Roger Stone
Roger Jason Stone (born Roger Joseph Stone Jr.; August 27, 1952) is an American conservative political consultant, lobbyist, author, and convicted felon. In November 2019, subsequent to the Mueller Report and Special Counsel investigation, he was convicted on seven counts, including witness tampering and lying to investigators. On February 20, 2020, he was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison. However, incarceration was postponed due to deferment on a decision for a retrial.
Since the 1970s, Stone worked on the campaigns of Republican politicians Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, and Donald Trump. In addition to frequently serving as a campaign adviser, Stone was previously a political lobbyist. In 1980, he co-founded a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm with Paul Manafort and Charles R. Black Jr. The firm recruited Peter G. Kelly and was renamed Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly in 1984. :124 During the 1980s, BMSK became a top lobbying firm by leveraging its White House connections to attract high-paying clients including U.S. corporations and trade associations, as well as foreign governments. By 1990, it was one of the leading lobbyists for American companies and foreign organizations. :125
Stone has been variously described as a "self-proclaimed dirty trickster", a "renowned infighter", a "seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics", a "mendacious windbag", a "veteran Republican strategist", and a political fixer. Over the course of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Stone promoted a number of falsehoods and conspiracy theories. He has described his political modus operandi as "Attack, attack, attack – never defend" and "Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack." Stone first suggested Trump run for president in early 1998 while he was Trump's casino business lobbyist in Washington. The Netflix documentary film Get Me Roger Stone focuses on Stone's past and his role in Trump's presidential campaign.
Stone officially left the Trump campaign on August 8, 2015; however, two associates of Stone have said he collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the 2016 presidential campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton. Stone and Assange have denied these claims. Nearly three-dozen search warrants were unsealed in April 2020 which revealed a web of contacts between Stone, Assange, and other key 2016 Russian interference figures, and that Stone orchestrated hundreds of fake Facebook accounts and bloggers to run a political influence scheme on social media. On January 25, 2019, Stone was arrested at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home in connection with Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation and charged in an indictment with witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and five counts of making false statements. Stone was convicted on all seven counts in November 2019 and was sentenced to 40 months in prison. He was ordered to prison by June 30. On June 24, Stone filed a motion to delay his transfer to prison, alleging potential health concerns connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. On June 27, Judge Amy Berman Jackson rescheduled Stone's surrender date as July 14, but also ordered him to immediately begin serving time in home confinement before reporting to prison
Stone was born on August 27, 1952, in Norwalk, Connecticut, to Gloria Rose (Corbo) and Roger J. Stone. He grew up in Lewisboro, New York. His mother was a small-town reporter, his father a well driller and business owner. He has described his family as middle-class, blue-collar Catholics.
Stone said that as an elementary school student in 1960, he broke into politics to further John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign: "I remember going through the cafeteria line and telling every kid that Nixon was in favor of school on Saturdays ... It was my first political trick."
When he was a junior and vice president of student government at his high school in northern Westchester County, New York, he manipulated the ouster of the president and succeeded him. Stone recalled how he ran for election as president for his senior year:
I built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket. Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that's mean? No, it's smart.
Given a copy of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, Stone became a convert to conservatism as a child and a volunteer in Goldwater's 1964 campaign. In 2007, Stone indicated he was a staunch conservative but with libertarian leanings.
As a student at George Washington University in 1972, Stone invited Jeb Magruder to speak at a Young Republicans Club meeting, then asked Magruder for a job with Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President. Magruder agreed and Stone then left college to work for the committee
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