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Aug. 29, 2025 - The StoneZONE - Roger Stone
39:52
The Stone Zone | 08-28-25

The Stone Zone dissects Lisa Cook’s fraud-fueled firing—$600K in tax breaks via dual mortgages—while Judge Gia Cobb, a Biden appointee, may rubber-stamp her lawsuit against Trump and the Fed. Contrast her silence with Adam Schiff’s denials of identical crimes, exposing elite impunity. Minnesota’s gun laws failed to stop Robert F. Westerman’s (born Robert) transition-regret massacre, yet the Nobel Committee snubs Trump for brokered ceasefires in Israel-Iran, Armenia-Azerbaijan, and Rwanda-DRC—calling him a "free speech warrior" while Obama-era officials censor dissent. RFK Jr.’s FDA reforms end vaccine mandates, demand placebo trials, and drop youth emergency authorizations, but Dr. Kirk Moore’s 22-day jail term for saline placebos reveals a Soviet-style prosecution later overturned by Trump’s DOJ, exposing COVID-19’s fraudulent narrative: VAERS logs 40,000+ vaccine deaths, linked to pediatric cancers. Roger Stone pushes cannabis rescheduling from Schedule I to III, arguing it unlocks banking, tax relief, and research—while rural hospitals, 24/7 lifelines for emergencies and childbirth, face congressional extinction threats. Elite corruption, judicial bias, and Trump’s restorative policies collide in a battle over truth, justice, and survival. [Automatically generated summary]

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Protecting Patient Care 00:14:33
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our nation has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
You are now entering the Stone Zone.
Well, Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook, fired for cause early this week after mortgage fraud allegations surfaced, has filed her lawsuit against President Donald Trump, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and the Board of Governors, claiming that she is unfirable.
Why should you care?
Well, it's very simple.
Today, if there were a vote of the Federal Reserve, it would be five to four against cutting interest rates on the American people.
Those are the interest rates you pay when you buy a car or buy a home or pay off your mortgage or make a loan for your personal or business reasons.
In this particular case, Lisa Cook, the black woman who serves on the Federal Reserve, got caught red-handed engaging in mortgage fraud.
Specifically, she claimed that her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan was her principal legal residence.
Therefore, she got a state tax break and a lower mortgage rate and a lower insurance rate.
And then just two weeks later, she claimed that a home she owned outside of Atlanta, Georgia, was her principal legal residence.
And she also got another state tax break, a lower mortgage rate, and a lower insurance rate.
Now, one cannot have two principal legal residences.
The important thing to understand here is that the Federal Home Finance Agency prosecutes average citizens every year, every week, every month, around the clock.
You don't hear about it because they're not famous, they're not prominent, but this is a crime, a crime for which literally hundreds of thousands of people have been prosecuted.
Now, in this particular matter, Lisa Cook is being represented by former Hunter Biden attorney Abby Lowell.
He's also representing New York Attorney General Letitia James, as she stands accused of committing very similar acts of mortgage fraud.
I know Abby Lowell.
He didn't do a very good job for Hunter Biden.
He represented former New York State Majority Leader Joe Bruno when he was convicted, his conviction being thrown out by the Supreme Court, and then him getting totally exonerated when the federal government improbably retried him, but he fired Abby Lowell and got himself a better lawyer.
Also, former Senator Bob Torricelli, forced to resign from the U.S. Senate, represented by Abby Lowell.
Lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. states a declaration that President Trump's August 25th, 2025 purported firing is unlawful and void, and that Governor Cook remains an active member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.
I spoke to Bradford Cohen today, a prominent member of the legal community here in Florida, who tells me that in his opinion, cause as defined in the law is really whatever the president decides it is.
In fact, in the history of the Federal Reserve, three previous Federal Reserve governors have resigned on those instances where they were under investigation, very much like Lisa Cook.
