Roger Stone and the Genesis of the Trump Presidency: Voter Suppression, Lobbying and Trump’s Boardwalk Empire (1980–1996)
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
As described in the first article of this series, Roger Stone was introduced to Donald Trump by the infamous mob lawyer and New York political fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn, who played an instrumental role in launching Trump’s Manhattan real estate career, was also a role model and mentor for Stone. According to friends, Stone wanted to be “the next generations Roy Cohn.”
Stone met Cohn and Trump while serving as the Northeast coordinator of the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign. This article covers the the first part of an extended period of Stone’s life that followed Reagan’s historic victory to Donald Trump’s 2015 announcement of his own presidential campaign.
This 35-year period of Stone’s life can be divided into two distinct parts. The first lasted from 1980 to 1996, during which time Stone operated very much at the heart of mainstream Republican politics. A tabloid sexual scandal involving Stone and his wife that broke during the 1996 Dole campaign marks a rupture in the political operative’s timeline.
In the period that followed, Stone became involved in fringe politics and masterminded a series of stunt campaigns designed to damage his enemies and line the pockets of himself and his associates. Many of these campaigns involved Trump himself, and understanding Roger Stone’s early activities and modus operandi provides critical context to what later occurred during during the 2016 election.
Having gained infamy for his minor involvement in the Watergate scandal, Stone now sought wealth and access at the beginning of the “Reagan Revolution.” In the aftermath of the Reagan’s historic 1980 victory, Stone and two other Reagan campaign alums, Paul Manafort and Charles Black, established the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, and Stone, which later became Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly (BMSK) with the 1984 addition of Democrat Peter G. Kelly to the firms roster.
That year also saw the addition of Republican campaign operative Lee Atwater, who was part of the political consulting arm of the firm. BMSK pioneered what became known on K Street as a “double-breasted operation,” in which one wing of the firm consulted for political candidates, while another part of the firm lobbied those candidates once in office on behalf of their clients.
Examples of BMSK corporate clients included Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Salomon Brothers, Bethlehem Steele, and the U.S. tobacco industry trade group the Tobacco Institute.
Perhaps the most controversial element of the firm was its foreign clientele, which was managed by Paul Manafort. BMSK lobbied on behalf of a rogues gallery of foreign dictators and kleptocrats, many of whom were at onetime on the payroll of the CIA, which led The Center for Public Integrity to prominently feature the firm in its damning 1992 report The Torturer’s Lobby: How Human Rights Abusing Nations are Represented in Washington.
I have written extensively about BMSK’s corrupt foreign clients in an article focusing on the career of Trump 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Roger Stone’s bailiwick was in domestic affairs and one of the earliest clients he brought on board was his and Roy Cohn’s mutual friend: Donald J. Trump.
ROGER STONE, THE 1981 NEW JERSEY GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION, AND THE ENDURING LEGACY OF VOTER SUPPRESSION
As the decade of the 1980s dawned, both Roger Stone and his top lobbying client Donald Trump were drawn to New Jersey. A 1976 state-wide referendum had legalized gambling in Atlantic City, the first place in the United States outside of Las Vegas to have done so over four decades. The pro-legalization campaign was funded by Resorts International, a hotel and development company with gambling interests in the Bahamas that had links to the Meyer Lansky organized crime syndicate.
Though Trump had initially opposed gambling in New Jersey, hoping that his home state of New York would legalize casinos first, he later changed his tune and aggressively moved to become the largest casino magnate on the historic-but-by-then largely rundown Atlantic City Boardwalk. In order to do so, however, Trump needed to curry favor and influence with New Jersey’s Governor.
It was the Governor, or the Governor’s appointed Attorney General, who appointed the powerful, if corrupt, Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) and the Casino Control Commission (CCC), the two bodies whose stamp of approval was necessary to be awarded a casino license.
Enter Roger Stone.
As Northeast coordinator of the 1980 Reagan campaign, Stone was responsible for campaign activities in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. His introduction to Garden State politics dates back two years earlier. In 1978, Stone managed the U.S. Senate campaign of Jeff Bell, a relatively unknown Republican speechwriter who managed an upset win in the Republican primary but ultimately lost to Democrat Bill Bradley. A year after Reagan’s election, Stone returned to New Jersey to manage the gubernatorial campaign of Thomas H. Kean.
