a slick, badass political operator and wants others to see him that way too.
That reputation has been punctured by a long series of dumb mistakes, many of them in his appearances on Infowars.
Mistakes like claiming exiled Chinese businessmen Guo Wengui had been convicted of financial crimes and donated illegally to Hillary Clinton and Steve Bannon.
None of this was true.
Stone and Infowars were sued for $100 million.
And last year, Roger Stone was forced to make an on-air public apology for having failed to do proper research.
Taking Pleasure in Misfortune00:12:29
He's almost 70.
Yeah.
That's what I keep reminding myself.
Yeah.
The way he behaves.
Yeah.
He's a grandfather.
He is a grandfather.
He's almost 70, and this is how he acts.
This is how he behaves.
This is the philosophy he has, that he's a spy and a badass and uses all this tough guy language.
And really, he's the one who sees himself naked and weak and his bones getting softer and his muscles starting to sag.
He can't beat time.
No, nobody can.
Nobody can.
Oh, it makes me so angry.
Patrick Stewart.
Other than Patrick Stewart.
You know what?
Nobody can beat time.
He's really nailed time.
Hate may be a greater motivator, but love makes your skin look better when you get older.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
He looks so good.
He looks great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, despite all of Roger Stone's claims to being a sly, badass, brilliant Nixonian-style political operator, Roger Stone has proven to just be a bad criminal who got lucky for a while.
He's not a badass.
He's just bad.
In the wake of his indictment, Roger Stone has whined incessantly about having roughly as much force used against him in his apprehension as a small-time pot dealer in Texas.
Stone complained that he wasn't called ahead of time to give him a chance to dress up and look his best for the cameras.
Instead, he was photographed in a simple blue polo shirt.
When he was released later that day, he had to give his press conference looking like a normal, elderly man and not the penguin.
It is a moment of great Schadenfreude for me, and we are going to end the episode by playing the clip of his press conference.
I love it.
I'm getting arrested.
I love it.
Define Schadenfreude.
What's Schadenfreude?
Taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.
It's a German one.
Oh, I like that word.
Yeah, it's a great word.
Schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude.
Congratulations, Roger.
Congratulations.
Got you, Roger.
Thank you.
Ambassador, Roger.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much.
So you've got to move over.
As I have always said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
After a two-year inquisition, the charges today relate in no way to Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration, or any other illegal act in connection with the 2016 campaign.
I am falsely accused of making false statements during my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.
That is incorrect.
Any error I made in my testimony would be both immaterial and without intent.
I think.
All right.
I want that on my iTunes.
Yeah, it feels good, right?
It feels good.
It's like a little squeegee for your soul after all.
It makes me believe in God.
And Santa Claus.
Lock him up.
Lock him up sounds.
Oh, it's so nice.
Oh, it's like a pizza after smoking weed.
Oh, it's so satisfying.
I'm not normally a big fan of chanting as part of a crowd, but that would have been a fun crowd to chant as part of.
Believe me, as an Arab in America.
The only time I like people chanting USA, USA, USA is during the Olympics.
Yeah.
Outside of that, I'm like, chanting lock him up at Roger Stone.
Man.
Oh, that's so good.
It's like emotional bubble wrap.
I just want to eat it all.
Yeah, man.
Guzzle that down.
Give me the bread to sop up the sauce.
Yeah.
Yeah, that tastes good.
That tastes good at the end of this gross tale.
So schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude.
Yeah, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.
I like that.
Great German word.
That's a great word.
Yeah.
They're really great at making single words for things.
Although this is like the joy of seeing justice.
Yeah, it was a little bit like this is justified.
The beginning of it, anyway.
Yeah, it's the start of a process of justice that hopefully leads to him dying in a cell.
Yeah.
I'm a big believer in rehabilitation, but if you're 70 and doing the shit Roger Stone's been doing for the last couple of years, I couldn't agree more.
You're probably not going to get rehabbed.
I absolutely agree.
Not allowed in society anymore.
Same thing with Paul Manafort.
If your crime is selling drugs or even beating someone, even accidentally killing an individual, even killing someone in the throes of a sudden rage, I believe in some sort of rehabilitation for you.
But if your crime is conspiring to thwart the liberty of millions of people around the world, I don't believe in rehabilitating that.
100% agree.
Yeah.
100%.