Eric Rosingen, Richard Clarinda, and Robert Kaplan were all federal board governors, and all of them resigned under a cloud because they were under federal investigation.
That is defined as cause.
Cook is, of course, the first black woman ever appointed to the Federal Reserve.
And I guess she thinks due to DEI privilege that she is untouchable no matter how much corruption she commits.
As the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besson said so succinctly in an interview yesterday, I have yet to see her deny doing it.
She doesn't deny doing it.
She says that she's being targeted like it's some kind of an act of selective prosecution.
When in fact, what she's really saying is that she's above the law.
She should be held to a different standard than everyone else.
When privilege is the typical entitled mindset of the DEI American, and everything has been handed to you because of your ethnicity or the cover of your skin or because of your gender, true equality can seem like injustice.
Hopefully the courts dismiss this ridiculous lawsuit.
I believe they will.
But the bad news is the case has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Gia Cobb.
Now, interestingly enough, I see a picture of Gia Cobb.
She looks amazingly like Lisa Cook, and she was appointed by Joe Biden.
Therefore, you can bet she is a left-wing activist jurist in D.C. I've had first-time hand experience in the D.C. courts.
I can tell you right now that this case, at least at the district court level, will be wrongly decided.
Meaning, I wouldn't be shocked to see Gia Cobb rule for Lisa Cook, which means the U.S. district, the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately get this case, where once again, I believe President Trump will win a resounding victory.
Thank God for the Federal Housing and Finance Agency Administrator Bill Pultey, who is being roundly criticized at the Wall Street Journal, Politico, all the usual suspects.
By the way, if the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, CNN criticize you, that means you're doing something right.
And in this case, what he's doing is enforcing the law evenly, the same way it's enforced for average citizens.
These elites seem to think that they're above the law.
Adam Schiff takes a different approach than Lisa Cook.
He got busted in the same way.
In his case, he claimed that his condominium in Burbank, which clearly, by the way, is not suitable for a family of four, which is what he claims to have, was his principal legal residence.
He got a state tax break.
He got a lower mortgage rate.
He got a lower insurance rate.
But then he claimed that his home in Potomac, Maryland, which he refinanced four times, by the way, was his principal legal residence.
Once again, he got another state tax break based on the basis that it was his principal legal resident, a lower mortgage rate, and a lower insurance rate.
But in Adam Schiff's case, when he was on NBC this weekend, rather than deny it, he just chose to lie.
He said, no, no, no, no, that's true.
That's made up.
Adam Schiff, made up?
You mean kind of like the Russian collusion hoax?
Completely made up.
If it's Schiff, flush it.
All right.
This is very sad news.
Robin Westerman, the transgendered psychopath who committed a mass shooting on children in a Catholic school in Minneapolis yesterday, expressed a deep regret about pursuing his gender transition.
Westerman, who was born as a male named Robert, wrote in his manifesto about what a mistake he made, joining the transgender cult and sacrificing his genitalia to Maloch.
Westerman said, I only keep the long hair because it pretty much is my last shred of being trans.
I'm tired of being trans.
I wish I had never brainwashed myself.
I can't cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat.
And it might be concerning change of character that could very well get me reported.
It just always gets in my way.
I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.
This is heart-rendering.
Our hearts go out to those who were murdered in that mass shooting.
But let me point out yet again, Minnesota has among the most restrictive gun laws in the country.
But if guns are made criminal, only criminals will have guns.
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has come out, no surprise here, against a Nobel Peace Prize for President Donald Trump.
Even though President Trump has organized countless peace treaties and ceasefires, has made diplomacy great again from a U.S. foreign policy perspective.
Influential members of the Norwegian, kind of tells you everything you need to know, Nobel Peace Prize Committee are heaping criticism on President Trump, making it less likely that he will win this award that, in my opinion, he so richly deserves.
The Nobel Committee Chairman, Jorgen Watney Friedness, has stated that Trump is responsible for, quote, the erosion of freedom of expression, even in democratic nations.
