Roger Stone

Op-Ed By Roger Stone: The Real ‘Stop The Steal’ Story

Once the corporately-owned and alternative left media cancels, deplatforms, and censures Republicans and conservatives, they set out to rewrite political history to fit their current narrative.
Op-Ed By Roger Stone, Photo courtesy of stonezone.com

Once the corporately-owned and alternative left media cancels, de-platforms, and censures Republicans and conservatives, they set out to rewrite political history to fit their current narrative.

In recent weeks, I have seen wildly inaccurate stories in the Daily Kos, Random Lengths News and now in The Nation, alleging that my 40 years of American political activity has been one long development of the “Stop the Steal” movement which they deem to be illegitimate and seditious.

Being liberals, they never let facts get in the way of a good story. If you believe their twisted narrative, I am the “self-described dirty trickster” who has orchestrated their defeat since the 1980s. While I have never described myself that way, I have merely acknowledged that bitter Democrats who face defeat based on their own strategic errors have saddled me with that moniker.

Let’s start in 1981. After Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, I was retained by former New Jersey Assembly Speaker Thomas H. Kean as his strategic consultant in his second bid for the Governorship of New Jersey.

Kean was a moderate Republican who had actually marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a college student, and, along with Congressman Jack Kemp – whose presidential campaign I supported in 1988 – was a proponent of a broader and more inclusive Republican Party with a specific outreach to African-Americans.

Congressman James J. Florio of Cherry Hill was the heavy favorite. Florio had run for Governor four years previously, challenging New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne in the primary.

With my help, Kean moved right on economic issues, championing the Reagan tax cut and putting forth his own state tax cut proposal that was publicly embraced by both Congressman Jack Kemp and early Supply-Side apostle Jeffrey Bell (who had defeated New Jersey U.S. Senator Clifford Case in the 1978 primary). Representative James A. Courter, a Congressman from Western New Jersey and a staunch conservative, chaired Kean’s campaign.

New Jersey was first experimenting with campaign public finance and matching funds. Although a patrician, Kean had a very likable manner, as well as deep relationships in the inner-city of Newark. Kean, to his credit, stayed on message and ran a letter perfect campaign where Florio made a number of strategic mistakes.

On election day 1981, Tom Kean was elected Governor by 1,797 votes out of two-and-a-half million cast; triggering an automatic recount.

The backdrop of this recount, however, was a Republican National Committee-funded project called The National Ballot Security Task Force that entailed armed individuals at some polling places and armbands for poll watchers. The Democrats and the media immediately accused Kean and the Republicans of voter intimidation.

Tom Kean was furious because it would marr a stunning coming-from-behind victory. I was also furious because, as subsequent litigation proved, I knew nothing about the program. Neither did Republican State Party Chairman Phillip D. Kaltenbacher, who had served in the New Jersey State Assembly with Kean.

A piece published by Rutgers University recently falsely claimed that I knew about or was involved in what was not only a stupid but a completely unnecessary election day operation. It’s a lie.

I learned, in retrospect, who both came up with the idea for and funded the political operation that so embarrassed Governor Kean but which fortunately did not derail Kean’s governorship. There is not a shred of evidence of my involvement but that doesn’t stop a leftist college publication from defaming me.

Then, of course, there is the famous “Brooks Brothers riot.” Contrary to multiple media reports, a crowd of Republican volunteers did not, as a mob, shut down the counting of paper ballots in Miami-Dade County. They did, however, prevent two Democrat officials from taking a substantial sheaf of ballots—which had already been recounted twice—out of the central counting room and into an anteroom where there were no windows and no Republican poll watchers. This is, of course, a direct violation of Florida’s state Sunshine Law.

This is not the dramatized event involving Miami-Dade Commissioner Joe Geller which is fictionalized in the HBO movie ‘Recount.’ Yes, I gave the order to demand that ballots not be taken into private in violation of state law. At that point, the Democrats had already demanded a third recounting of the same ballots, and when they realized there were no new votes to be found they threw in the towel; making George W. Bush President. The Wikipedia page regarding the “Brooks Brothers riot” is a hilarious fairy-tale and total bullshit.

All of the colorful details of my operating from a trailer and using a walkie-talkie don’t change the historical facts. I was asked to oversee the recount by James A. Baker III, who recalled my previous experience in New Jersey in 1981.

‘Stop the Steal’ actually originated at the 1952 Republican National Convention when Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio arrived in the convention city of Chicago with a sufficient number of first ballot votes to be nominated. Because the Republican National Convention is governed by its own rules, the forces supporting General Dwight D. Eisenhower mounted a challenge in the Credential’s Committee; unseating Taft delegates in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana based on the spurious claim that state party officials in those states had kept the location of the state caucuses that selected delegates from the Eisenhower forces. The gambit worked when the convention approved a Credentials Committee report seating the Eisenhower delegates who were claiming that their votes had been stolen. Ike was nominated on the first ballot and went on to become President.

In 2016, Senator Ted Cruz, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced that they would launch a convention fight to stop Donald Trump, who had rolled up enough delegates to be nominated on the first ballot, from the nomination. I believed that the Republican establishment, setting out to stop Trump, would challenge the results of the delegate selection process in multiple states including Colorado and Texas.

I also recognized that although Trump had swept many state primaries and caucuses, the actual delegates appointed, at large by state party officials, were anti-Trump. Both in 1952 for Dwight Eisenhower and in 1940 for Wendell Willkie, grassroots supporters would visit the hotels of their “duly elected delegates” to urge them to vote based on the state’s primary results rather than on their own preferences. When I called for letting Trump supporters know the hotel location of various delegations where Trump’s grassroots legions could lobby their state delegates I was, of course, depicted falsely by the media as having issued a “call to violence.”

In the run-up to the 2016 election, I began to worry about the technology that connected computerized voting machines with a central server. I even wrote an op-ed piece about it for The Hill after interviewing several computer scientists who proved how easily one could manipulate the voting machines with a simple $35 device from Best Buy. I was immediately attacked by the Clinton campaign and by Media Matters for America because they said I was “planning to deny the results of the election;” exactly what they did after Donald Trump won.

I devised a program of exit polling in which voters could be voluntarily interviewed after they cast their ballots, with the intention of comparing the results of the exit poll with the ultimate results reported from the voting machines. Once again, the Democrats claimed that Donald Trump and I were engaging in “voter intimidation.” Both Trump and I were sued by the Democratic National Committee and five individual state Democrat Parties who asked for a federal injunction to stop our perfectly legal exit polling exercise. The Democrats lost in five different Federal courts when the courts refused to issue the restraining order based on our simple argument that if you were only talking to a voter after they had voted, you could not possibly be intimidating them regarding their already cast vote. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly refused to hear an appeal from the Democrats.

You won’t find these facts reported in any of the false narratives promulgated by the legacy media or their Democrat allies.

The irony, of course, is that after chiding Donald Trump about his unwillingness to declare before the election that he would accept the results, it was actually Hillary Clinton and her campaign who demanded recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. It was also Hillary Clinton and John Podesta who argued for a delay in the certification of the Electoral College vote in the U.S. Senate -even demanding that a Clinton-appointed attorney be allowed to make a presentation to the Electors alleging “Russian collusion” in the outcome of an election. The Washington Post falsely claims that Trump’s election was only challenged by a small handful of Democrat Congressmen. A simple Google News search, of course, proves that that is a lie. Interestingly, no one accused Hillary Clinton of sedition or treason.

Now, congenital liar and conman Adam Schiff and his understudy Jamie Raskin, are falsely accusing me of being involved in both the illegal activities at the Capitol on January 6th, as well as the effort to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to several state legislatures so that the voting results in those states could be reviewed. I was involved in neither one.

I went to Washington D.C. to speak in a legally permitted rally on Freedom Plaza during the night of January 5th, where I exercised my First Amendment right to question the anomalies and irregularities in the 2020 election results, and to describe what I believe is the apocalyptic struggle facing the country. Nowhere in my remarks do I advocate lawlessness, violence, or insurrection.

Unfortunately, YouTube removed my fine speech but I see that the unselect committee utilized it in order to defame me. By law and the Constitution, I am entitled to express my opinion on political matters of the day.

Equally false is the hearsay spit up by former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who Representative Liz Cheney coached to say that it was, her “understanding” that President Trump had directed his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to call both me and General Michael Flynn on January 5th to, as Cheney improvised, to find out what was going to happen on January 6th. Notice the careful wording of this smear.

No such call ever took place, and, in fact, I have never spoken to Mark Meadows on the telephone in my entire life. I did meet him once in 2019 when he was still a Congressman. General Flynn has told me he has also never spoken to Meadows on the phone, particularly on January 5th or 6th.

Hutchinson, coached by Cheney, goes on to say that it was her “understanding” that some of President’s Trump allies had set up a “war room” at the Willard Hotel but that she had dissuaded Meadows from attending a briefing there and that Meadows later participated in a briefing by phone with Roger Stone and General Flynn. This is a lie.

If there was a “war room” at the Willard, I was unaware of it. Even the Washington Post reported that three separate sources involved in the legal machinations by Rudy Giuliani and Prof. John Eastman, told the Post that I was not involved.

The broad use of “guilt by association” insists that just because I know President Donald Trump, know individual members of the Proud Boys, and came in contact with members of the Oath Keepers, means that I must have known of their alleged plans to storm the Capital. There is no witness, no e-mail, no phone call, no text message, no encrypted message, and no documentary film footage that would prove otherwise.

When it comes to complete fabrication, it’s really hard to beat The Guardian. Their report that a documentary film crew captured Ali Alexander and I conspiring on January 5th or 6th is but another lie.

Adam Schiff, who insisted for two years that he had seen more than circumstantial evidence of “Russian collusion” with the Trump campaign and produced none, is now re-cycling the same tactic regarding January 6th, claiming falsely that his bogus investigation has established “ties” between Stone, Flynn and “extremist groups.” Once again, he has nothing. The ominous claim by both Schiff and his understudy in this particularly odious sleight of hand, Jamie Raskin, that their investigation continues, is a baseless smear.

This is Witch-Hunt 3.0. Why would anyone believe Adam Schiff who lied about having seen “more than circumstantial evidence of Russian collusion,” falsely accused Donald Trump Jr. of receiving assistance from Russian assets (who we now know to be Fusion GPS plants who provided nothing), lied about a Ukrainian whistleblower who turned out to be a member of his staff, altered text messages between White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Congressman Jim Jordan before leaking them, and insisted that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation direct from the Kremlin?” You can always tell when Adam Schiff is lying; his lips are moving.

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