The arrest of Roger Stone as part of the Mueller investigation on Friday was on seven separate criminal counts, each detailed in the screenplay-waiting-to-happen that is his indictment. The self-described ‘dirty trickster’ and curator of the presidential notions of Donald Trump continues to follow the playbook of Stone’s Rules he proselytised in the 2017 Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone – ‘deny, deny, deny’ now acting as synonym for ‘not guilty.’ The eccentricities and evil genius of Stone are bizarre bordering on brilliance, as he holds up his signature pose outside a Floridian courthouse one can only speculate what will come next. He says to ‘never pass up the opportunity to have sex or be on television,’ and we wonder what made this man so fame-hungry, and what is he willing to do to once again bask in the spotlight?
[art by alex merto]
Donald Trump told New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin in 2008 that, ‘Roger is a stone-cold loser. He always tries taking credit for things he never did.’ With Stone, fact and fiction are merely malleable parts of a story, ethics are optional, publicity is essential. Upon reading Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative in childhood, his blood turned Republican red and at nineteen, it had spattered on his hands. In 1972, Stone was working on the campaign to re-elect Republican president Richard Nixon, the face of whom he would later get tattooed on his back. Under the alias of Jason Rainier, Stone made financial contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to Nixon’s opposition. He alerted the media and, with the receipt, ‘proved’ Pete McCloskey was too left-wing to be presidential. The first of his ‘dirty tricks,’ perhaps the most mild, but one which implicated him in the Watergate scandal and gave Mr. Stone his first taste of infamy.
Infatuated with the Nixonite era, with Nixon himself, ‘because of his indestructibility and resilience,’ Roger Stone established a political consulting firm where he is accredited with being the man who manipulated the exodus of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ to the Republican party, without which there would have been no Reagan presidency. Those he would help elect, he would then lobby. It earned him the title of State-of-the-Art Sleazeball who, as Reagan’s political director said, ‘was always a little rat. I don’t think you’ll find anyone in the business who trusts him.’
In 1996, while working on the Bob Dole campaign, Stone became the feature of his own scandal. Headlined ‘Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring,’ The National Enquirer reported that ads, commissioned by Stone and his wife, were being run the magazine Local Swing Fever. ‘Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband,’ the ad read, ‘seek similar couples or exceptional muscular single men.’ The Stones’ photograph was inserted beside the part of the ad which discouraged overweight candidates. It was undeniable, but ‘deny, deny, deny’ Stone did. He was forced to resign from the Dole campaign and became a political pariah for the following decades, throwing caution to the wind in 2008 and revealing that, since his grandparents were now dead, he was ready to admit that the advertisement was, in fact, his own doing.
Since the 80s, Roger Stone had been courting Donald Trump, to marry him to the idea of a presidential run, to which he was always met with sneers. He was an informal confidante of the billionaire who, in 2000, eventually inflated both Trump’s ego and ambitions, and directed the exploratory committee for a Trump presidential bid. As 2016 loomed, Roger was Trump’s top political strategists but, 3 months into working on the campaign, he was out. He was brandished a publicity seeker by Trump, but their lovers tiff didn’t last long – the hiring of Paul Manafort in March 2016 was by Roger’s hand.
Perhaps it is being generous to ascribe the Trump presidency to a malevolent circus of horrors of which Roger Stone is the ringmaster, but it is indisputable that the Stone philosophies have poisoned the already septic superintendence of the Trump administration. These links are manifested in the President’s adherence to another of Stone’s rules that, ‘politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people. The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring’ – and being boring is something recent developments certainly are not.
The Mueller Special Counsel Investigation indicted Roger on Friday last, the 24-page document detailed his knowledge of and the Trump campaign’s knowledge of the contents of the Russian-recovered Hillary Clinton emails prior to their ‘official’ leakage by Julian Assange in 2016. Stone publicly claimed many times that he was aware of these emails, many of which damaged Clinton and the Democratic National Committee and proved the deliberate undermining of the Sanders’ campaign by the party. In consequent months however, Mr. Stone feigned ignorance and flip-flopped, telling TIME that he neither knew Assange nor had knowledge of Russian hacking, he only liked Russian vodka. The indictment, however, provides testimony to texts exchanged between Stone and a ‘senior Trump Campaign official’ to whom he then told ‘about potential future releases of damaging material by [Wikileaks].’
Arrested on seven counts, Stone was released to a media swarm on Friday afternoon on a $250,000 bond and travel restriction. He continues to make TV appearances – he will revel in this fame as much as his naysayers’ hatred. But will he turn on Trump and be a witness to his collusion with Russia in exchange for amnesty? His seven convictions include perjury and witness tampering, all of which even he cannot possibly deny and discount as a witch hunt. On the steps of the Floridian courthouse he said, ‘there is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president.’ His loyalty to his politics is perhaps what has preserved Stone as a boomerang in the US political sphere, but to Trump, it is reported by Vanity Fair, Roger’s loyalty is waning. A Republican close to Trump allegedly revealed, ‘Stone knows Donald isn’t loyal. He calls him ‘Mr Ingratitude.’’ All the President is hoping is that Stone casts himself as the martyr of Nixonian Republicanism and dirty tricks. There is an unpredictability to Stone which is making Trump sweat – is Mueller closing in? Or will he again be vindicated? Stone is clear on his rules, if not his ethics – ‘He who speaks first, loses.’