This is really strange because, of course, the people who were censoring folks on the internet, whether it was Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Twitter, that happened under Joe Biden and before him, under Barack Obama.
Actually, Donald Trump is the one who is committed to free speech.
Free speech in the United Kingdom, free speech in the United States, free speech in Europe.
Again, this is what's called Alinskyism.
It's named after Saul Alinsky.
He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Please, if you're listening to the Stone Zone regularly, keep this in mind.
They are always guilty of exactly what it is they accuse us of doing.
So when they say Donald Trump is a danger to democracy, no, it was Barack Obama, Joe Biden, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the Director of National Intelligence General James Clapper.
They are the ones who are a danger to democracy.
They favor endless foreign war, above all, censorship.
Don't question their wars.
Don't question the effectiveness or the efficiency or the safety of a COVID-19 vaccination.
Otherwise, we will be forced to just silence you.
Another committee member of the Nobel Priest Prize group of elites, Christian Clement, said that President Trump is well underway in dismantling American democracy after his first 100 days of his current term.
I wonder what it is he hates so much about America.
Is it our booming economy?
Is it the fact that X now just no longer allows censorship, or is it our refusal to commit to endless foreign war?
These people are truly, truly deranged.
Another member of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Prize Committee, Gray Larson, posted in 2017 that President Trump was putting millions of lives at risk by cutting foreign aid while wearing a cringe-inducing make human rights great again hat.
These people are laughable jokes, folks, elites.
President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the nation of Pakistan, as well as the chairman of the Tunica Biloxi tribe of Indians from Louisiana, Marshall Pirate.
President Trump acknowledged that there was a good chance that no matter what I do, they'll never give it up and refuse to do any politicking or campaigning to actually receive the reward that he so richly deserves.
The truth is the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has always been a tool to promote globalist leftism and undermine conservatism and nationalism.
They gave Barack Obama the Nobel Prize Prize.
What was his great accomplishment for peace?
He killed more people.
He fired more drones.
He fired more missiles than any president in American history.
He has no accomplishments for peace, unlike Donald Trump, who negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, negotiated an end to the conflict between Iran and Pakistan, ended the hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan, ended the hostilities between Egypt and Ethiopia, ended the war between Rwanda and the Democrat Republic of Congo.
Those are just some examples of why Donald Trump deserves this award.
But I agree with the president.
These elitist leftists who see everything backwards, Trump is the danger to democracy, not the people who stole an election, not the people who want to censor free speech, not those who want to make their vaccinations mandatory.
I'd say they're the danger to democracy.
35 Years for Refusing COVID Protocols 00:12:54
Thanks for listening to us here in the Stone Zone.
I'm Roger Stone, right here on the Red Apple Audio Networks, and we'll be right back.
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The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Welcome back into the Stone Zone.
The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced new FDA rules today, which fulfill his promises to stop COVID vaccination mandates, allowing people who want to take the vaccinations the access to them, mandating placebo-controlled clinical trials from big pharma, and ending the emergency authorization to skirt normal authorization legalization protocols.
JF, pardon me, RFK Jr. Announced in an ex-post that he has rescinded emergency youth authorizations for COVID-19 vaccinations.
The FDA has also issued a marketing authorization for COVID vaccinations produced by Moderna at ages six months and above, Pfizer at ages five and up, and Novavax at ages 12 years and up, making them available for patients only after they consult with their doctors ahead of time.
And it is determined that there is an elevated risk of getting severely ill from COVID.
This is what we have always favored: free choice.
Let those who choose to take the vaccinations take them.
Let those who choose not to, not to.
Seems to me the American way.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s critics who claim that he's anti-vaccination were lying all along.
He never wanted to take vaccinations away from the people.
He simply wanted people to be able to make informed choices without government coercion about their personal health.
With one move after another, RFK Jr. is putting America back on the trajectory towards a health care and medical system that puts patients, not big pharma, first.