After having lost a statewide election in 1977, Kean enlisted Stone for the 1981 election. Both Roy Cohn and Donald Trump were early and enthusiastic Kean supporters.
According to Wayne Barrett, Cohn hosted a fundraiser for Kean at his infamous Manhattan townhouse in January of 1981. Several attendees told Barrett that they remembered Trump being in attendance, despite that fact that as he already had an application for a casino license pending he was legally barred from contributing.
Kean was a moderate Republican running in the aftermath of the conservative reawakening represented by Reagan’s victory a year earlier. Stone contacted White House Chief of Staff James Baker III to arrange for Reagan to make a trip to New Jersey to support Kean’s candidacy.
According to an unpublished memoir written by Stone, he would return the favor 19 years later when Baker, who was then-managing George W. Bush’s 2000 Florida recount fight, called in Stone for to perform his dirty tricks. Kean’s opponent was the Democrat James Florio.
The election was ultimately decided by the slimmest margin of any gubernatorial race in New Jersey state history, and election day itself was marred by Republican-backed voter suppression activities that would reverberate for years to come.
In the lead up to election day, the Republican National Committee (RNC) sent a political operative named Jack Kelly to oversee hardball voter suppression tactics in support of Kean’s candidacy. Kelly enlisted “Flying Squads” of off-duty police and others to accompany RNC lawyers and patrol polling places in heavily Democratic areas such as Trenton, Camden, Newark, and Atlantic City on Election Day.
The squads, consisting of men wearing black arm bands identifying them as the National Ballot Security Task Force, some of whom were armed, stalked polling places on Election Day and illegally put up signs that offered a $1,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of individuals violating New Jersey election law.
Almost immediately, reports emerged of “Task Force” members intimidating black and brown voters. In a subsequent lawsuit, Trenton resident and legally registered voter Lynette Monroe claimed that she had been turned away from her polling place by Task Force members who falsely claimed she needed to be in possession of her voter registration card in order to vote. In fact, her polling place possessed that information.
Monroe was hardly the only New Jersey resident who claimed intimidation. Jack Kelly had also engaged in “Voter Caging,” whereby Republicans used old and outdated Democratic voter registration lists to send out 200,000 do-not-forward postcards to predominantly Black and Hispanic districts. The GOP then used the 45,000 postcards that were returned to build a list of voters to challenge at the polls.
After the chaos of election day, where there were multiple reports of voter intimidation, the tallies were totaled. That evening it was reported that after nearly 2.3 million votes were cast, Kean led by 1,158 votes. When one county clerk reported a readjustment in his counties vote totals, Roger Stone didn’t hesitate to make an allegation he would repeat on a much larger stage decades later.
“They’re stealing it,” Stone complained to The New York Times. “[W]e’re just not going to stand for it, just to “find” a precinct like that.” However, upon learning the readjustment had benefitted Kean, Stone changed his tune. “We just took a vote here and think that’s okay.”
Kean ultimately won the election by 1,797 votes, the narrowest margin in New Jersey history. After the election, Democrats sued the RNC and the New Jersey for violating the 1964 Voting Rights Act. In a settlement, the RNC agreed to a federal consent decree that prohibited such activities that was in force until 2017. Indeed, the 2020 election was the first presidential election to take place when the federal consent decree, dating back to the 1981 New Jersey election, wasn’t in force.
Stone, who continued to advise Kean after the election, later denied having any knowledge of voter suppression activities. A member of the Kean campaign, Roger Brodman, stated that the if effort wasn’t directly arranged by Stone, it was “Stone-esque.”
A New York Times editorial in the lead-up to the 2016 election was more direct. “Unsurprisingly, the man behind the New Jersey voter-intimidation case that led to the original consent decree, Roger Stone, is now one of Trump’s top advisors.”
While Trump had already been treated with kid gloves by both the Department of Gaming Enforcement and the Casino Control Commission, which at various times overlooked lies and omissions on his casino license application forms as well as his relationships with individuals linked to organized crime in both New York and New Jersey. This included his widely known association with Roy Cohn, attorney for the highest echelons of the American mafia.
Barron Hilton, heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, wasn’t so lucky. In 1985, his association with the Chicago-based fixer and mob attorney Sidney Korshak was enough to have his license denied by New Jersey authorities, paving the way for Trump to acquire his second Casino in Atlantic City, the Trump Castle, despite his relationship with Cohn.