It's a crazy thing to see someone who came that way.
Like, you know, I came from a dad that was abusive and he had PTSD from war and he had a drinking problem.
He had everything against him.
But I could always look back and say, I understand the dynamics of abuse.
I understand that he was abused too.
And then the guy that bit him was like a vampire.
And then I had to go to therapy so I could be like one of the vampires on Twilight.
Like there was a cause.
There was an origin.
And that's why you're great at baseball.
Yeah, exactly.
But with him, you just look at this and I still, at the end of it, even if there's satisfaction, I just go, why?
Yeah, it's a sad story.
Yeah.
As it usually is with these guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's really like it's a man who I don't think ever had anything at the center of himself that he was proud of.
So he was proud of his ability to do things for other people he admired.
Whether and at first people who didn't know him, like when he's lying about Nixon so that he can get, you know, his class to vote for JFK.
And then he gradually gets like the first one of these guys that he works for that he gets anywhere close to Richard Nixon.
He just loves the rest of his life.
Yeah.
Because Nixon spent time with him.
Like he wasn't a part of Nixon's staff, but they like hung out together and stuff.
And so I really do.
You see, he doesn't say a lot about it other than like fawning praise for Nixon, but you see pictures of Nixon and Roger Stone.
And he very much has that doting son look in his head.
100%.
Even his office is like a shrine.
A shrine.
To Richard Nixon.
Nixon.
It's so crazy.
It'd even be one thing, like a guy like LBJ who like killed a lot of people in Vietnam, but you could also be like, well, but then there's the Civil Rights Act.
And like, I can see how someone could, like, even with this guy's really problematic legacy, I could see how someone who worked for him could be still loyal to that memory.
Nixon?
And some of the stuff, and some of the stuff he kept was like neg anti-Nixon stuff.
That shows that he just doesn't care about the way Nixon is talked about.
Yeah, he just wants attention.
Because again, his parents were never around.
Exactly.
I don't know.
There's always a thin line in this show between trying to give a detailed history of these people and psychoanalyzing them.
You can't avoid it entirely, though, when you read quotes like how Roger describes his childhood and then just see what his adult life is.
Sure.
Well, I mean, his life couldn't have been easy.
He was a child with doll hair.
Yeah.
That is sad.
A child bodybuilder with a Nixon tattoo.
Child bodybuilder?
I just imagine a shrunk version of him.
That's it.
He's always been that guy.
He always had that tattoo on his back, even when he was breastfeeding.
You know, one of the great forever untold stories of history will be the sheer impact and damage that insecure male egos have had in our society.
Even in places where you wouldn't expect it.
You wouldn't expect Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Didn't give off a lot of impulses of being an insecure man.
But then you see what he was doodling when we overthrew Guatemala, when he heard that like he'd successfully instituted a coup in this country.
And he drew a picture of himself young and swole, like muscular next to a battleship flexing.
And it's like, yeah, dude, you had some issues.
That's not normal.
That's weird, dude.
Our whole lives, we hear how hard it is for women that they lose their beauty, but we don't talk about fading power.
Yeah.
You know, like I grew up in a really rough neighborhood.
And I used to be a scary looking guy and I'm sleeved in tattoos, but I'm a nicer person now.
And I go to go to therapy.
But the one thing I miss is when I walk down the street that people move away from me.
Because you're like, you're big and muscular and stuff.
And there's something about that.
As much as I hated who I was back then, I miss that feeling.
Yeah.
Of being a human pit bull.
There's not a lot of training in our society for young men to get used to the fact that they will someday not have the kind of physical power they have.
This is something I really admired my grandpa for.
My grandpa was a really big guy, six foot five, six foot six, something like that.
And he was military most of his life, fought in Korea, was like a very big, very imposing man.
But the last 10 or 15 years of his life, he was just completely debilitated with Parkinson's.
Couldn't really move.
But I never got, never, ever, ever, of all the emotions that I saw from him, none of them was anger.
None of them was like lashing out at people over the fact that I could tell he was frustrated, obviously, and not being able to control his body anymore.
And I don't think a guy like Roger Stone or a guy like Dwight D. Eisenhower or whatever, I don't think they got that at any point.
That attitude of like, okay, you're going to be able to control the world around you less as you get older because that's just life.
And that's why we have society and civilization.
We all work together to take care of each other because when we get weaker, we need more help.