This is what will make America healthy again.
This is a very, very apropos from our upcoming guest.
Dr. Kirk Moore was wrongfully prosecuted for upholding his medical ethics during the COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
He was facing 35 years in prison until the Trump Justice Department did the right thing.
We're going to be right back with Dr. Kirk Moore to talk about that.
It's a chilling story, which you're not going to want to miss.
So far, I think Robert F. Kennedy is one of the absolute standouts of this cabinet, and he is fulfilling his mandate to make America healthy again.
He's done so under withering criticism from big pharma and from their allies in the big media.
Now, considering how much of today's paid advertising is paid for by large pharmaceutical firms, you can understand why Robert F. Kennedy has come in for specific criticism.
But yesterday took the cake when Robert Kennedy, in the tradition of his uncle John F. Kennedy, challenged America to get fitter today and begin exercising.
And he and the Secretary of Defense Pete Eggseth demonstrated by doing push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and so on.
The New York Times actually had an editorial urging people not to exercise because they said it might be dangerous.
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
Stay with us right here in the Stone Zone.
We'll be back with Dr. Kirk Moore and his chilling story.
They wanted to throw him in jail for 35 years for upholding his own medical ethics.
We'll be right back.
The Stone Zone, entertaining and informative on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Welcome back in the Stone Zone.
Joining me now is Dr. Kirk Moore.
Kirk Moore is a respected 59-year-old physician and former Navy flight surgeon from Utah.
He was facing up to 35 years in prison, not for harming his patients, but for honoring his oath to do no harm.
You see, with informed parental consent, Dr. Moore administered saline in the place of COVID vaccinations to children and adults who were facing coercive mandates that threatened their jobs, education, military service, and even life-threatening transplants.
Dr. Moore acted out of compassion and ethics, not criminal intent.
He treated patients for free during the COVID crisis.
He made house calls, and he stood by those whose medical autonomy was under attack.
Yet he was relentlessly prosecuted, jailed for 22 days, destroyed in the media, and stripped of hospital privileges and board certification, all because he put his medical ethics and his honor first, always prioritizing informed consent and patient safety.
This federal case was riddled with jurisdictional flaws, suppressed evidence, and procedural violations.
Boy, does that sound familiar.
Anyway, Dr. Moore, welcome to the Stone Zone.
Well, Roger, thanks for having me.
I certainly didn't go through what you went through from the standpoint of, you know, at gunpoint and all that, but yeah, it was pretty hairy.
Well, I want to get into this because, and I want to give enormous credit to Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Trump Justice Department for dismissing all charges against you.
That happened on July 12th, 2025.
The Attorney General publicly recognized the unjust nature of this prosecution.
Also, credit to my friend, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Senator Mike Lay of Utah for their advocacy in helping secure this happy outcome.
This was more than just a legal win.
It was a stand for truth.
So let me ask you: you were prosecuted by the Biden regime.
You were facing up to 35 years because of your refusal to submit to COVID-19 protocols during the pandemic.
Can you explain the particulars of how this unfolded and indignities that you were forced to endure during this prior administration?
Well, you know, Roger, you know all about it.
The process is the punishment out of all this.
And they did everything they could to make an example out of me.
All I did was just do what was right and what I felt was right, what my patients, you know, asked for.
You know, all they were looking for is to have a choice.
And most people, almost everybody that we treated, didn't have that choice.
You know, even my own judge during one of our hearings said that, well, the worst they could do is lose their job.
Yeah, I mean, the callousness of that kind of a statement is just, you know, it's just the way our system is kind of geared towards right now.
It's kind of like, do what the government wants you to do or else you're done.
And you don't, you know, you don't even, you don't deserve to be alive.
You don't deserve to kind of contribute to society.
That's the way the attitude is these days.
It's kind of scary.
You know, the politicization of our judicial branch is something I really never really imagined.
