Roger Stone and the 2016 Election — InfoWars and the Origins of Stop the Steal
This article covers Roger Stone’s earliest activities on behalf of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, including his interactions with Alex Jones of InfoWars, the right-wing “Birther” conspiracist Jerome Corsi, and finally Stone’s establishment of the “Stop the Steal” group. It is the seventh article in a continuing series about Roger Stone. While it is not necessary to read the earlier entries, it is recommended.
The first article covers Stone’s involvement in Watergate through to the Reagan campaign, which brought him into contact with Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.
The second article covers Stone’s work on the controversial 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign and his lobbying for Trump in Atlantic City.
The third article covers Stone’s involvement in the 2000 election, his coordinating of Trump’s flirtation with running for President, and the “Brooks Brothers Riot.”
The fourth article covers Stone’s involvement in New York State gubernatorial politics from the years 2000–2010.
The fifth article covers Stone’s involvement in the local politics of Broward County, Florida, and his relationship with Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.
The sixth article covers the life of Stone’s friend and associate Michael Caputo, chronicling his lifelong proximity to global intelligence agencies.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Roger Stone was Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic political advisor. Their relationship has been described by those who know them as love-hate, sometimes adversarial, other times conspiratorial.
Both protégés of Roy Cohn, Stone and Trump ruthlessly pursue their own self interest with nary a concern for either truth, law or ethics, and are both masters of media manipulation. Prior to the 2016 election, both Trump and Stone occupied the fringe of politics and few within the establishment took either very seriously.
This was a mistake.
During Trump’s 2016 run, Stone developed and executed a multi-pronged strategy to get Donald J. Trump elected president.
Stone is a protégé of Republican political strategist Arthur Finkelstein. He was influenced by Finkelstein’s theory of “rejectionist voting,” which consisted of focusing on demonizing one’s opponent rather than promoting your own candidate in order to demoralize their potential supporters. In 2016, Stone pursued this strategy with reckless abandon.
In order to damage Hillary Clinton’s standing among African Americans, he peddled an unsubstantiated claim that former President Bill Clinton had fathered an out-of-wedlock son with an African American prostitute in Arkansas.
To hurt her standing with woman, Stone called her husband as a rapist and accused Hillary of having attacked his alleged victims, all the while ignoring sexual abuse claims made against Donald Trump.
Stone’s attempts to depress African American turnout were similar to the contemporaneous efforts by other elements within and without the Trump campaign and the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.
The third prong of Stone’s battle plan against Clinton involved Wikileaks. By April or May of 2016, months before Wikileaks’ July 22nd release of the DNC’s emails and later staggered release of John Podesta’s emails beginning on October 7th, Roger Stone repeatedly told Donald Trump and senior members of his campaign that Wikileaks would soon release information harmful to Clinton.
Stone wrote in support of, and was in contact with via Twitter direct message (DM), Guccifer 2.0, the online cutout for the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. These communications occurred while Russian Military Intelligence was in the midst of its election interference efforts.
Stone was also in contact with Wikileaks via Twitter DM both before and after the election. Due to Stone’s use of encrypted communication apps and email providers, the extent of these communications remains unknown.
Stone’s prescient predictions of Wikileaks releases raise obvious questions.
The Trump Campaign, which anxiously awaited and later celebrated and promoted each Wikileaks dump, saw Stone as an “access point” to the organization.
On August 21st, 2016, over a month before Wikileaks released John Podesta’s stolen emails, Stone sent out the following tweet: “Trust me, it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
This tweet, made in tandem with Stone’s public claims of having an “intermediary” with Wikileaks, as well private claims Stone made of speaking to Assange himself, fueled suspicions and later investigations of Stone’s relationship with Wikileaks and whether he may have coordinated with the group concerning its election year anti-Clinton activities.
Stone was later convicted of having lied to the House Intelligence Committee regarding his supposed “intermediary” with Wikileaks, among several other matters.
These lies raise the simple question, what does Roger Stone have to hide? Federal and Congressional investigations were unable to provide a satisfactory answer to this question.
It is important to understand that the extent of the information available at the time of this writing is largely based on the strengths and weaknesses of these investigations.