New Jersey Governor Tom Keane attended the unveiling ceremony of the Trump Castle, just as he had attended the groundbreaking of the Trump Plaza casino several years earlier.
MANAGING CAMPAIGNS, LOBBYING FOR TRUMP
In 1982, Roy Cohn hosted Stone’s 30th birthday party at a private room in Manhattan’s 21 Club. Cohn was at this time at the height of his powers in Manhattan, representing the owners of the legendary and debauched Studio 54. Cohn’s glory days, however, were destined to be short lived. Four short years later, he would be disbarred and die of AIDS.
Stone used his newfound prominence to gain clients for BMSK and to manage multiple campaigns in New Jersey and elsewhere. The Stone playbook of petty grift, dirty tricks, and acts of vengeance continued to develop during this period.
He peddled his connections to Republican party heavyweights, both real and invented, to sources in the media to promote an aura that would convince gullible, lesser candidates to pay him as much as $100,000 to take them on as clients.
According to Jacob Weisberg of The New Republic, Stone was running a “promotion racket.”
Another powerful motivating force in the life and work of Roger Stone was and is vengeance.
“I will often wait years to take my revenge,” Stone wrote in his book Stone’s Rules, “hiding in the tall grass, my stiletto at the ready, waiting patiently until you think I have forgotten or forgiven a past slight and then, when you least expect it, I will spring from the underbrush and plunge a dagger up under your ribcage. So if you have fucked me, even if it was years ago, don’t think yourself safe.”
While this may seem like bluster, there are numerous examples in Stone’s biography to prove he does in fact relish revenge.
In 1982 Stone once again managed Jeff Bell’s Senate campaign. After Bell lost the Republican primary to the well-liked Republican septuagenarian Millicent Fenwick, Bell later reported that Stone was so infuriated that he sent his pollsters to Fenwick’s general election Democrat opponent and urged them to attack her on the basis of her age.
Stone continued his lobbying on behalf of Trump during this period, working on projects related to Treasury Department currency transaction rules pertinent to casinos and FAA limits on the height of skyscrapers that impacted a building Trump was planning in Chicago. Characteristically, Trump didn’t always pay BMSK in a timely manner.
“We had trouble getting paid on time,” BMSK partner Charles Black later admitted to The Washington Post. Black would often have to personally travel to New York to get a check from Trump.
Both Cohn and Stone pulled strings within the Reagan administration to aid with the appointment of Trump’s elder sister Maryann to a federal judgeship. In 1983, Governor Kean nominated Maryann for the position. The nomination was controversial as Maryann had achieved the New Jersey Bar Association’s lowest favorable rating. When it appeared that someone else was in line in front of Maryann, Cohn contacted Reagan attorney general Ed Meese and advocated on her behalf. A few months later, she landed the position.
“He [Donald] had Cohn call Reagan about needing to appoint a woman as a federal judge in New Jersey,” Maryann Trump said years later in a recorded conversation. “Because Reagan’s running for re-election, and he was desperate for the female vote.”
Maryann was given the appointment, and later admitted that her brother never allowed her to forget how it came about.
That same year, 1983, Cohn arranged for Reagan to meet an up-and-coming Australian media magnate by the name of Rupert Murdoch, who was also represented by BMSK. Murdoch’s Fox News would later become a key pillar of support for Trump’s candidacy and presidency.
According to the reporting of the late Robert Parry, Cohn and Murdoch had first formed a relationship due to their joint admiration for Israel. After Cohn arranged for Murdoch to meet Reagan in the Oval Office, Parry reports that Murdoch assisted a privately funded PR operation set up by CIA propagandist Walter Raymond and CIA director William Casey to support the Reagan administrations hardline anti-Communist activities in Central America.
Cohn was also close with William Casey, who had managed Reagan’s 1980 campaign. According to notes kept by Cohn’s switchboard operator, he and Casey spoke on a daily basis during the 1980 campaign.
Reagan’s policies in Central America would later explode into the Iran-Contra scandal, in which illicit funding was provided to the right wing rebel group the Contras through illegal weapons sales to Iran.
Roger Stone’s first wife, Ann Stone, occupied a minor footnote in Iran-Contra. Ms. Stone was a specialist in direct-mail fundraising and had been mentored by Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of the practice. She and Viguerie were involved in direct-mail fundraising activities the Contras.