When I was falsely accused of covering up Russian collusion, which is, of course, an actual impossibility because one cannot cover up something that never actually happened.
So when they said you lied under oath, what would be my motive to lie?
What would I be covering up?
President Trump's involvement in exactly what?
Hakeem Jeffries, Congressman from New York, now the minority leader in the House, he actually says in a tweet that Donald Trump pardoned Roger Stone and in return, Stone maintained his silence about Trump's wrongdoing.
I say it yet again, Congressman, waive your congressional immunity and I'll sue you in a heartbeat because that's an egregious lie, but you won't because you know you're lying.
And I actually was, I don't know, naive enough to thought when I was charged that, well, I'll get a fair trial.
I'll be able to prove that there is no Russian collusion.
There was no collaboration with WikiLeaks.
Little did I know the judge would never allow me to enter any evidence on my own behalf.
She wouldn't allow me to call the witnesses I wanted to call.
It was a Soviet-style show trial start to finish.
And I have little doubt that had you proceeded to trial, this is exactly what would have happened to you.
Well, that's, Roger, that's exactly what they did to me.
You know, I was precluded from bringing to evidence any patients that came to me for the vaccine and for the saline shots or for the COVID cards.
I couldn't bring anybody in and have them testify as to their own reasoning.
I couldn't bring anybody that was vaccine injured, and I couldn't bring any experts in to talk about all of the downsides of the vaccine and the shots that people were given.
So they were basically railroading me through.
They didn't want to talk about the COVID vaccine because they know all about the downsides of it.
But yet, and they knew that they were going to lose if that was the case.
So they did everything that they could, just like they did to you, in terms of limiting our ability to even defend myself.
I mean, ultimately, they accused me of fraud, and fraud requires intent.
And therefore, intent should allow me to tell the jury, hey, what was my intention?
What was I trying to achieve?
And weeks before trial, they filed four more motions that basically were going to preclude me from even talking about my own intent.
And I mean, the whole process, again, the process is the punishment.
They do this to, you know, they have, I mean, they have unlimited budgets.
I'm totally broke.
They've nearly bankrupted me, ruined my business, ruined my livelihood.
And that's their goal.
You know, that's what they're trying to do.
They did it to Mike Flynn.
They did it to you.
They're doing it to anybody that they can that pushes back against their narrative.
It's asinine.
It's just so the lawfare is unbelievable.
That's how it works, by the way.
They don't allow you to mount any reasonable legal defense.
In my case, for example, my whole case was based on the fact that the Russian intelligence hacked the Democrat National Committee and that I lied about it.
Well, there never was any online hack of the Democrat National Committee by the Russians or anyone else.
I wanted to bring expert testimony and forensic evidence from Bill Binney, who was the leading CIA counterintelligence IT expert, who could have proved to a jury of all Democrats that there was no hack of the DNC.
When at my trial, the FBI was forced to admit that they had never inspected the computer servers of the Democrat National Committee, and therefore they were relying solely on the opinion of a third-party IT firm called CrowdStrikes.
The judge refused to give my defense attorneys the CrowdStrikes report.
Now, you're supposed to be able to see the evidence against you as a fundamental matter of law, but now, of course, we know why.
The head of CrowdStrikes testified before the House Intelligence Committee under oath, as I did, and even he admitted there was no evidence whatsoever in his possession or in the possession of the FBI that showed that the Democrat National Committee had been the target of an online hack.
In fact, the forensic evidence was just the opposite.
It showed that based on the download times of the material that was purloined, that the material had been downloaded to a portable drive of some kind and most likely taken out the back door.
But my lawyers were not allowed to have that witness called.
They were allowed to introduce that evidence.
So I've been exactly where you were, and I'm grateful to the Attorney General and to the Department of Justice for stepping in before this went horribly wrong.
Vaccine Profits and Pediatrician Bonuses 00:04:58
In general, how would you say you feel about the whole COVID-19 pandemic era?
