Tyler Nixon unpacks JFK assassination archives released by Trump, revealing no "smoking gun" but exposing CIA conspiracy theories and LBJ’s alleged manipulation—like rerouting the motorcade to endanger Connally while shielding himself. Nixon’s book frames Johnson as a vengeful psychopath, citing his preemptive dive into the limo and Hoover’s suspicious call. African-American Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, who thwarted a Cuban plot, was later falsely convicted in a racially biased trial; Nixon now seeks to overturn it. The episode ties assassination theories to systemic betrayal—from LBJ’s power grab to Bolden’s racial persecution—undermining official narratives with buried evidence and suppressed truths. [Automatically generated summary]
Listen to this podcast now on the Red Apple Podcast Network, The Leadership Thread with Dr. Peggy Polonis.
I'm Dr. Peggy Polonis.
Join me on each episode where I unravel the story that shaped leaders, tracing the thread that led them where they are today.
Because leadership isn't born in adulthood.
Thank you once again for joining us on the leadership thread, education, ethics, and sustainability.
Download all of Red Apple Media's podcasts right now through your favorite podcast platform.
This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
They went after a guy named Roger Stone who's sitting in the office.
And I'll say this in front of Roger.
He's no baby.
And right now, he's cleaner than anybody in this place.
Now, they treated him very unfairly.
Now, get him a zone.
It's the Stone Zone.
Here's Roger Stone.
And we're back.
The big story today, the release of the JFK assassination archives, as promised by President Donald Trump during the campaign, a promise that he has now fulfilled.
It is impossible to parse 80,000 documents overnight, although many have tried.
Joining us now is attorney and respected RFK researcher Tyler Nixon.
He also represents Abraham Bolden, who is among, I think, the first African-American Secret Service agents who was there in Dallas.
The story of Bolden is something we'll get into a little later.
But Tyler, welcome to the Stone Zone.
Roger, great to be with you.
Congratulations.
It is great to have you.
I know few people as knowledgeable as you are about the Kennedy assassination.
So let me ask you off the top with these disclosures yesterday, what do you make of what you have seen so far?
Well, I'm not surprised.
And I think we've talked about this many times.
I don't believe that there will be any sort of bombshell, smoking guns, or any type of dispositive evidence that comes out that conclusively says that it was any one particular person or that it was Lee Harvey Oswald.
What I am seeing a lot of is a lot of focus on what I think would be considered the cover story or the story that they wanted to be believed, which Oswald wasn't a lone nut that he was backed by Cuba or Russia in order to exacerbate and make worse and potentially spark war for the Warhawks, the Curtis LeMays of the world who wanted the confrontation with Russia and didn't mind potentially having a nuclear war.
And Kennedy had thwarted that, and I believe that was part of what cost him his life.
And what we're seeing are a lot of, I think, documents that are key to that sort of story.
Oswald was controlled by this and that Russian operatives and that kind of thing.
It's a lot of, to me, it's a lot of filler.
It's really, there's only been one, I think, document, the Underhill, the memo that indicates that a gentleman named Underhill, the day of the assassination, went to friends with, you know, with terror.
It was terrorized.
Said that the CIA did it.
And of course, he committed suicide supposedly six months later.
And, you know, that's kind of a little juicy tidbit, but nothing at the core of the story.
I think we know that 62 years that these documents have been sitting in the recesses of the government archives at the CIA or wherever have you.
And they have been gone over and scrubbed, I'm sure, so many times.
I agree, Tyler.
I'm going to stop you there.
We're going to go to a quick break.
When we return, Tyler Nixon will continue to talk to us about the disclosures of the JFK documents.
And I want to get into the story of Abraham Bolden, a Secret Service agent who has been disserved by this country.
You're tuned into the Stone Zone.
Whatever you do, don't touch that dial because, well, we'll be right back.
This is The Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
If you're looking to create, grow, and sustain your wealth, download and subscribe to the Pain Points of Wealth podcast at bebullish.com with Bob, Ryan, and Chris Payne.