On July 10th, 2020, Trump pardoned Roger Stone for multiple crimes, including lying to Congress and witness tampering. As the pardon power of the President hung like a shadow over these investigations, Stone felt empowered not only to refuse to cooperate with them, but to attempt to get others to not cooperate as well.
American Disinformation: Roger Stone, InfoWars and Donald Trump
Stone, along with Michael Cohen and Sam Nunberg, formed the core set of advisors around Trump during the earliest days of his presidential bid. In a campaign composed of warring personalities consumed by political infighting, Stone and Cohen reportedly did not get along.
Nunberg, on the other hand, thought of Stone as a “mentor” and “like a surrogate father to him.”
In an early contribution to Trump’s messaging, Stone and Nunberg came up with the idea of “The Wall” as a way to keep Trump focused on issues related to the border. Nunberg was later fired from the campaign in July when racist Facebook posts he had published surfaced.
The next month, August 2015, Stone left his paid position on the campaign in disputed circumstances. During the first Republican Primary Debate, Trump had an intense exchange with Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly regarding his treatment of women. After the onstage blow-up, Trump proceeded to lay into the popular female reporter in public statements and on social media.
Stone viewed the conflict as an unnecessary self-sustained political wound and told Trump as much. Trump later claimed that he fired Stone over the incident. Stone claimed he quit because of clashes with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Despite this brief falling out, Stone remained involved as a shadow advisor to Trump, with whom he was in regular contact. He promoted Trump on alternative media sources such as InfoWars, a website and broadcast hosted by Alex Jones.
Jones, who has been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, was America’s leading proponent of the New World Order conspiracy, which maintains that globalists are conspiring to rule under a totalitarian world government. He has also claimed that the US Government was behind the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing, 9/11 and the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Some portion of the content put out by InfoWars came from RT. Between May of 2014 and 2017, over 1000 RT articles were republished on InfoWars without permission from the Russian broadcaster. RT does not appear to have taken any action to stop InfoWars from stealing their content.
Jones’ conspiracy mongering has overlapped with Russian disinformation campaigns. Between July 15th and September 15th of 2015, the US Military held a training exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15. Right wing conspiracy theorists began making wild, unfounded claims online suggesting that the exercise was an Obama administration pretext to impose martial law, and Jones on InfoWars claimed that “Helm” was in fact an acronym for “Homeland Eradication of Local Militants.”
Russian bots promoted the alt-right conspiracy theories, which gained so much traction that Texas Governor Gregg Abbot called out the state guard to observe the exercise.
According to former CIA director Michael Hayden, the Russians saw the operation as such a success that it influenced their decision to direct a disinformation campaign toward the 2016 US election.
McClatchy later reported that the FBI investigated both InfoWars and Breitbart News (in addition to the Russian state sponsored networks RT and Sputnik) for the roles they played in these disinformation campaigns.
Stone cannily understood that InfoWars received ratings comparable to the major networks and offered access to an untapped population that would find a political outsider like Trump appealing. On November 9th, 2015, Stone appeared on Jones’s show and informed his viewers that “Trump is for real.”
Less than a month later, on December 2nd, Stone arranged for Trump himself to appear on the show.
“I know now, from top people, that you are for real,” Jones said to Trump on the broadcast, parroting what he had heard from Stone, “and you understand you’re in danger, and you understand what you’re doing, is epic — it’s George Washington level.”
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump replied to Jones, “I will not let you down.”
From that point on, Alex Jones supported Trump on InfoWars and helped shape his messaging. Jones was one of the first and loudest voices to claim that Hillary was going to steal the election and called on Trump to make it an election issue.
Two days after he did so, Trump claimed that the election was going to be “rigged” at a rally in Columbus, Ohio.
ROGER STONE, JEROME CORSI AND THE BIRTHER LIE
Stone’s penchant for conspiracy theories brought him into contact with the infamous right wing journalist and author Dr. Jerome Corsi, who would become a central figure in the mystery surrounding Stone’s relationship with Wikileaks.
In February of 2016, Stone and Corsi dined together at the Harvard Club. While this was their first face-to-face meeting, the two had connected three years earlier while both were working on books about the JFK assassination to be released upon it’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013.
