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Roger Stone was a dark political force even before 2016
By Jennifer Cohn 2/11/22
Even before the 2016 presidential election, Roger Stone was a dark force, screwing with voters’ perceptions of reality and corrupting politics from behind the scenes.
In 1972, at just nineteen years of age, Stone belonged to then “President Richard M. Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, better known as CREEP,” according to the Washington Post. As a member of CREEP, Stone recruited someone to spy on several Democratic presidential campaigns. He also made a campaign contribution in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to one of Nixon’s Republican challengers. Stone then sent the receipt to the media.
Stone has acknowledged that, in 1980, the late mob lawyer Roy Cohn (who was a mentor of both Stone and Trump) had him deliver an apparent cash bribe (Stone didn’t look in the suitcase) to the Liberal Party of New York. Stone believed that whatever was in the suitcase was meant to persuade the Liberal Party to run a spoiler candidate to siphon votes from President Jimmy Carter, who was running for reelection against Ronald Reagan. The Liberal Party then ran such a candidate.
During the eighties and nineties, Stone partnered with a political operative named Paul Manafort — who would later serve as Trump’s campaign manager — in a lobbying business.
Trump was one of their big clients.
The business came to be known as the Torturers’ Lobby for its willingness to represent brutal dictators, including President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. In 1986, Marcos called a snap election that was reportedly rigged to ensure a Marcos victory, sparking a revolution. The late Warren Mitofsky, a renowned pollster, traveled to the Philippines with CBS News to monitor the election. He later told the Atlantic that a “representative of Manafort’s firm had asked him, ‘What sort of margin might make a Marcos victory legitimate?’” “The implication was clear,’” Mitofsky said. “‘How do we rig this thing and still satisfy the Americans?’”
The Washington Post reported at the time that the partners, Stone and Manafort, had “been criticized by some fellow consultants for their brand of influence-peddling: first electing clients to office, then lobbying them.” In 2016, Trump had the audacity to run on “draining the swamp” that his own advisors, Stone and Manafort, had helped create.
In 1996, Stone served as a senior consultant to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. He resigned from the campaign after the National Enquirer reported that Stone had placed an ad seeking sexual partners in a swinger’s magazine. At the time, Stone claimed the ad was a fake, but he admitted years later that it was real.
Stone spread a rumor during the 2000 presidential election that the Reform Party’s candidate, Pat Buchanan, who was in a position to siphon votes from Republican George W. Bush in the general election, had fathered a black baby out of wedlock. During the Republican primary that year, someone had spread the same rumor about the late Senator John McCain, a reference to the daughter McCain and his wife had adopted from an orphanage in Bangladesh. The McCain family suspected Karl Rove was behind the smear, but Rove denied it. Years later, Stone spread a rumor that former President Bill Clinton had fathered a black child too.
Per Stone’s own account, it was Stone who orchestrated the manufactured Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the manual recount in Florida during the 2000 general election, securing Bush’s victory against Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes. In Stone’s words, “The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba.” Even Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a longtime friend of Stone’s, has said that Stone’s conduct in that election “subverted democracy.”
The Brooks Brothers riot would foreshadow the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In 2006, Stone and one of his protégés, Mike Caputo (who worked for a time as Stone’s driver), worked for a Ukrainian politician believed to have ordered the murder of a journalist who was then found beheaded. Russian President Vladimir Putin later awarded the politician the Order of Friendship.
Caputo himself had previously represented Gazprom Media in Russia, which tasked him with improving Russian President Vladimir Putin’s image in the U.S. In 2020, Trump would appoint Caputo to a leadership position at the Department of Health and Human Services, even though Caputo had no medical or science background. Caputo landed the job after tweeting that “Chinese people suck the blood out of rabid bats.”
In 2011, Stone tried to persuade Trump to run against then President Barrack Obama. He and Michael Cohen created a PAC called “Draft Trump.” As reported in Politico, one of the PAC’s contact numbers was “the same number listed for the [2010] stunt campaign of Kristin Davis for governor of New York…” Davis is a “convicted madam who claimed to have procured prostitutes for Eliot Spitzer,” who resigned as New York governor in 2008 due to the prostitution scandal. As of 2019, Davis was Stone’s live-in publicist. (She says she moved out after the FBI raided their shared duplex.)
As further reported by Politico, the “Draft Trump” PAC’s phone number was “answered by Andrew Miller,” one of Roger Stone’s proteges. In 2010, Miller was paid by Carl Paladino, who ran for New York governor in 2010, while Miller concurrently volunteered for Davis’s New York gubernatorial campaign.
Stone had another PAC in 2011 called “Should Trump Run,” which was investigated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for allegedly violating campaign finance laws. Stone threatened to sue journalist Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel blog after she reported that Don McGahn (Trump’s future campaign finance director and White House counsel) had “helped kill” the investigation in his former position as an FEC commissioner.
Randy Credico, a New York radio host and comedian, posted this about Stone and Miller in 2012:
In 2016, Miller would request, as a condition of providing testimony in the Russia investigation, “some form of immunity” from prosecution regarding PACs involving Stone, as further reported by emptywheel.
Trump, of course, did not run in 2012. But as reported by journalist Bob Norman, Stone did help elect Broward County (Florida) Sheriff Scott Israel that year, “using a host of his storied dirty tricks, and the new sheriff returned the favor by hiring three of Stone’s associates on the public dime. None had any business in law enforcement.”
After Norman reported on various scandals involving Sheriff Israel, Stone attacked Norman in ways that foreshadowed the brutal tactics deployed by Stone and his protégés in 2016 and beyond. Stone transformed the sheriff’s old campaign website into a fake “news” website called the Broward Bugle with Andrew Miller, a Roger Stone protege, as its editor. The Bugle then launched weekly smears against Norman, calling him “insane,” “demented,” and an “alcoholic.”
Norman says that “[f]ake accounts on Facebook — some with facetious names like ‘Benjamin Gay’ — began jumping on posts in which [Norman] was mentioned to hurl slurs. Anonymous commenters would appear on local blogs and law enforcement message boards and rant about [Norman], the general theme being that [he] was an obese and corrupt madman.”
Sam Nunberg, who has called Stone a “mentor” and “like a surrogate father,” even falsely tweeted that Norman was being investigated for touching a 19-year old intern.
At one point, the Bugle claimed, again falsely, that Norman was being investigated as a “Peeping Tom.” The police determined it was a hoax after speaking with Miller (Stone’s protege at the Bugle). Norman eventually confronted Stone in person after which the attacks abated.
Years later, Israel’s office botched the response to an active shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Seventeen people died during the attack, including many students.
After the 2012 election, as Trump considered a 2016 presidential run, Nunberg helped Trump transform his Twitter account into a political weapon by posting inflammatory and highly divisive content, including the unfounded claim that Obama was born outside the U.S. In a video posted by the BBC, Nunberg later said, “I want to be clear. I believe Obama was born in the United States. I believe he’s an America citizen. It was a little stunt. But it got a lot of tweets and it got a lot of coverage.
During the 2016 election, Stone and his associates learned to weaponize social media in new and dangerous ways. The Proud Boys were formed during that election by one of Stone’s friends. It was also during that election that Stone joined forces with Alex Jones, an alliance that would cause more damage to the country than I think anyone anticipated at the time.
I have written separately about the 2016 election and the Stone/Jones/Proud Boys trifecta here.
Update 2/16/22
Roger’s response to this piece.
Seems relevant:
