“Past is F*ing Prologue,” - The Origins of the Roger Stone-Donald Trump Relationship and the Ghost of Political Scandals Past
“Past is fucking prologue,” — Stone’s Rule #4
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
ROGER STONE AND THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION
Convicted felon Roger Stone, one of America’s most infamous masters of the political dark arts and a longtime friend and advisor to former President Donald Trump, has come under renewed scrutiny for his promotion of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and for his activities in and around the January 6th insurrection.
Despite achieving prominence following the 2020 election, the idea that the election would be “rigged” against Trump was actually formulated and promulgated before the 2016 election.
The “Stop the Steal” rally that Trump addressed on January 6th immediately prior to the assault on the Capitol borrowed the phrase “Stop the Steal” from Stone, who had coined it as far back the 2016 Republican primaries.
In 2015, Stone facilitated Donald Trump’s first interview with Alex Jones of InfoWars. Jones, America’s most prominent conspiracy theorist, later introduced the idea that the 2016 election was going to be “rigged” against Trump.
Two days after Jones did so, Trump echoed the idea that the upcoming election would be “rigged” at a rally in Columbus, Ohio held on August 1st, 2016. Thus a seed was planted that would germinate for over five years. While Trump’s upset victory in 2016 obviated the need for the “Big Lie,” it was dusted off and put back into use after he lost the 2020 election.
Stone is also linked to groups that were centrally involved in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
Early in the Trump presidency, Stone was a central figure in the so-called “Russia investigation” conducted by the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
At critical moments during the 2016 election, Stone was in touch with an online avatar operated by Russian military intelligence, the entity that hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign and later provided the stolen emails to Wikileaks.
Shortly thereafter, Stone made public statements which suggested that he had prior, non-public knowledge that Wikileaks was in possession of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails.
Investigators have never been able to determine how Stone came into possession of this information. The investigation into Stone was obstructed and Trump later pardoned his old friend.
Stone lied under oath in testimony relating to these matters before Congress. He was subsequently indicted by Mueller’s prosecutors, with additional charges such as witness tampering to follow.
After being arrested and released on bail, Stone began interacting and coordinating with the now notorious right-wing group the Proud Boys, who occasionally served as his “body guards” during the various rallies and legal proceedings that followed.
Stone became friendly with Enrique “Ricky” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who is currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy.
According to the Washington Post, the FBI is investigating Stone and Alex Jones’ connections to the Proud Boys.
The far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, members of which are also currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy for storming the U.S. Capital, also have links to Roger Stone. During the protests in and around Washington, D.C. on January 5th and 6th, members of the Oath Keepers provided Roger Stone with security.
Oath Keeper Roberto Minuta, who is named in the indictment alongside Oath Keeper leader Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, was seen with Stone outside the Willard hotel in Washington, D.C. on the morning of January 6th. Alex Jones was also staying in a suite at the Willard Hotel, where he interviewed former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, one of the lead cheerleaders of the “rigged” election canard.
In another suite was located the so-called “Command Center” where, at various times, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, among others, plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the lead up to, and during, the January 6th insurrection.
The exact role Roger Stone played in the unprecedented events of the January 6th insurrection remains to be fully explained. The path that led him to January 6th involves decades worth of involvement in political scandals, corruption, and criminal election stunts.
Stone developed an early conviction that American elections are often determined by dirty tricks, criminal associations and subterfuge. An account of Stone’s life, and the story of the circumstances by which he met Donald Trump, paints a disturbing picture.
ROGER STONE, RICHARD NIXON, AND WATERGATE
Roger Stone was born in 1952 and grew up in Lewisboro, New York. Half Italian and half Hungarian, Stone’s mother wrote for a local newspaper and his father was a laborer who dug wells for a living.
Though as a child he had supported John F. Kennedy because he was Catholic and “had better hair than Nixon,” upon receiving a copy of Barry Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative, Stone became a staunch Republican at the age of 11.
“I read this book,” Stone told The Washington Post, “and I was completely transformed into a zealot.”