While often described in the media as a right-wing conspiracy theorist, a better description for Jerome Corsi would be a black propagandist and inveterate liar who uses weaponized half-truths and outright falsehoods to impact political outcomes.
In 2004, he co-authored Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, a New York Times best seller released during the 2004 presidential election that attacked Senator John Kerry’s character and Vietnam war record. Corsi never served in Vietnam and the book was denounced by those who actually served with Kerry as being “wrong.”
Thereafter, “swift-boating” entered into the American political lexicon, referring to the targeting of a politician with untrue or unfair political attacks. Kerry lost the race narrowly to George W. Bush.
In the next election, Corsi targeted Barack Obama with yet another New York Times best seller The Obama Nation, which explored Obama’s supposed ties to Islam and radical poltics. The book opened with a quote from Andy Martin, the progenitor of the falsehood that Obama is secretly a Muslim.
Corsi appeared on Alex Jones’ radio show to promote the book.
While Obama cruised to victory, it was only the beginning of Corsi’s attacks against him. Corsi became a chief proponent of the false birther conspiracy theory claiming that Obama had actually been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president.
In May of 2011, Corsi released Where’s The Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible To Be President. Corsi’s birther crusade brought him into contact with Trump.
“Trump asked me what I thought of the controversy regarding Obama’s birth certificate — not because he really wanted to know my opinion, because I think his opinion was already formed,” Roger Stone explained to The New Yorker. “And Trump said, ‘Do you know this guy Jerry Corsi?’ I said, ‘I only know of him. Why?’ He said, ‘Well, because I’ve been looking at his book’ — he doesn’t read books — but he said, ‘I’ve been talking to him.’”
Corsi first met Trump decades earlier as a guest at the Plaza Hotel, which Trump owned at the time.
Trump, who had been using the birther conspiracy to establish connections and burnish his reputation with the American right, received an advance copy of Corsi’s book in April of 2011. Michael Cohen signed a NDA to receive the book and described how Corsi and Trump had spoken on a handful of occasions, explaining that “Jerome Corsi had reached out to Mr. Trump to explain certain facts that are in his book.”
Corsi described his interactions with Trump during an interview with Alex Jones, explaining how he pressed Trump to question the long-form birth certificate that Obama ultimately released in an effort to quell the controversy, and to demand a forensic examination of the original document.
At the time, not even Trump’s efforts to promote birtherism were enough for Corsi and Jones, and they openly speculated whether he had dropped the issue because of a payout from NBC or perhaps was even working with the Obama White House.
Despite Trump not pursuing birtherism as vigorously as Corsi would have liked, Corsi later became an avid supporter of his candidacy.
In September of 2015, he visited Trump Tower where he met with Michael Cohen, who introduced him to Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks. Corsi was surprised that Lewandowski and Hicks the only occupants of the floor of Trump Tower that served as the campaign’s headquarters.
Beginning on February 22nd, 2016, Corsi began to have recorded conversations with Roger Stone in his capacity as a reporter for WorldNetDaily (WND), a right wing news outlet notable for trafficking in conspiracy theories. During their discussions Stone told Corsi that he was speaking with Trump every day, and that while Trump didn’t listen to everything he said, he described his hit rate as seven out of ten.
“I’m really careful to pick my shots,” Stone told Corsi. “I try to keep it to structural issues and important stuff, not trying him [sic] to get his picture taken with somebody’s mother-in-law.”
The FBI later heard testimony that Stone was in daily contact with Trump over January and February of 2016 and kept contemporaneous notes of these conversations, the purpose of which was to later provide a “post mortem of what went wrong.”
The location of these notes, doubtless of incalculable value, is unknown.
Over the course of their conversations, Stone explained to Corsi his plans to damage Hillary Clinton’s standing with women and African American voters by pushing stories related to Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assault victims and the unsubstantiated claim that he had a black child out of wedlock who he refused to recognize.
As Corsi well understood and later wrote about: “A fundamental principle of the modern political campaign is that successful candidates must cut into the percentages their opponents expect to get from key voting blocs loyal to the opponents political party.”