Adolfo Calero, head of the Contras and their chief lobbyist for funds, specifically mentioned Ann Stone while testifying before Congress. Calero was an associate of Oliver North’s, the Reagan National Security Counsel member at the heart of the Scandal.
Following North’s explosive testimony before the U.S. Congress, Ann Stone and Viguerie used North’s testimony to raise further funds for the Contras.
Stone and Trump also had dealings with another key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, the Saudi arms dealer and reputed wealthiest man in the world, Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi was a major facilitator in the development of the Saudi-U.S. intelligence relationship, brokering billions of dollars of arms sales between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Years later during Trump’s presidency, Khashoggi’s nephew, Washington Post reporter Jamaal Khashoggi, was murdered and dismembered under the orders of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Stone’s partner, Paul Manafort, had lobbied on behalf of the Saudi’s and was also close personal friends with Adnan Khashoggi’s one-time brother-in-law and arms dealing partner, Abdul Rahman al-Assir.
Khashoggi’s reputation as the wealthiest man on the planet piqued Trump’s interest. Indeed, Trump admitted to Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne that he “read every word” he could about Khashoggi.
In the late 70s, Trump attended a party in Khashoggi’s swanky Olympic Tower penthouse and subsequently ordered his architect to ensure that the dimensions of his penthouse in Trump Tower were even larger.
In 1989, Trump purchased a 280-foot super yacht from the Sultan of Brunei that once belonged to Khashoggi, which Trump renamed the Trump Princess.
Stone later successfully lobbied Atlantic City authorities to dredge the city’s harbor so the Yacht could be anchored outside of the Trump Castle Resort and Casino.
During Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, Stone and Roy Cohn worked together to find dirt on the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferrarro and her family. Cohn also enlisted the support of Rupert Murdoch’s publications to help them in the effort.
It was also at this time that Stone began to consider Trump’s political prospects. The idea of a Trump candidacy of some kind had already been floated in a 1984 New York Times Magazine cover story of Trump, though Trump claimed in the article that he wouldn’t want to run because of “false smiles and “red tape.”
Stone reportedly met with Trump in Atlantic City to explore whether he would be interested in running against Mario Cuomo in the 1984. Though Trump declined, soon Stone’s political aspirations for his top client would become even more ambitious.
ROGER STONE AND TRUMP’S EARLIEST POLITICAL STIRRINGS
Trump had been asked questions about running for president by celebrity journalists as early as 1980.
Roger Stone began urging Trump to consider running in 1987. In July of that year, Trump registered as a Republican for the first time.
That same month, Trump made his first visit to Moscow in a trip that was arranged by the Soviet State tourist agency, Goscomintourist, which was operated by the KGB.
Shortly after he returned from Moscow, Trump purchased a controlling interest in Resorts International, the aforementioned company that had funded the pro-legalization campaign during the 1976 referendum to allow casinos gambling in Atlantic City.
Roger Stone wasn’t the only one interested in a potential Trump presidential run in those early days.
A July 27th, 1987 edition of Executive Intelligence Review, a publication by the conspiratorial Lyndon Larouche organization, wrote that “[t]he Soviets are reportedly looking a lot more kindly on a possible Presidential bid by Donald Trump, the New York builder who has amassed a fortune through real-estate speculation and owns a controlling interest in the notorious, organized crime linked Resorts International.”
Roger Stone had first met Larouche, a perennial crack-pot candidate for the U.S. presidency known for outlandish conspiracy theories, in 1980, and many years later would claim that he had come to embrace Larouche’s “extraordinary and prophetic thinking.”
In September of ‘87, Trump spent $94,801 to purchase full page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, which articulated a policy position that he would maintain for decades: the United States was being cheated by its allies.
Trump’s first flirtation with a presidential run peaked the next month when on October 22nd he arrived by helicopter to an event in New Hampshire arranged by a Republican named Mike Dunbar who supported a Trump presidential bid. Trump ended speaking at a local Rotary Club before a crowd of 500, many of whom were sporting pro-Trump signage.
Stone would later say in an interview with PBS Frontline that he had arranged the event, characteristically inflating the number of attendees to 2000. However, an extensive article on the New Hampshire speech by Michael Kruse in Politico Magazine makes no mention of Stone. Regardless, it is known that Stone was actively encouraging Trump to consider running.
