The Last Act of 'Dirty Trickster' Roger Stone

By Alex Thomas


all the Trump associates that have shaped Donald’s trajectory to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 66-year-old Roger Stone is… well, one of the nastier ones. Stone’s is a name you’ll visualize scattered across newspaper stories from the past few decades, dating back to mentions of his relationship with Richard Nixon and slowly climbing up until he became the center of the story itself. While in his long career, Stone grew close with Donald Trump and for years had encouraged him to run for president before Trump finally got really interested in a Oval Office attempt.


In the Nixon administration, Stone cut his teeth as a self-described “dirty trickster” — among other devious acts, he contributed to the demise of a Nixon opponent, Rep. Pete McCloskey, in the 1972 Republican presidential primaries by posing as a socialist, and then tipping off a New Hampshire newspaper about the move. In the polls, McCloskey earned only 11 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. These below-the-belt tricks even have a name in politics: ratfucking. And Roger Stone proved to have a gift for them. Richard Nixon became an icon to Stone, to the extent that Stone has the former president’s face tattooed on his back.


Stone later became close with Paul Manafort, the resultant chairman Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. In the ’80s, the pair put with each other congregated a lobbying firm called Black, Manafort, and Stone. The firm eventually earned a reputation for doing PR work for brazen dictators of countries struggling with democracy like the Phillipines and the Republic of Congo. At some point in that decade, the firm started representing Donald Trump.


As soon as Black, Manafort, and Stone broke up, Manafort continued to define dictators including Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, while Stone went mainstream. He worked on Bob Dole’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1996.


Over the years, Trump and Stone continued to circle each other, it seems waiting for the moment if they would capitalize on their talents. Stone was Trump’s longtime fan; he consistently encouraged the real estate mogul to run for president yet it’s unclear if that feeling was reciprocated. In 2008, Trump instructed them New Yorker, “Roger is a stone-cold loser,” despite Stone’s role as an adviser to the 2000 presidential run Trump considered.


Finally, in the summer of 2015, Trump came down the escalator in his Manhattan tower and reported that he would run for president. Stone came along for the ride, once again joining as an adviser, yet left his role soon after only several months. (Unsurprisingly, Trump claims he fired Stone; Stone says that he left voluntarily.)


Right after leaving the campaign, Stone became involving other controversial figures, most notably, WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Though Stone right now claims that he has never talked to Assange, in August of 2016, he told a crowd of Florida Republicans, “I've actually communicated with Julian Assange.” In 2017, Stone was subjected to a closed-door interview with the Residence Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his connections to Assange's company and the Trump campaign. The Atlantic has since reported that Stone and WikiLeaks discussed to one another by means of the Twitter.


And based on Stone's tweets from the time, he usually have had advanced knowledge in 2016 of once WikiLeaks was preparing to “dump” emails that were hacked from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That crosses a couple of lines. Every American intelligence corporation has mentioned that the emails were hacked by Russian actors and sent to WikiLeaks in a task to undermine Hillary Clinton. This connection has proven of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller.


Last week, Stone was arrested by FBI agents in a pre-dawn raid at his Florida residence. Mueller charged Stone with seven counts that include witness tampering and lying to Congress while in that 2017 interview. He’s mentioned that the method of that arrest was unnecessary and that he would have turned himself in, yet it’s hard to imagine Stone being taken in by the feds in any way other than a raid in the Fort Lauderdale darkness. He definitely would have preferred those tactics if any of his adversaries were to be taken in by the authorities. Any time Stone appeared outdoors the courthouse that same day, he was grinning and mimicking his idol, Nixon. As he started to give a statement, the crowd chanted, “Lock him up.”


In the charging documents, the unique counsel mentioned that Stone was in communication with a top official in the Trump campaign and was tipping them off about WikiLeaks’ email dumps. Stone maintains that he’s innocent, and today (January 29), in a Washington federal court, he pleaded not guilty to the expenses against him.


The next chapter in Stone’s long career in and about politics will be an arduous process in which he’s forced to defend himself against bills. The unique counsel has defeated everybody who has been charged: Mueller’s team has already sent Stone’s one-time co-worker Manafort off to jail for tax fraud, and Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn is now awaiting sentencing.


The odds are not in Stone’s favor, and that doesn’t look good for Trump.


The investigation and trial is sure to lose a light on the communications between Stone, WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign. Mueller’s team mentioned in the charging documents that they have the paper trail showing those communications. If the unique counsel can prove that Stone was coordinating with a top Trump campaign official while in his communications with WikiLeaks, there would be further consequences for Trump's team.


Unfortunately for the president, Stone was a key segment of his campaign. Most of the allegations that Trump is facing from Mueller's investigation — like possible collusion with Russian-state actors — date back to the campaign and, even more specifically, to the earlier days of the campaign. While in that time, Stone was directly regarding Trump.


The possible crimes have evolved, with most pundits suggesting that the more substantial costs that Trump would be facing are related to obstruction of justice. Specifically, the theory that the president has attempted to cover his tracks for possible crimes committed throughout the campaign. Since Stone was a member of that campaign, and has been at least loosely tied to WikiLeaks, efforts that Trump made to put investigators off that scent could implicate Stone.


And as for Stone, this could just be the last act for the dirty trickster.