It's your podcast for market insights, money tips, and real talk on the economy.
Download and subscribe at BeBullish.com.
This is the stone zone.
Now, get in the zone.
It's the stone zone.
Here's Roger Stone.
And we're back in the stone zone.
We're talking to Tyler Nixon, attorney at law, but also one of the most respected JFK assassination researchers in the country, also a longtime personal friend.
He's represented me personally.
Johnson's Suspicions00:15:03
There's really nobody better on these topics.
You made an excellent point before the break, Tyler, and that is these documents have been in the hands of the federal government for 62 years.
They have had more than enough time to cleanse them of any document that would disprove what I think is the largely discredited theory of the Warring Commission, that being that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nut, supposedly a Russian communist, shot and killed the president and acted alone.
I always thought it was interesting that Malcolm Kilduff, the man who was the deputy press secretary for President John F. Kennedy, the man who had the horrific job of announcing to the huddled press in Dallas that John F. Kennedy had, in fact, passed away, is almost subsequently on an elevator with the new president, Lyndon Johnson.
And he says to him, according to Kilduff's memoirs, Mr. President, who would do such a horrible thing?
Who would kill our president?
And Johnson says, it was a communist son.
And Kilduff says, a communist?
What kind of a communist, sir?
And Johnson says, it was a Russian communist son.
The problem with this conversation, of course, is that Oswald had not yet been apprehended.
So how did Johnson know that a quote-unquote Russian communist had killed John F. Kennedy?
Interestingly, just as you had noted, I saw, I believe, a tweet from yesterday, Roger, that Johnson asked for a second set of clothing, a suit, to be brought on the 21st.
So as if he was going to the next day have to change his clothes.
And, you know, look, Johnson was your amazing book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, the Case Against LBJ, which I would urge everyone to go out and get if you haven't gotten it yet, really does tie it all together.
At the center of it all was this just homicidal, sort of megalomaniacal psychopath, Lyndon Johnson.
And he, you know, it really, you have to think of the milieu in which everybody lived back then and the grandeur of the presidency and the ability of the intelligence services and, frankly, the powers that be to control media is the fact that if you think about it today as just a basic story, John Kennedy was invited to Texas, the home turf of Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson goes back as president and Kennedy comes back in a body bag.
I mean, and that really tells you what you need to know about the whole thing.
We know that the night before the murder, that Johnson goes to President Kennedy's room in Fort Worth in a hotel and tries to persuade Kennedy to change the motorcade arrangements to put his hated enemy,
Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas, the head of the progressive liberal wing of the Texas Democrat Party, in the death car with Kennedy and have Johnson crony, Governor John Connolly, removed and put in the vice presidential car.
And because that defeats the whole supposed purpose for the trip to Texas, which is to bind up the divisions in the Texas Democrat Party between the bourbon conservative wing of the party, a wing that no longer exists today, I might add, and the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, Kennedy refuses.
And Johnson throws, pitches a fit, leaves in a huff.
Jacqueline Kennedy asks her husband, what's wrong with Johnson?
And Kennedy says that's just Linden being Lyndon.
So it is clear to me that Johnson knows that his protege, the man who served as his Senate administrative assistant, a man of whom he once said that John Connolly is as loyal as a dog.
He said, if you called him at three o'clock in the morning, told him to come polish your boots, he'd come a running.
It's a direct quote.
He knew that Connolly was in the death car.
Connolly, of course, would be wounded in the attack on Kennedy.
He would never allow the bullet to be removed from his wrist, but he always publicly denied the so-called single-bullet theory, that is, that he had been hit by the same bullet as John Kennedy.
Yes, no question.
And it's interesting.
There's some pictures of Connolly right at the airport as they're getting ready to leave Love Field.
And he's got this stiff expression on his face.
I mean, he looks tense, let's just say, as if he knew, I think he knew something was coming as well, obviously, because he's the one who invited Kennedy to Texas.