Trump opened his speech at the Rotary Club by announcing that he wouldn’t be running in 1988. He proceeded to speak for 30 minutes without notes, excoriating America’s allies like Japan and Germany.
“If the right man doesn’t get into office,” Trump prophesied, “you’re going to see a catastrophe in this country in the next four years like you’re never going to believe. And then you’ll be begging for the right man.”
Why did Trump tease the public about a potential presidential run at the particular moment in time? Likely to generate interest in his book, The Art of the Deal, which was about to be released in November and would go on to become a best seller, launching him from the New York tabloids to the national consciousness.
The reception Trump received clearly made an impression on the young developer and planted the seeds for a future candidacy.
Trump continued to address political issues while on Oprah in the spring of 1988 to promote his new book, prompting Winfrey to reply, “This sounds like political, presidential talk to me.”
EXILE FROM MAIN STREET: ROGER STONE, DOGWHISTLE POLITICS, AND THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER “GROUP SEX” SCANDAL
Though Trump didn’t run in the 1988 election, Stone was involved in a number of different capacities. During the primary, he advised Republican Jack Kemp. After Vice President George H.W. Bush got the nod, Stone served as a senior advisor to the Bush.
The Connecticut patrician’s campaign was being managed by another notorious hard-knuckled politico and BMSK partner, Lee Atwater. Paul Manafort served as Bush’s director of operations.
Donald Trump attended the 1988 Republican National Convention, telling Larry King he was there to see “how the system works.”
Time Magazine later accused Stone of participating in the decision to run the infamous Willie Horton ad, masterminded by Atwater. Horton was a prisoner in Massachusetts while Bush’s opponent Michael Dukakis was Governor who had failed to return after participating in weekend furlough program and went on to commit armed robbery, assault and rape.
The vicious attack ad came to symbolize how the Republican mainstream came to fully embrace race-baiting and dog whistle politics. Stone later denied involvement.
“We both knew he believed in nothing,” Stone told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, referring to Atwater. “Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.”
In 1989, Trump engaged in race baiting of his own in an episode that came to be known as the Central Park Five. That year, five black and latino men were convicted of gang-raping and nearly killing a jogger in New York’s Central Park. In the media frenzy that ensued, Trump once again took out full page ads in four New York City newspapers calling for the alleged perpetrators to receive the death penalty. After it was determined that the five men were wrongly convicted of the crime, Trump refused to apologize.
“[Recognize] that this is prior to the rise of [Rudolph] Giuliani,” Stone later said of Trump’s running the ads. “Crime in New York is an enormous problem. It’s become the crime center of the world. Therefore, I think it’s a comment on the deterioration of the quality of life and the safety of the streets in New York. It’s a precursor to the rise of Giuliani and later [Michael] Bloomberg, who bring the crime rates way down.”
As the 1980s turned to the 1990s, Stone continued to lobby for Trump, particularly in the area of Indian gaming, a subject which will be explored more fully in the next article.
There were also developments in Stone’s personal life. Stone divorced his first wife and married Nydia Stone (née Bertran) in 1991. Bertran was the daughter of a diplomat in pre-Casto Cuba who had fled to the United States following the Cuban Revolution.
In 1996, Stone worked on Republican Senators Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. A central plank of Dole’s attacks on President Bill Clinton was to highlight the the Democratic incumbent’s numerous sexual scandals. Thus, it was a significant embarrassment to the Dole campaign when The National Enquirer reported under the salacious headline “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group Sex Ring” that Stone had been placing ads in publications such as Local Swing Fever soliciting “well hung in shape men” to participate in “3-somes” with himself and his wife.
Stone initially claimed that the ads were false plants made by a disgruntled domestic employee he had fired for substance abuse, though he later admitted this was a lie. The scandal led to his resignation from the Dole campaign and exile from mainstream Republican politics.
To the outside world at the time, the episode must have seemed little other than a minor scandal on the sordid periphery of American presidential politics. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that by forcing Stone out of the Republican mainstream and driving him to the political fringe, which would ultimately coalesce years later around the Trump presidential bid, the National Enquirer scandal may in fact have changed history.
The next article in this series will explore how Roger Stone’s years in the political wilderness led to the 2016 Trump campaign.
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