Stone and Corsi met in-person for the first time in late February at the Harvard Club in New York City. Over dinner, which included martini’s, a bottle of French Bordeaux and London-style roast beef, Corsi came to agree with Stone’s strategy of targeting African Americans and female voters with anti-Clinton messaging.
Corsi later introduced Stone to Candice Jackson, a Vancouver, WA based attorney and author of the 2005 book Their Lives: The Women Targeted By The Clinton Machine. Jackson introduced Stone to several of Bill Clinton’s accusers, including Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers.
Stone used these contacts to write his book The Clinton’s War On Women, published on the eve of the presidential election in September of 2016.
It is unknown whether Stone or Corsi discussed Wikileaks during this first meeting in late February.
On March 10th, 2016, GRU Unit 26165 began targeting the Clinton campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters.
Six days later, on March 16th, Wikileaks released its first set of Clinton emails. This first release consisted not of stolen or hacked emails, but rather of emails from Clinton’s time as Secretary of State that had been released by the State Department following a Freedom of Information Act request.
Wikileaks arranged the emails in a more searchable format, which they labelled the “Hillary Clinton Email Archive.”
Roger Stone, the “Stop the Steal” Scam and Corruption in Broward County
In April of 2016, as Trump overtook Ted Cruz to become the Republican nominee, Stone established a (supposedly) independent non-profit called “Stop The Steal,” the full importance of which wouldn’t be appreciated until after the 2020 election when the phrase was trotted out again to spread the lie that the election had been stolen from Trump.
In the lead up to the 2016 convention, Stone used Stop The Steal to intimidate Republican delegates thinking of voting against Trump, threatening on its website “four days of non-violent demonstrations, protests and lobbying delegates face to face… We must own the streets. In numbers there is strength.”
Stop The Steal was registered by Paul Rolf Jensen, a California-based personal injury attorney and Obama birther conspiracy theorist. In 2007, Jensen authored a letter to the FBI, which was never actually sent to the FBI but rather to media outlets, in which Roger Stone claimed that he had learned from an off-work call girl at an “adult themed club” that New York Governor Elliott Spitzer wore knee-length socks while cavorting with prostitutes.
Stone wanted to use Stop The Steal to recruit volunteers to conduct exit polls at over 7,000 polling places to determine if there was a discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results. This “solid evidence” could then be used to show the election had been “rigged” in the event that Trump lost. Stop The Steal’s efforts became the subject of litigation when Democrats sued claiming Stone was engaging in voter intimidation.
Stop The Steal was closely affiliated with a Stone-founded Super PAC called the Committee to Restore American Greatness (CRAG), launched in December of 2015.
Upon first hearing of CRAG, Trump campaign head and bitter Stone rival Corey Lewandowki described the Super PAC as a “Big League Scam.”
While CRAG reported raising $587,000 during the 2016 election cycle, only $16,000 went towards independent political expenditures consisting of two pro-Trump billboards. In April of 2016, CRAG donated $50,000 to Stop The Steal. Despite this initial infusion, IRS records show that Stop The Steal only raised $40,000. Perhaps this is because on July 12th, 2016, without explanation, Stop The Steal donated $63,000 back to CRAG.
Other Stop The Steal expenditures included $4,000 to Steven Gray, the best friend of Danney Williams, the African American man who claimed to be Bill Clinton’s out-of-wedlock child. $5000 dollars went to Alejandro Vidal, a Florida-based rapper whose oeuvre includes “Clinton Crime Cartel” and a music video for the song “Justice for Danney Williams.” $3,500 went to a PR firm Christian Josi, who operated the Clinton Rape T-shirt campaign for Stone which was promoted on InfoWars.
CRAG paid $100,000 to Jensen Associates, Paul Rolf Jensen’s law firm, for “legal and accounting” and “consulting” services. $130,000 went to Citroen Associates, operated by Stone’s former driver and social media aide John Kakanis, supposedly for “voter fraud research and documentation.” $12,000 went to Drake Ventures, a PR firm operated by Stone and his wife that shares an address with Citroen Associates. In July of 2016, CRAG paid $5,000 dollars to Cheryl Smith of Oroville, California, the mother of a Stone associate named Kristin Davis.