And, you know, I just, I guess it shows that JFK, maybe as savvy as he was, was a little naive about how ruthless and crazy that Lyndon Johnson was and how high his blood was up for the Kennedys and all the slights.
And it's probably because Jack Kennedy tried to treat Linden and tried to get his people to treat Linden with respect or some level of dignity, Dignity, but they couldn't help it.
I mean, they call him Uncle Cornpone, I believe, was one of the nicknames they called him.
And, you know, he was treated very, very shabbily by the Kennedy retinue as well.
As, of course, he and Bobby Kennedy hated each other.
But it does, you know, I guess you got to say at least Lyndon tried, right?
But nevertheless, he had to send, watch his protege go right into the kill zone as he ducked down inside his limit or his Lincoln Continental a few cars back.
Yeah, that's another key factor, which is you can see in both newsreel footage and also still photograph footage from that day riding in the vice presidential limousine, which was a Cadillac that they called the Queen Mary, which would normally have been directly behind the presidential limousine.
But there was, in this case, both a Secret Service car full of agents and a car full of reporters between the presidential and vice presidential limousines.
And if you look at the pictures, you see Lady Bird Johnson and you see Senator Ralph Yarborough and you see Lyndon Johnson.
Then in the next frame, Johnson is missing.
That's because, as we now know, before the first shot is fired, Johnson hits the deck.
He's on the floor of his limousine talking into what Ralph Yarborough says in his memoirs and in oral history is a walkie-talkie or some kind of small radio.
So clearly, Johnson anticipates the attack on Kennedy in advance.
Now, the Secret Service agent assigned to Johnson would tell the Warren Commission that after he heard the first shot, that he forced Johnson to the floor.
Only after Johnson's death did that agent come forward and say, Well, that wasn't really the truth.
That's what I was told to say.
In fact, Johnson hit the deck prior to the first shot being fired.
That's right.
And he told the story that Rufus Youngblood leapt over to the car and threw himself on top of Johnson, leapt over the seat.
And this was not true.
This was not true at all.
He was just trying to play up the whole drama of it, you know, as though he was in mortal danger as well as John F. Kennedy.
And of course, we have that infamous November 27th conversation between recorded, which Johnson knew was being recorded, of course, between he and J. Edgar Hoover, where he sort of asks, Do you think they were firing at me or do you think there was any threat to me?
Something along those lines.
And, you know, playing up for the recording, clearly, because he knew full well that there was no guns aimed at him that day.
You have taken on the case of Abraham Bolden.
This is, I think, a very compelling story that unfortunately the mainstream media has not covered.
Bolden was a Secret Service agent.
I think he may have been the first or among the first African-American Secret Service agents who've been treated extremely shabbily by our government.
Tell us this story.
Sure.
It's really, it's a horrifying story, especially considering that not only were some of them hung over beyond belief, Secret Service agents there in Dallas that day, none, not a single agent was either disciplined.
In fact, many of them were promoted.
The shift supervisor Emery Roberts, who stood, told the agents to freeze in the limousine behind Kennedy's limousine, the Queen Mary, told them to freeze as the shooting began.
He became the appointment secretary to Lyndon Johnson.
Kind of an odd role for a Secret Service agent, but that, again, touches back on Lyndon's complicity.
But Abraham Bolden was the first black Secret Service agent ever to serve on the White House detail.
He was hand-selected by President Kennedy when President Kennedy came through Chicago on April 28th, 1961.
Bolden served, It was a brief period because he experienced such intense racism amongst the agents and constantly being lampooned.
And he also saw among the agents quite a bit of laxity and carousing and drinking, similar to what the agents who were out in the cellar in Fort Worth till 4 a.m. the morning of the assassination did.
Bolden Returns to Chicago is an extremely meritorious and brilliant undercover Secret Service agent doing counter busts on counterfeiters.