During Goldwater’s Presidential run, Stone rode his bike to the local campaign headquarters after school each day to lick envelopes and run errands. The 12 year-old Stone cried after Goldwater lost. However, his passion for politics remained undimmed. By age 13 Stone was taking the train into New York City to work weekends for William F. Buckley, Jr’s unsuccessful bid to become mayor.
Stone developed an early fascination with Richard Nixon and came to believe that he “had been fucked out of the presidency in 1960, thanks to Joe Kennedy and [his] mob friends.”
It is worth pausing for a moment to note how alleged acts of chicanery in the 1960 presidential election influenced Stone’s views on politics.
Another individual who believed the 1960 election had been stolen was Richard Nixon himself. Indeed, this belief influenced Nixon’s later sabotaging of President Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations in Vietnam during the 1968 election, as well as the activities and events the led to the Watergate scandal.
After Nixon’s 1960 loss, Stone penned a letter to the candidate encouraging him to run again. Nixon replied with a thank you note, telling Stone that he had no plans to run again but if he did, he would be in touch. Stone’s passion for Nixon would remain undimmed for the rest of his life, ultimately leading him to get a tattoo of the former President on his back.
Stone later moved to Washington, DC to attend George Washington University. At a time when the counterculture movement was in full steam, Stone joined the Young American’s for Freedom.
During Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, Stone invited Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), to speak before the college’s Young Republican Club. “There are a bunch of hippie-type, leftwing, pinko degenerates that attend and harass him, but he handles it okay,” Stone recalled of the event.
Afterwards, Stone asked Magruder for a job and was hired. He dropped out of college and joined CREEP.
Stone served as the assistant to the President of CREEP Bart Porter, who also ran the organizations notorious dirty tricks operations. During the day, the 19 year-old Stone worked as a scheduler for Nixon campaign surrogates. “By night, I’m trafficking in the black arts. Nixon’s people were obsessed with intelligence.”
Under orders from Porter, Stone arranged for a spy named Michael McMinoway, operating under the codename Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign.
Under the pseudonym Jason Rainier, Stone provided donations in the name of the Young Socialist to the campaign of Democrat Pete McCloskey and then forwarded the receipts to the newspaper. Stone’s experiences during the Nixon campaign would have an enduring influence on both his political ideology and his reputation as a “dirty trickster.”
It’s a reputation that far from run away from, he’s spent a lifetime cultivating.
“Roger likes the aura of having done something bad in the past,” said Stone friend David Keene in reference to his hijinks for CREEP during the Nixon reelection campaign. “You get the feeling that he’s sorry it was so minor. He likes to say, ‘Watch me, I’m a tough guy.’”
After Nixon won reelection in 1972, Stone got a job at the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was responsible for many of the programs initiated under Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. As Stone describes it, H.R. “Bob” Halderman’s, “charge to us was to dismantle, replace, and fire everybody.”
A year later Halderman was embroiled in the raging Watergate scandal and was tried on counts of perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Stone had been renting a room from Bart Porter. On the evening of the Watergate break-in, Stone claims that Porter was out of town so he took urgent phone messages from a variety of individuals associated with the break-in, including G. Gordon Liddy, chief operative of the White House Plumbers unit.
Nixon went on to become the first and only President to resign from office to avoid being impeached and removed.
Following Nixon’s fall from grace, Stone got a job in December 1973 as a junior staffer for Senator Robert Dole. However, six months after he began, Stone’s association with the “Ratfuckers” of the Nixon campaign was revealed during a Congressional hearing and he was forced to leave Dole’s staff.
In the immediate aftermath of Watergate, many Republicans wished to avoid the taint of scandal and Stone admits, “It was tough to get a job for a couple of years.”
ROGER STONE AND THE REAGAN REVOLUTION
In 1976, Stone served on Ronald Reagan’s first unsuccessful attempt to garner the Republican nomination as the campaigns Youth Director. A year later he formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee with fellow young Republicans Charles Black and Terry Dolan.
The Committee pioneered the practice of bundling campaign contributions in order to circumvent campaign finance limits on individual contributions. It served as a precursor to super Political Action Committees (PACs) that came to dominate politics. It was at this time that Stone worked beneath the legendary Republican pollster and negative campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who had an enduring influence on Stone.
In the spring of 1977, Stone ran to be the chairman of the Young Republicans. A network of influential Republicans between the ages of 18–40, in the days of brokered conventions the Young Republicans was an influential organization. Stone’s candidacy was managed by a young, up-and-coming Republican operative named Paul Manafort.
Manafort later served as chairman of the 2016 Trump Campaign after Stone lobbied the candidate to hire him. Stone and Manafort had known each other from their days in the College Republicans. Manafort managed to convince Stone’s chief rival to run for treasurer instead of president with a promise of future support that he later broke.
Stone won after a campaign that Manafort would later describe as, “one of the great fuck jobs.”
By the time Stone was elected Chairman of the Young Republicans, he was already working on Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In this capacity, Stone was introduced to one of America’s most infamous lawyers and political fixers: Roy Cohn.
Stone’s meeting with Roy Cohn in 1979 was perhaps one of the most consequential of his life. Years later, whenever asked about who his heroes were, Stone listed Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon and the Duke of Windsor. It was an unconventional list, but revealing of the man’s taste and character.
ROY COHN AND THE BIRTH OF THE ROGER STONE-DONALD TRUMP POLITICAL ALLIANCE
Roy Cohn exploded into the American national consciousness as an infamous player in the Red Scare of the 1950s. With the drawing of the Iron Curtain, the onset of the Cold War and the discovery of significant Soviet intelligence infiltration of American political, military and scientific institutions, a sense of fear and in many cases near hysteria swept over the body politic. As is so often the case in moments such as these, reasonable fears can be seized upon by unscrupulous demagogues for their own political purposes.
Cohn was a child prodigy. He graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and through his family’s political connections landed a job at the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. His early cases involved the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss, and the infamous Rosenberg trial. The most controversial part of the trial came during sentencing. The Rosenbergs, accused of sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets, were found guilty.
Cohn claimed that the judge presiding over the trial, Judge Irving Kaufman, owed his position to Cohn’s father, who was a judge based out of the Bronx. Cohn further claimed that he had Kaufman assigned to the case through his connections to the district court’s clerk office. Evidence suggests that Cohn engaged in inappropriate communications with Judge Kaufman at the time he was contemplating what sentences to impose. Cohn suggested the death penalty, and that’s what the Rosenbergs received.
The vast majority of individuals caught up in the Red Scare were innocent and many lives were needlessly destroyed. The demagoguery, hysteria and self-serving cynicism of the era found its personification in Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, giving rise to the epithet McCarthyism.
Cohn started working with Joe McCarthy as his chief counsel in 1953. McCarthy had built a national profile by making outlandish claims of Communist infiltration and subversion infecting nearly all walks of American life, from Hollywood to the State Department to the Pentagon. McCarthy and Cohn’s hunt for hidden Communists inordinately impacted members of the Jewish faith and homosexuals.
For Cohn to have played such a prominent role in the persecution of these communities was curious indeed as he was both Jewish and a closeted homosexual.
McCarthy’s enemies found the opportunity to pounce when it came to the drafting into the military of G. David Schine, an unpaid “Chief Consultant” working with McCarthy and Cohn. After it became clear that Cohn was seeking preferential treatment for Schine, a scandal broke and culminated in the the Army-McCarthy Hearings.
The hearings led to McCarthy’s downfall and Cohn’s banishment from Washington. Cohn was outclassed and out-lawyered by the Chief Counsel of the US Army Joseph N. Welch, who in a confrontation with McCarthy uttered the phrase that marked the end of the McCarthy era, “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”
Cohn returned to New York where he became one of the city’s most influential power brokers. He developed a reputation as a “legal executioner.” His methods were relentless and unethical.
His professional and personal life were constantly under scrutiny, and yet he always seemed to get away with it. In the 1960’s, when his rival Robert Kennedy was Attorney General, Cohn was indicted four times but acquitted in each an every case. In the 1970’s he was charged with violating banking laws in Illinois and was again acquitted.
