Roger J. Stone cut his teeth as a young operative working for President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign and ever since then he has built a reputation as one of the toughest and most creative political tacticians ever.
When Stone’s longtime friend, New York City developer Donald J. Trump, decided to run for president in 2015, he reached out to Stone to help him put it all together.
Stone wrote about the 2016 Trump campaign in his book “Making of the President 2016,” which he revised for paperback into: “The Myth of Russian Collusion: The Inside Story of How Donald Trump REALLY Won.”
Speaking over the din of the Laura Loomer GOP primary victory party he was attending in the president’s Florida congressional district, Stone said he feels good about Trump’s chance for reelection.
“I feel like he is gaining,” Stone said.
“I have always thought that this would be very tight, very competitive in the end and I think he had this election won prior to the necessary destruction of our economy to protect the country from the very serious public health crisis,” he said.
“At this point, I would rather be behind than ahead,” he said. “I think the debates are crucial to putting the president over the top.”
Stone drops effort to reverse convictions
After Stone left his official role in the 2016 Trump campaign, he remained an outsider advisor and it was in this role that he was accused of being a courier between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign for the purposes of facilitating exposure for the emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
His arrest in a pre-dawn SWAT-style raid was carried live on CNN after the new channel was tipped off.
After Stone’s conviction on seven of Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III’s original 24-count indictment, Trump commuted his sentence July 10.
Although, Stone had pledged to continue to fight his convictions, in order to clear his name, now, he told the Star News Network he is dropping that effort.
“First, look at the court,” he said. “The Appeals Court essentially punted when I challenged the gag order in my case. The court ordered me to prison immediately, at the same time it was the policy of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons to release to home confinement non-violent criminals.”
Stone said it was not enough that they denied him the right to speak out about his case, they were sending him into a prison system rife with COVID-19.
“Contrary to their own precedence – and their own policies – that court was essentially going to send me to my death in a COVID-infested prison,” he said.
This is the same court that vacated its own order to vacate the charges against retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, ordered former White House Counsel General Donald F. McGahn II to testify before the House of Representatives and ruled that former first lady Hillary R. Clinton does not have to testify in Judicial Watch’s lawsuit regarding her handling of sensitive electronic correspondence when she led the State Department, he said.
Stone: Same judge would get same result
“That court is so badly politicized, no reasonable, fair trial could be expected from them – and, were I to when a new trial, it would be before Judge Jackson,” he said. Judge Amy Berman Jackson was the judge for Stone’s first trial.
“Judge Jackson demonstrated her bias over and over again,” he said. “Like when she said, for example, there was nothing phony about the Mueller investigation, except we know differently now, based on declassified documents. Or like, when she said to me: ‘You were convicted of covering up for Donald Trump,’ not what I was convicted for and not even what I was charged with.”
Stone said the second factor was his own need to move on.
“At some point, you have to worry about putting yourself and your family at risk in a highly-politicized court, and having a new trial the circumstances of which would be no different from that old trial,” he said.
He goes into more depth on his decision in a post on his Stone Cold Truth website.
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Neil W. McCabe is a Washington-based national political reporter for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. In addition to the Star Newspaper, he has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and national politics for One America News, Breitbart, Human Events and Townhall. Before coming to Washington, he was a staff reporter for Boston’s Catholic paper, The Pilot, and the editor of two Boston-area community papers, The Somerville News and The Alewife. McCabe is a public affairs NCO in the Army Reserve and he deployed for 15 months to Iraq as a combat historian.