He had been the first black detective in the Illinois State Police, and he was the first black Pinkerton detective.
He had a spotless record.
After the assassination, and by the way, he also had heard amongst agents, some of these southern agents who called him, who took to referring to President Kennedy as a N-word lover.
I won't use the actual term.
And sentiments that they might not protect Kennedy were there to be an attack on him, which he found also shocking.
So Bolden, of course, is shocked and just dismally disappointed and horrified at the assassination of President Kennedy.
And in part because on November 2nd, 1963, the Secret Service in Chicago had busted up, well, not busted up, but learned of some Cuban Cubans who were in town staying in a rooming house.
And the rooming house, I guess, the lady who runs it had been cleaning the room and found high-powered rifles and a map with the parade route proposed.
President Kennedy was going to come to town to see the Army-Navy game.
They broke that up or they were onto it.
And essentially, President Kennedy's trip to Chicago ultimately was canceled.
We're unclear as to why, but they bungled the pursuit of these Cubans.
I think they only caught one of them.
They interrogated him and apparently just let him go.
And knowledge of this was held within Chicago, the Chicago field office and potentially some higher-ups maybe in the Secret Service, but was not disseminated throughout the system.
So, you know, this was a shocking.
It should have been a high alert to the agency throughout that they should have been on, you know, there should have been extra precautions taken in Dallas.
So Bolden continues his work as a Secret Service agent, and the Warren Commission is formed in early 64.
And Bolden decides that he can't hold this information to himself concerning the laxity of the agents and especially concerning the plot that he was aware of in Chicago.
And he requests to speak to the Warren Commission.
He sends a formal request up the chain of command and is denied.
Of course, they say, no, you will not speak to the Warren Commission.
So, Bolden was not one to accept, he's a truthful man, an honest man.
He's really, if you hear him speak, he has the wisdom of Solomon.
And so, in May of 64, around the, I believe, the 18th, he is sent with a number of agents to Washington for what they said was annual training that was due that Secret Service agents have with the national headquarters.
Immediately that afternoon, the same day, they're all ordered, the agents from Chicago, including Bolden, to return to Chicago.
And he begins to get suspicious because it was unusual.
They said there was some counterfeiting case that they needed everybody on deck for.
The head of the Secret Service in Chicago at the time, Maurice Martineau, directly gave the order.
When Bolden gets down on the ground, they escort him to the U.S. Attorney's Office and charge him out of the blue with soliciting a bribe.
Now, this was a crazy instance because, first of all, Bolden had arrested one of the people accusing him twice before.
And these were two career criminals who had absolutely long records of crime and were also under pending charges.
And the main witness was facing upwards of decades in prison.
Tyler, Tyler, I'm going to stop you there.
We're going to pick it up on the other side.
If you're just tuning in, we're talking to Tyler Nixon, JFK assassination researcher, and will be right back.
This is the stone zone with Roger Stone.
The Stone Zone Zone.
This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
They went after a guy named Roger Stone who's sitting in the office.
And I'll say this in front of Roger.
He's no baby.
And right now, he's cleaner than anybody in this place.
Now, as they treated him very unfairly.
Now, get him a zone.
It's the stone zone.
Here's Roger Stone.
We're back in the zone.
If you're just tuning in, we're talking to Tyler Nixon, attorney at law, who represents Abraham Bolden, a former Secret Service agent.
Tyler, continue with this story of injustice regarding Abraham Bolden.
Sure.
Abraham Bolden, the Secret Service agent, first black Secret Service agent on the White House detail, handpicked by President Kennedy, is arrested by his fellow Secret Service agents in Chicago on May 18th, 1964, and charged with soliciting a bribe.
Trial By Career Criminals00:04:59
The story on its face is frankly crazy because, first of all, the only witnesses against him, supposed witnesses, were career criminals who were in the essentially under the pressure of facing immediate trial on serious counterfeiting charges.
