The Forrest Gump dandy of right-wing dirty tricks is in the news again. Strategizing from the Willard Hotel as January 6 unfolded; protected by a coterie of now convicted Oathkeepers; captured on video dictating Trump’s fake electors scheme for an email. These are just a few of the things Roger Stone has done.
Stone may be the swampiest of Deep State operatives our politics has seen. Julian gives a colorful breakdown of this longtime Trump ally who's been involved in every anti-democratic scheme, from Watergate to Bush’s 2000 steal to 2016’s Russian interference—raking in millions from the “torturer’s lobby” along the way. Stone has always slithered away from accountability, but maybe this time he’ll pay the price.
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This time on Swamp Creatures, the poisonous Forrest Gump of right-wing politics is in the news again, after having been under the radar for a while.
Footage of Roger Stone via Danish documentarian Christopher Gulbransen increasingly implicates him in both the events of January 6th, And the fake electors scheme that attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.
The narcissistic hubris of giving filmmakers this kind of access may fittingly be his final downfall.
We'll see.
It's hard to imagine he won't be indicted soon, given his proximity to the convicted Oath Keepers and Proud Boys he was with during, and on the days before, January 6.
But we'll get to that later.
Hello, Conspiracuality listeners.
Julian here with episode two in my Swamp Creatures series.
Roger Stone is quoted as saying, it is better to be infamous than to never have been famous at all.
He also loves to refer to himself as an agent provocateur.
He's a bit like a Batman villain.
The slicked back silver hair often covered by some kind of aristocratic hat.
You know, bowler hats, derbies, even top hats.
He at times wears three-piece suits with pocket watches or double-breasted jackets.
In either case, a colorful pocket square and his trademark round and thick-framed black glasses, often with tinted lenses, complete his very deliberate presentation.
When in shirt sleeves he's going to have thick and stylish 1930s style suspenders strapped over his shoulders and attached to his pants.
When posing for pictures in one of his signature outfits he might mug like a smirking wide-eyed provocateur or adopt his famous Richard Nixon pose with arms outstretched holding two-finger victory salutes.
With both hands.
Or he might clench his teeth and jut out his chin to make a long antique cigarette holder point up at a jaunty angle.
All of this to say that his presentation is very important to him.
Perpetuating the legend of Roger Stone as a figure in the popular imagination seems like a deliberate choice.
He wants people like me to be writing these words.
Now, last time on Swamp Creatures, we covered Stone's involvement in the infamous Brooks Brothers riot.
You remember, that's when Republican political operatives successfully disrupted the crucial recount of votes during the Bush vs. Gore presidential election of 2000.
Stone's account is that he actually ran that operation from a parked Winnebago close to that Miami-Dade election office, listening in to the election officials' communication with a walkie-talkie and then relaying instructions to his own troops via cell phones.
Now, since we're on the topic of clothing, the tip-off to journalists that these were no ordinary protesters was the class-identifying expensive blazers, shirts, and watches worn by those who yelled, shoved, and punched their way toward ensuring that George W. Bush would be declared the victor in Florida, and therefore the country.
By making sure that the recount of 10,000 votes missed by tabulation machines due to a voting machine error would be impossible to complete.
This is in a race where Bush led by just 1,700 votes.
This event from 23 years ago is just one example of how, far from draining the swamp and fighting the deep state, Donald Trump was enabled and advised and even, we might say, groomed by long-time cutthroat career political operatives.
Now, speaking of long-game right-wing political operatives, three of the lawyers on the W side during the Bush versus Gore case are now, drumroll please, justices on the current most venal and reactionary SCOTUS bench.
But Roger Stone's career doesn't start in the year 2000, and it doesn't end with his being
included on the list of 29 pardons and commutations by Trump two days before Christmas of 2020,
which meant Stone would never serve his 40-month sentence after being found guilty of witness
tampering, obstruction of justice, and lying to Congress about involvement in Russian interference
in the 2016 election. Now, dear listener, you may think you know all about Roger Stone,
but stay tuned.
Let's go back in time to something that you may be familiar with.
It's 1972, and a 19-year-old Roger Stone became a staffer on Richard Nixon's political campaign.
His official job description?
Junior scheduler.
His first assignment, go down to the campaign office of a potential Nixon rival and falsely make a donation in the name of the Young Socialists Alliance, so as to then deliver the receipt with that letterhead to the local newspaper.
Next up, the budding dirty trickster was tasked with recruiting a double agent to infiltrate Democratic Party campaigns in a caper referred to as Operation Sedan Chair 2.
Then, he ran a spy into Nixon opponent Hubert Humphrey's campaign, who was able to become that presidential candidate's driver.
Even at this tender age, our young sociopath was then named in the initial reporting on Nixon's Watergate scandal, and he was investigated.
And his boss, Charles Colson, was convicted as a co-conspirator in Watergate, but Stone emerged unscathed.
He adopted Nixon's famous double victory sign salute in defiance and got the man's face tattooed on his back to remind him, he tells interviewers, that you have to get up off the mat after you've been knocked down.
After Nixon, Roger Stone worked on Bob Dole's campaign and then played a role in the founding
of NCPAC, usually pronounced Nick Pack, which pioneered the pack strategy of circumventing
campaign financing rules by feigning a kind of independence, that they're outside of the
actual political campaign. And they also pioneered political attack ads created to sour the public
on opponents by smearing their reputations or feeding moral panics.
He then worked on Reagan's failed 1976 bid for president.
The next year, now a political veteran at 24 years old, Stone won the leadership position of the Young Republicans organization with the help of a campaign manager named Paul Manafort.
By all accounts, this was the most heavily funded and interpersonally manipulative campaign that organization had ever seen.
With Stone and Manafort using dossiers they had gathered on each of the 800 delegates who would vote on the leadership.
I haven't seen them myself, but Franklin Foer at The Atlantic says that there are photographs of the then 28-year-old Manafort sitting in the classic backroom command center at a folding table surrounded by phones he'd had especially installed amongst the stacks of dossiers that he called whip books, which he could use to gain power over the group by understanding the needs, aspirations, and weaknesses of each of those delegates.
In 1980, Stone would go on to coordinate the Northeast for Ronald Reagan's victorious presidential bid.
In that campaign, Paul Manafort coordinated the South, and he used the infamous GOP Southern strategy to do so, which appealed to white voters by using dog whistles that appealed to Confederate and segregationist racial sentiments.
In this case, by having Reagan stump at locations charged with racist history and having him express allegiance to states' rights and a disdain for federal big government.
To get any deeper into the actual deep state than Stone and Manafort, you'd have to be Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who were around since Nixon and then in the Ford administration.
Cheney was then in Congress under Reagan, later Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr., and then of course famously Vice President and perhaps Svengali for Bush Jr.
He took a break in between all of that to run Halliburton, which would profit obscenely as the only company allowed to bid for certain government contracts during the war in Iraq.
Donald Rumsfeld was himself Secretary of Defense under Ford, the youngest ever, and then under Bush II, the oldest ever Secretary of Defense.
Talk about deep state.
OK, we're going to come back to Manafort and our boy Wonder, Roger Stone, shortly.
But bear with me, because I want to paint a few vignettes for you involving Ronald Reagan.