Cohn represented the most senior members of the American Mafia. He once boasted that he had gotten Irving Saypol, the the prosecutor of the Rosenberg case, his job as US Attorney. According to Cohn, Saypol’s appointment needed to be approved by Frank Costello, boss of the legendary Luciano crime family (later known as the Genovese crime family), one of the New York mafia’s infamous Five Families.
“In those days, nobody became U.S. Attorney in New York without the O.K. from the mob,” Cohn stated. “But Saypol would not have gotten the nod from Costello without me.”
Cohn’s connections to the FBI, he was a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s, along with his network judges, prosecutors and district attorneys, made him an ideal lawyer for a wide range of mafioso. His clients included Genovese Crime Family underboss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Bonanno boss Carmine “Nino” Galante and numerous members of the Gambino crime family including Carmine Fatico, Aniello Dellacroce, Tommy and Joe Gambino, Angelo Ruggiero and a young and a then little known mobster by the name of John Gotti.
Federal anti-organized crime strike force members told Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman that in the 70s, when wiretapping was increasingly becoming an issue, members of “The Commission,” the governing body of the American mafia, met in Roy’s office because attorney-client privilege made recordings in-admissible in court.
While at the top of his game as a political fixer and mafia attorney in New York, Roy Cohn met a brash young real estate developer by the name of Donald J. Trump.
In 1973, the U.S. Justice Department sued the Trump Organization for housing discrimination against blacks. After a chance encounter at a Manhattan watering hole called Le Club in which Trump bemoaned the timidity of his lawyers, Cohn took Trump on as a client. In typical Cohn fashion, he countersued DOJ for $100 million. The case eventually settled.
Trump was enthralled with Cohn, who went on to play a pivotal role in Manhattan real estate career. Trump also developed a new appreciation for the benefits of having a consummate legal fixer that he took with him to the White House.
Roger Stone tells several variations of the story of how he first met Roy Cohn in 1979. In one version of events, Stone first met Cohn at a party held by Sheila Mosler, a socialite and vice chairman of the New York County Republican Committee.
In another, Roy Cohn’s name came up on a rolodex given to him by Michael Deaver, an advisor to Ronald Reagan. At the time, the 27-year old Stone was the political director of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for the Reagan Campaign.
Regardless of how initial contact was made, all the stories end up with Roger visiting Roy at his 68th Street townhouse in Manhattan.
“When I got there, Roy was in his bathrobe, eating three strips of bacon burned crisp and both halves of a deviled egg,” Stone later recalled. He noticed a heavy set man sitting next to Cohn.
“Mr. Stone, I want you to meet Tony Salerno,” Cohn said, introducing the young Reagan staffer to the underboss of the Genovese crime family.
“So Roy says we’re going with Reagan this time,” Salerno chimed in. Stone launched into his pitch for Reagan as Cohn and Fat Tony listened intently.
“You know, Tony, everything’s fixed.” Stone quoted Cohn as saying. “Everything can be handled.” Salerno mentioned the Supreme Court. Cohn continued. “Cost a few more dollars.”
“He started telling me how he was going to help me set up the Reagan Campaign,” Stone said of Cohn. “[E]verything from union endorsements to office space. He told me to ride down to the courthouse with him. He had a young lawyer with him, and it was clear that Roy knew nothing about the case he was going to argue. But he knew it didn’t matter. He used to say, ‘Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge.’ Roy knew how the world worked.”
Years later, Stone told the reporter Matt Labash that he suggested to Cohn that if they could get the candidate John B. Anderson to make a bid for the Presidency on behalf of New York’s Liberal Party, it would split the vote between Carter and Anderson and deliver the New York to Reagan.
“Let me look into it,” Roy replied. Shortly thereafter, Cohn told Stone, “You need to go see this lawyer… and see what his number is.”
“Roy, I don’t understand,” Stone replied.
“How much cash he wants, dumbfuck,” Cohn shouted.