Look, I think the whole COVID thing is just a fraud, the whole thing from beginning to end.
And you know, I don't.
I don't believe there ever was a pandemic.
I think the actual disease and the COVID narrative was invented in order to launch the COVID vaccine.
And you know you, you can just look at everything.
There were no excess deaths in 2020.
Excess deaths didn't start until the vaccine was deployed in January of 2021.
There were 700 deaths that were reported to VARES by the end of January.
There were 1700 deaths reported to VARES by the end of March and now there's 40,000 deaths that have been reported to VARES since the COVID vaccine was launched.
40,000 vaccine I mean, they took the swine flu vaccine off in 1975 76 with with reported 25, some people say 25, some people say 50, but regardless, you know double-digit deaths and we have 40,000 people that have reportedly died, that have been screened and approved and documented on the VARES database.
We have a study that was done in 2010, I believe, a Harvard study, that said that those numbers only show anywhere from one to ten percent.
So 40,000 deaths.
That means that you know it's either four hundred thousand to four million deaths have been, you know, caused by the vaccine and it's just what what's going on right now is absolutely, it's truly, it's it, it's truly scary, and and what they're doing to physicians and what they're doing to the population right now is is is a mass genocide, is a democide, in my opinion.
I completely agree with you two things that interest me.
It's hard for me to understand how Dr. Anthony Fauci and his wife, who's also a high-level health official in our government, were allowed to directly profit from the very vaccinations that they were trying to mandate.
I mean, that should be, that should be illegal.
The Bai-Doll Act allows them to do that.
You know something else that I found out about this Roger, is pediatricians directly profit from the number of vaccines that they give into their clinic and they get bonuses based upon the percentage of their clinic that is vaccinated.
Oncologists make money from the money from the, from the actual uh the, the actual chemotherapy that they prescribe.
Um, they are directly reimbursed by the pharmaceutical companies based upon the you know the protocol that they put their patients on um.
You know, we're not, as physicians, we're not even allowed to own a you know a surgical center, because they're worried about us self-referring to people.
How do pediatricians get paid?
I mean it's not just pediatricians anybody who takes care of kids, so family practice docs internists um, you know, general practice physicians pediatricians, anybody who does Vaccines, OBGYNs, you know, they get paid a bonus based upon the number of people that they vaccinate.
How is that allowed?
Final question for you about the two minutes we have left.
There's a surprising spike in cancers among people in their 20s and 30s.
We had an excellent guest, Michael Caputo, the former assistant secretary of HHS, the other day commenting on that.
Your thoughts on that?
Oh, the number of cancer patients.
I mean, I talked to a guy the other day who said he saw a seven-year-old boy with metastatic pancreatic cancer.
I have a client, a friend of mine who's actually a plastic surgeon here locally who sees breast cancer patients.
And she sees on a regular basis women in their 20s with breast cancer with advanced breast cancer that she's taking and doing reconstructions on.
She used to see one or two of those a year.
Now she's seeing two or three a week.
The numbers are astronomically high.
I just watched a podcast with Dr. Chris Shoemaker who said that if kids aged 10 to 14, this was in, this was National Health Service in England, England and Scotland and Wales, that the increase in death in kids aged 10 to 14 was 82 times higher with kids that had had three COVID shots.
So 10-year-old to 10 to 14-year-old kids that get three COVID shots are dying at a rate that's 82 times higher than kids that don't get vaccinated at all.
Cannabis Rescheduling Debate 00:06:29
So what the numbers are there, and we have to figure out how to stop this.
And that's my goal now.
I'm a free man.
I can speak freely.
But my goal is to get these COVID shots off the market and figure out how to try to stop killing humanity.
All right.
Well, it has been our great honor to have you today in the Stone Zone.
I want to thank you, and we are celebrating your freedom, my friend.
God bless you, Dr. Kirk Moore.
Folks, don't go away.