Once known as the “Manhattan Madam,” Davis was a vice president of a hedge fund before leaving finance to operate a brothel, for which she was arrested in 2008. Stone came to know her through her alleged involvement in the prostitution scandal that brought down New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. In 2010 and 2013, Stone assisted her pro-bono in two pro-drug and prostitution legalization bids for New York Governor.
Her 2013 campaign was derailed when she was arrested for passing prescription pills to a drug dealer for him to resell. Upon being released from a halfway house in May 2016, Stone put Davis up in his Manhattan apartment on 71st Street.
It is unclear what services Davis’ mother performed for the Committee to Restore American Greatness. In 2017, Stop The Steal, which IRS records show stopped raising money after the 2016 election, paid Davis two installments of $3,500.
Another Stone associate, Andrew Miller, was paid $9,000 by CRAG and an additional $5,000 from Stop The Steal. Miller, who worked for Stone for over a decade managing his schedule and travel, is the stepson of Stone’s longtime assistant Dianne Thorne. Stone arranged for Miller to work on Kristin Davis’ campaign pro-bono as it’s treasurer. Miller’s father, Timothy Suereth, is a convicted felon immigrant smuggler who was caught by police transporting 19 illegal immigrants on a boat in Florida.
In 2010, Thorne, Suereth and their son Miller were hired at Stone’s direction by the New York gubernatorial campaign of Carl Paladino. Thus, Stone had arranged for Miller to be in the bizarre position of working as Kristin Davis’ campaign treasurer, while at the same time being paid $7,000 by her ostensible campaign rival Paladino. In total, Thorne, Suereth and Miller were paid $110,000 by the Paladino campaign, which lost to Andrew Cuomo by 30%.
“They all show up from Florida and it’s one big con,” Paladino later stated. “We’re paying this guy [Suereth] $12,000 a month to be a driver and he couldn’t drive … his wife [Thorne] was also on the payroll and so was his kid … they were all con people.”
Stone, who once compared politics to “performance art,” appears to have orchestrated Kristin Davis’ stunt campaign as a means to further humiliate the already disgraced Elliott Spitzer, and then arranged for his friends to get lucrative positions on her rival’s doomed campaign.
A year later, in 2011, when Politico reporter Ben Smith called a contact number listed on a press release on a supposedly independent “Draft Trump” for President movement, he discovered the number belonged to Andrew Miller.
Stone, who is a resident of Broward County, Florida, was behind a similar arrangement involving Thorne, Suereth and Miller on Scott Israel’s 2013 Broward County Sheriff campaign and during his controversial tenure as Sheriff. Israel’s campaign strategist, Ron Gunzberger, was a friend and associate of Stone’s and after Israel won was hired by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) as its general counsel for $205,000 a year.
Israel then hired Dianne Thorne as his personal assistant. She later resigned after local press investigated allegations that she had falsified her college degree. Andrew Miller was later hired to operate Sheriff Israel’s campaign website. Jenn Hobbs, Miller’s fiance, was hired by Israel and paid $60,000 to be a “community liaison.” Mike Colapietro, the co-author of Stone’s book on the JFK assassination, also received a job at the BSO as a “comunity liaison.”
In 2016, the Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency targeted Broward County and interacted with unwitting Trump supporters who managed the Facebook page Team Trump Broward Country. Stone’s use of Stop The Steal to imply that the election would be stolen, as well as Alex Jones and Donald Trump’s suggestion that the election would be “rigged,” overlapped with Russian efforts to cast doubt on the election.
In 2016, the State Department became aware of Russian efforts to send election observers to polling sites in the United States, which included going outside of traditional channels and directly approaching state and local officials with the request. These requests were denied.
Furthermore, GRU hackers had the ability to alter Florida’s voter rolls. As the full scope of the Russian election interference became clear the Obama White House worried that the Russians might make the election appear rigged by tampering with voter rolls in key precincts which would lead to a kind of chaos that would seem to validate claims of a “rigged election.”
The next article will cover Roger Stone’s 2016 interactions with Wikileaks and Russian military intelligence.
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