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Roger Stone Let Danish Film Crew Record Him Plotting 1/6 Coup And You Are A Dirty Crimer For Noticing!
Something something he likes them to watch.
No one ever accused Roger Stone of having good judgment. This is the guy who got booted off Bob Dole's presidential campaign after using his wife's credit card to run personal ads in a magazine called Local Swing Fever . But letting a Danish film crew follow him around with a camera during the 2020 election and its aftermath seems like a pretty substantial error in judgment, even allowing for the fact that Stone probably didn't anticipate that his associates would be charged with seditious conspiracy and the entire episode would be the subject of a congressional inquiry.
But done is done, and there's no use crying over spilt brain matter. The Washington Post got its hands on the footage, as well as documents that ratfucking genius handed over to the filmmakers, and it's A LOT. We're going to save the pardon hijinks for another post, this one by Gary, including Ol' Roger's threats to beat up Jared Kushner for putting the kibosh on his big plans. (On a hot mike, doh!) Let's talk now about what Roger Stone said he did in the lead-up to January 6, and what the filmmakers caught on tape, because those two things are not the same .
“Any claim, assertion or implication that I knew about, was involved in or condoned the illegal acts at the Capitol on Jan 6 is categorically false and there is no witness or document that proves otherwise,” Stone told the Post when it contacted him for the story.
Hmmmm. Roll tape!
It started long before the first vote was cast, with Stone telling his assistant Enrique Alejandro in July of 2020 that Trump should simply wield the power of the presidency to stay in office.
“It’s going to be really nasty,” Stone said at home on July 9, 2020, predicting that Democrats would try to steal the election. “If the electors show up at the electoral college, armed guards will throw them out,” he said, apparently referring to ceremonial meetings of electors in state capitals.
“ ‘I’m the president. F--- you,’ ” Stone said, imagining Trump’s remarks. “ ‘You’re not stealing Florida, you’re not stealing Ohio. I’m challenging all of it, and the judges we’re going to are judges I appointed.’ ”
The film crew documented Stone in the days after the election re-mobilizing the "Stop the Steal" campaign, something he'd generated in 2016 to harass Democratic voters and allege fraud if Trump lost.
“We’re going to raise money from Stop the Steal — it will be like falling off a log," he said gleefully, before throwing himself into the effort to overturn Biden's win.
By November 5, Stone was reconnoitering with Michael Flynn, promising that he could “document an overwhelming and compelling fraud" in all the swing states. By sheer coincidence, everyone in Trump's orbit immediately started tweeting the hashtag #StopTheSteal.
According to the Post 's reporting, the film strongly suggests that Stone was the genesis of much of Trumpland's post-election messaging. “Our slogan should be ‘count every legal ballot,'" he told Flynn, just hours before Trump vomited the same words out in the White House briefing room. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he insisted.
But Stone apparently wanted to keep his role in the events under wraps, writing in a Nov. 30 blog post that he was “not a participant” in the efforts to overturn the election. For instance, Stone appears to have significantly downplayed his relationship with Ali Alexander , who had a copy of Stone's Stop the Steal action plan on his laptop on November 5 and met with Stone at his home in Florida on November 12.
After Stone received a pardon in December, Alexander, who has now testified before the House January 6 Select Committee, gushed, “Roger’s fully in the fight now. Roger wasn’t allowed to be fully in the fight. We’ve taken the leash off the pit bull. So, this is something Roger and I have been planning for a long time. And, finally, he’s off the leash. So, you know, it’s a knife fight, and your two knife fighters are Ali Alexander and Roger Stone. And you either fight with us or you get slashed.”
Alexander's attorney offered this hilarious response to reporters' queries:
An attorney for Alexander, Paul Kamenar, told The Post that Alexander and Stone were “friends and brothers-in-Christ” but had no part in the violence on Jan. 6 and did not anticipate it. “Ali has never participated in a literal knife fight nor advocated one,” said Kamenar.
Alrighty then.
Stone also established encrypted communications channels with far-Right militia figures such as Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes and henchmen John James and Brian Ulrich. Those three particular Oafs were all charged with seditious conspiracy , and James pled guilty yesterday and agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department. These are the group of "protesters" who marched into the Capitol in formation and had a giant arsenal of weapons stored at a Comfort Inn in Arlington.
Stone, who seems to struggle with the concepts of causation and object permanence, sent those messages while cameras were pointed at his phone. Nonetheless, he denies their existence, and/or accuses the Post of cahootsing with the January 6 Committee to steal them.
"Your assertions regarding my text messages or Signal messages only proves the leaking of the partisan Jan 6 witch hunt or illegal methods of collection on your part," he huffed, perhaps unaware that a screenshot of an encrypted text is not itself encrypted.
Whatever. Take a wild-ass guess which self-professed "libertine" and "dirty trickster" James and Ulrich were guarding on January 5, 2021.
The movie documents an ugly spat between two groups of rally organizers over the speakers list. Katrina Pierson, at the White House, led the faction trying to keep some of the more deranged speakers off the stage. Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, backed up by Kimberly Guilfoyle and Julie Fancelli, a Publix supermarket heiress and major donor to the rally, wanted Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, and Stone himself on the dais. Pierson got her way, but not without calling the US Park Police on the morning of January 6. And in case you're wondering, all of these people have either spoken to the committee or been subpoenaed .
In the end, Stone didn't attend the January 6 rally at all. After some kind of drama involving Bernie Kerik, he changed his mind, saying, “The point is, I don’t want to be turned away. That’s what they want. You don’t want to reach for something and not get it.” Which is how he wound up watching the attack on the Capitol from a hotel room, after which he beat a hasty retreat from DC on a private plane out of Dulles. In a very real sense, this asshole ought to send Pierson a fruit basket for keeping his wrinkly ass out of even more trouble.
Stone accuses the Post of employing “a clever blend of ‘guilt by association,’ insinuations, half truths, anonymous claims, falsehoods and out of context trick questions” to make him look bad. As if he weren't more than capable of doing that all on his own.
“You attribute things to me I never said,” he complained, going so far as to suggest that the videos he was dumb enough to let those Danes take were “deep fakes.”
Good luck with that one, Rog.
[ WaPo ]
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Roger Stone Let Danish Film Crew Record Him Plotting 1/6 Coup And You Are A Dirty Crimer For Noticing!
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Great. Now all we have to do is bring Merrick Garland back from the Dead.