And there was no physical evidence or any sort of evidence directly dispositive or showing that Bolden had, in fact, solicited a bribe.
And it just makes no sense.
The man had a spotless record of service, was a meticulous undercover agent who had been commended multiple times within the agency for all the great work he did.
And so he's immediately brought to trial.
And I'm talking within a matter of weeks before let's just say a bombastic, aggressive, and racist judge in federal court.
He is put through this ridiculous, almost absurd sort of trial where the evidence are things like a whiskey bottle that has fingerprints of one of the witnesses against him to prove that they were together when the bribe solicitation was passed along.
It was just an absurdity.
And the judge constantly cut off Bolden's defense attorney and really made it quite a slog for him just to get through and put on any kind of defense.
And the judge finally, as they're getting ready to, the jury is getting ready to retire to deliberate, does the unusual move of telling the jury that he believes that the evidence is sufficient to show that the defendant is guilty.
In other words, essentially tells them that he thinks Bolden's guilty.
So this is, I mean, this is so rigged.
It's unbelievable.
Bolden ultimately gets a hung jury in that first trial.
And it was a single black lady who was on the trial of the jury who said she didn't, you know, she held out.
She would not vote guilty.
So it was a hung jury.
And immediately within a matter of, again, a couple of weeks, I mean, you're talking, he went through two federal trials within a matter of three months, which is in itself unheard of and certainly would never happen today.
goes through a second trial, same deal, and is ultimately found guilty by the all-white jury, of course, in Chicago, and is sentenced ultimately to six and a half years in federal prison where he serves three and a half.
Now, this is where it really gets nuts.
The main witness against him, this guy, Joseph Spagnoli, the counterfeiter, the career criminal, goes to trial before the same judge a couple months later in Chicago, or a few months later.
During that trial, he is under oath and testifies, and to the surprise, obviously, of the federal prosecutors, that the assistant U.S. attorney, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys in Bolden's case, prosecuting Bolden, suborned perjured testimony from this witness, Spagnoli, against Bolden.
So in other words, Bolden was convicted on perjured testimony solicited by the assistant U.S. attorney and coached as well, not just sedly solicited, but also suborned.
And this goes to appeal that the judge presiding was at a really nasty grind, I guess, with Bolden was a racist.
He refuses to even declare a mistrial or do anything about it.
It goes up to appeal in the circuit court of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
And this information is brought out.
This assistant U.S. attorney is called before the Court of Appeals to answer for the perjury charge or the suborning perjury charge, whether he did this.
He pleads the Fifth Amendment before the Court of Appeals, if you can believe that.
How would that be acceptable in this, anywhere, in any ethical environment or fair environment?
Tyler, we've got about one minute.
You are fighting for justice for Abraham Bolden.
Tell us how folks can support that fight.
Well, right now we're getting ready to request that the president settle Abraham Bolden's civil case and order the vacature through Pam Bondi of his conviction in Chicago in 1964, and that he be restored as a Secret Service agent.
And there will be more coming on that, Roger.
I don't want to, everybody can catch my Twitter feed, my ex feed at RealTyler Nixon, and I'll be posting more and more information about that in the days ahead.
And I appreciate your support, Roger.
You worked so hard to try to get him a pardon several years back, and he ultimately did get one, but justice has not been done yet in his case.
All right.
I want to thank our guest, Tyler Nixon, and also for laying out the story of injustice against Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent assigned to a presidential detail.
This has been the Stone Zone.
We appreciate your tuning in.
Until we meet again, God bless you and Godspeed.
Graduate Degrees Built Around00:00:29
At Manhattan University, a graduate degree is not out of reach.
You'll gain real-world skills, credentials, employers' value, and connections to New York City's top companies.
Choose from their new master of science degrees in healthcare, informatics, digital marketing, and analytics, business analytics, or financial analytics, all built around hands-on learning and industry partnerships.
Graduate ready to lead, not just work.
Take the next step at manhattan.edu slash graduate.