Stone claims to have visited the lawyer and learned that his number was $125,000 cash. Thinking the number was outlandish, Roger returned to Cohn thinking with a number that high that was the end of it. Not according to Cohn, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?”
“There’s a suitcase,” Stone explained to Labash. “I don’t look in the suitcase… I don’t even know what was in the suitcase… I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”
Remarkably, neither Stone’s introduction to a crime boss, nor the alleged plot to split the liberal vote, was the most important consequence of his meeting with Roy Cohn. Cohn provided Stone with an introduction that would change the course of American history.
“You need to meet Donald and his father,” Cohn insisted. “They’d be perfect for this. Let me set up a meeting.”
“I went to go see him,” Stone recalled, “and Trump said, ‘How do you get Reagan to 270 electoral votes?’ He was very interested [in the mechanics] — a political junkie. Then he said, ‘O.K., we are in. Go see my father.”
Stone travelled to Fred Trump’s Avenue Z office in Coney Island. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan for President.’ It was not illegal — it was bundling. Check trading.”
The Trumps even arranged for Stone to open Reagan’s New York City campaign headquarters in a townhouse next to the 21 Club. It was the beginning of a fateful political alliance.
Roger Stone was hardly the only member of the Reagan Campaign that Cohn was connected to. According to notes taken by Cohn‘s switchboard operator, Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, William Casey, “called Roy almost daily during [Reagan’s] 1st election.”
Casey was a Wall Street investor and a veteran of America’s World War II-era intelligence service the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). Following the 1980 election, reporters and researchers alleged that Casey cut an “October Surprise” deal with the Iranians, who were holding American diplomatic personnel hostage, to wait until after the election to release them.
Nearly four decades later, Stone and another 1980 Reagan campaign alum, Paul Manafort, would be suspected of “colluding” with a foreign adversary to impact a domestic election.
Interestingly, Stone addressed the so-called “October Surprise” allegations in a book he co-authored with Saint John Hunt during the 2016 Republican primary attacking Jeb Bush and the Bush family in general.
“The Reagan/Bush camp needed to cut a secret deal with the Iranians not to release the hostages before the election,” Stone and Hunt write in Jeb! And The Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty.
“As it turned out, the hostages were not released as Carter had promised, and partly as a result of the years-long standoff with the Iranians, Carter lost the election. On January 21st, 1981, the very day that Reagan and Bush were being sworn in, the hostages found themselves on a plane to freedom. Coincidence? The accusations that Reagan and Bush had somehow thwarted the Carter/Iranian deal to free the hostages by election time, thereby winning the election for [Reagan], were rampant. How much of a role did [Bush] play? That’s the million dollar question.”
Stone and Hunt later continue, “Political researcher Robert Morrow interviewed retired admiral Bobby Ray Inman in 2009 in Austin, Texas. Inman, who was involved in intelligence for over 25 years, told Morrow that he was convinced that the Reagan campaign made a deal with the Iranians not to release the American hostages until after the 1980 general election. Inman said he was completely convinced Reagan campaign chair William Casey was involved in such a deal, but he said he did not think G.H.W. Bush was involved because Casey hated Bush. Inman worked at high levels of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency while Bush was CIA director in 1976 and they developed a close working relationship.”
“So, as with so many other “facts,” we come to our own conclusions. Do we believe that our candidate was honest and would never dream of co-opting a presidential deal for his own gain? No, I say.” A curious thing to say, seeing as Stone himself had worked on the campaign.
So it appears that just as be believed that Joseph Kennedy had used his connections to Organized Crime to steal the 1960 election, Roger Stone is just as convinced that Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, who later became Reagan’s director of the CIA and became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, had negotiated with enemies of the United States to engage in activities that would impact the outcome of a Presidential election.
Thirty six years later, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would find himself courting help from another American adversary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Roger Stone was exactly where he wanted to be, at the very heart of the controversy.
Forty years later, decades of political corruption and lies would culminate in a violent assault on the very seat of American democracy.
The next article will cover Stone’s involvement in the 1981 New Jersey Governors race and lobbying work for Donald Trump.
You can find my collected writings here.