We'll be right back with our final segment here in the Stone Zone.
The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
In America today, no issue better demonstrates the yawning gulf between the will of the people and the paralysis of their government than the policy towards cannabis, also known as marijuana.
Overwhelming majorities of Americans believe cannabis should be legal in some form.
I've held this position for 30 years because when my own father was dying of cancer, he was not only in horrific pain, but he completely lost his appetite.
A man who once weighed about 230 pounds was down to about 125 pounds.
That's when my sisters and I decided to get him some illegal marijuana, which both eased his pain and restored his appetite, making his dying days far more comfortable.
After all, alcohol is legal, far more damaging than marijuana, yet we legalize it, we regulate it, and we tax it.
At the federal level, Washington has dithered, stumbled, and flat out failed with one possible exception.
That would be Donald J. Trump.
Since 2016, Donald Trump has taken the position that marijuana policy is a state's rights issue.
The federal government's dereliction that has forced states to go it alone is something to behold.
Some have bravely enacted medical or adult use cannabis laws seeking to serve their citizens while Washington will not.
Now, that doesn't mean you should be able to smoke it or consume it in public places.
After all, you cannot have an open container of alcohol.
And I dislike the fact that everywhere I go in Manhattan seems to, well, smell like pot.
There should be regulations on it, but that doesn't mean that it should not be legal.
The state reforms collide head-on, of course, with federal policy, leaving consumers, patients, and businesses in some kind of a legal limbo.
Imagine driving across state lines and discovering what you bought at a dispensary in one state, even at a 7-Eleven in some places, could earn you a felony charge in the next jurisdiction.
That's not liberty.
That's not fairness, and it's certainly not certainty.
When Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill, he unleashed the hemp economy, creating jobs, investment, and innovation nationwide.
Trump's action didn't just access to benign hemp products.
It jump-started an entire industry.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in investment now hang in the balance.
Yet the industry remains shellacked by uncertainty because Washington refuses to reconcile federal law with reality.
So now the question looms, what will President Trump do next?
The chattering class insists that this is an either-or debate.
Either Trump reschedules cannabis, moving it from a Schedule I drug of the Controlled Substances Act, where it's classified with heroin absurdly, to a lower schedule, like, for example, Schedule III, or, this is what I would favor, he deschedules it entirely, removing cannabis from a Controlled Substances Act altogether and letting the states decide how to regulate it.
That framing is false, unfortunately.
This is not an either-or debate.
This is about progress, about, well, what must be done next.
Rescheduling cannabis is not the endgame, but it is, in my opinion, a critical next step.
The move would do more than signal a new direction.
It would unlock immediate, measurable relief for patients, entrepreneurs, and state programs.
See, by moving cannabis to Schedule 3, businesses would finally escape the crushing burden of the IRS Code 280E, which currently denies them ordinary tax deductions.
That single change would level the playing field, allowing dispensaries and businesses and cultivators to be taxed like normal businesses rather than penalized like criminals.
Rescheduling would also open the door to banking.
Today, cannabis companies are forced to operate largely in cash because banks fear federal money laundering penalties.
Schedule 3 would not only solve every obstacle, but it would reduce the risk profile enough that many regional banks and credit unions could finally provide accounts, loans, and payments processing to those who are legally in the business.
With that one action, Trump could dramatically reduce the public safety risks of cash-heavy businesses, increase tax compliance, and unlock billions in private investment.
And then lastly, there's research.
You see, research would now flourish.
Universities and pharmaceutical firms could study cannabis without jumping through near-impossible DEA hoops.
Evidence would accumulate quickly, proving what I already know and what millions of Americans already know.
Both hemp is safe and useful.
CBD is benign and medically valuable.
And THC deserves further study as both medicinal and a regulated product.
I'm Roger Stone.
You're listening to the Stone Zone.
This is my opinion and my opinion only, but we appreciate your tuning in today.
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Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our country has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state, every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
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