You know?
Yeah.
They don't get that.
And that's where libertarians come from.
There's dangerous language in our society.
A friend of mine reminded me the other night, like, boys don't cry is a phrase that turns us into men that don't talk.
It's like women grow up with impossible physical standards, but really men grow up with impossible emotional ones.
Yeah.
And when something bad happens to a little boy, if he's not able to talk, can he turn into something evil and dark and twisted and upside down?
Yeah, if the alternative, which is admitting like weakness and pain and a need for help, if that is literally unthinkable because of the society he's been raised in, like, yeah, what else does he do but like get violent?
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is like a worldwide problem.
I agree.
Obviously.
I agree 100%.
I went to college in Sweden and I saw a movie there.
It was Judge Dredd.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
The original.
The original.
Okay.
The good.
I was going to college.
So class wasn't starting for three weeks.
So we went to see Judge Dredd and it was rated X.
And I was like, oh, Stallone's making porn.
So then I wasn't going to watch it, but a bunch of people were going in.
I'm like, screw it.
I'll go in.
I go regular movie.
Two weeks later, I see a movie with a Swedish friend, a Swedish movie, rated PG, and his nephew's next to us.
And a guy pulls down his pants and his penis is out there and he's shaking it around.
And I'm in shock.
And the little kid's just eating Swedish fish.
It's just a penis.
Just a penis.
Whatever.
And then my friend goes, oh, I forgot you're from America.
Yeah.
You guys rate your movies by sex.
We rate our movies by violence.
Yeah.
And I just felt like a monkey.
No, and it's it makes more sense.
Yeah, it really does.
And there's a lot of, I mean, we could, we could, we could go down this rabbit hole for forever.
We're well off now.
I mean, don't apologize because it's a subject that's never not interesting to me.
You know, it's the difference between as a little kid, I started shooting guns when I was six or seven.
My uncle came over and he taught me how to shoot and we did some hunting and stuff like that.
And I don't think that's unhealthy, but I think playing with guns the way I played with guns as a little kid was unhealthy.
I think that's bad for you.
I think that like fetishization of violence and power and then coming into a world.
And I think there's this, I think video games give it to you too, where you get used to in this one little aspect of your life, this fantasy aspect, having all this control and being able to be the arbiter of who lives and dies and all this stuff.
And you go into the real world where you have none of that control because it's the world and there's other people doing their own things and you can't just be that's where the alt-right comes from is that like dichotomy, that like mental disconnect.
I think you're right.
I think people masturbate to the alt-right the way people who don't have sex masturbate to porn stars.
Yeah.
They're behaving in a way and doing things that I can't do, but I wish I can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's that that's why these guys focus on Nazis or whatever, who just got rid of all the people they don't like because all these little kids in their rooms just have a bunch of hate for people who won't go away the way they're enemies in a video game will.
Yeah.
And I guess that's why Roger Stone embraced the proud boys in the alt-right so definitively because at the end of the day, he didn't have video games to grow up with, but he is that guy.
He definitely is that guy wearing fancy suits and calling his suspenders braces so that he can be better than everybody and control his world more.
We brought it back around.
It was great.
We brought it back around.
You're a poet.
Tami, you want to plug your pluggables?
Masturbate to the Alt-Right00:03:37
Sure.
If you're looking for live comedy with a political bent, you can find all my live shows in and around LA and around the country at tamerkatan.com, T-A-M-E-R-K-A-T-T-A-N.
My podcast is They Tried to Bury Us.
Every week we have a new American origin story from a different immigrant, and I'm Tammer Cat on all things social media.
And you can find me on the twits, the tweet at iBrightOK.
That's me on the Twarts.
And you can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on the soch meads at bastardspod.
You can buy a shirt.
You can buy a cup.
Very cool shirts, by the way.
Thank you.
Very great shirts.
You can buy scale models of the spaceship from aliens, all from tpublic.com, all branded with our don't tell James Cameron that.
It's very illegal.
But for a limited time until we get a takedown request, we will be selling all of that stuff.
James Cameron has sex in bikinis.
Really?
Well, Roger Stone said it.
Oh, well, I mean, then it's got to be true.
It's got to be true.
Well, let's all leave you guys on that absolutely true note from our buddy Roger Stone.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
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Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shall we stay with me each night each morning?
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Stad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
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Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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