With the firehose of right-wing diarrhea running full bore all the time, much of it echoed daily in the mainstream “liberal” media, it is hard to recall the recent details of how the Party of Lincoln (so hated his election forced the immediate secession of eleven US states) morphed into the Party of Trump (so loved that his violent attempt to overturn an election is just a reflection of his indomitable, winning spirit, the rascal!). The January 6 Committee, investigating the riot that Trump and his co-conspirators organized, funded, whipped up and unleashed, has recently subpoenaed one of Trump’s biggest backers and strategists, political dirty trickster Roger Fucking Stone. Who is Stone?

Roger Stone, self-proclaimed political dirty trickster, is, how to put it delicately? A toxic piece of shit, I suppose is the least offensive way to describe him. He is the living incarnation of Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, without the law license. Cohn, as cunningly evil a man as ever lived, is currently spending eternity in hell, at Satan’s right hand.

Self-proclaimed rat fucker Roger Stone continues to do what he has always done, fuck rats. He has been well-paid for this act, during his long, dirty career as agent provocateur and political scam artist. He’s come a long way from being the youngest person implicated in the Watergate cover-up. During the witch hunt of his protege Trump, when he repeatedly lied to Mueller’s investigators, he did his best to keep the boss safe. Afterward in federal court Stone continued to play the buffoon (as when he playfully trolled the judge by putting a rifle target on her face) and be as defiant as the law would allow. He was convicted of lying, threatening witnesses and obstructing justice, as a loyal friend will do in an exchange of political favors. At one point experts felt he could face up to fifty years behind bars, the DOJ asked the judge for nine years, before Barr later cut the recommended sentence by a hefty slice of years.

Here is the skinny on the man who made lobbying what it is today by the innovation of working on an electoral campaign and then selling access to and influence with those people when they are elected — a political influence machine that raked in millions during decades of political dirty tricks, with his equally amoral partner, fellow Trump-pardoned felon Paul Manafort.

A longtime friend of Donald Trump,^[10][11] Stone has been variously described as a “renowned infighter”, a “seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics”, a “mendacious windbag”, a “veteran Republican strategist”,^{[12][13][14][15][16]} and a political fixer.^[17] Over the course of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Stone promoted a number of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.^{[18][19][20][21][22]} He has described his political modus operandi as “Attack, attack, attack – never defend” and “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”^[23] Stone first suggested Trump run for president in early 1998 while he was Trump’s casino business lobbyist in Washington.^[24] The Netflix documentary film Get Me Roger Stone focuses on Stone’s past and role in Trump’s presidential campaign.^[25]

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.^[26][27] Nearly three dozen search warrants were unsealed in April 2020 which revealed contacts between Stone and Assange, and that Stone orchestrated hundreds of fake Facebook accounts and bloggers to run a political influence scheme on social media.^[28][29][30]

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A moment of research reveals a connection between the young Roger Stone and Roy Cohn:

Stone, the “keeper of the Nixon flame”,^[51] was an adviser to the former President in his post-presidential years, serving as “Nixon’s man in Washington”.^[52] Stone was a protégé of former Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge, who introduced the young Stone to former Vice President Nixon in 1967.^[53] After Stone was indicted in 2019, the Nixon Foundation released a statement distancing Stone’s ties to Nixon.^[54][55][56] John Sears recruited Stone to work in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, coordinating the Northeast.

Stone said that Roy Cohn helped him arrange for John B. Anderson to get the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York, a move that would help split the opposition to Reagan in the state. Stone said Cohn gave him a suitcase that Stone avoided opening and that, as instructed by Cohn, he dropped off at the office of a lawyer influential in Liberal Party circles. Reagan carried the state with 46% of the vote. Speaking after the statute of limitations for bribery had expired, Stone later said, “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.”^[4]

The reviewer of Get Me Roger Stone (linked above and recommended) is even more explicit about the connection between Cohn, Trump and Stone, going back decades:

The documentary also sketches a political family tree that could be its own movie and that has Cohn, the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy, at its head and branches out to include Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump. Mr. Stone wasn’t yet 30 when he met Cohn in 1979. (At the time, Mr. Stone was helping to run Reagan’s presidential campaign.) Cohn served as Mr. Trump’s lawyer for years and, by many accounts, assumed the role of mentor. It was Cohn who introduced Mr. Stone to Mr. Trump; Mr. Stone decided that Mr. Trump was presidential material and, years later, has become identified as one of the president’s outside advisers.

the review

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.^[31][32] In November 2019, a jury convicted him on all seven felony counts.^[10][33][34] He was sentenced to 40 months in prison.^[35][36] On July 10, 2020, days before Stone was scheduled to report to prison, Trump commuted his sentence.^[10] On August 17, 2020, he dropped the appeal of his convictions.^[37] Trump pardoned Stone on December 23, 2020.^[10][38]

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Stone, convicted of lying under oath, obstructing justice and witness intimidation, tweeted, shortly before he was to report to prison to start serving a sentence Barr had already intervened to reduce, that he didn’t want a pardon from Trump for his criminal conviction, just a commutation of his prison sentence. Trump obliged. In the end, in an abundance of caution, two days before Christmas, Trump also pardoned his long time adviser and political dirty trickster.

Merry Christmas, Rog!

As for Stone’s work as a highly paid lobbyist:

In 1980, after their key roles in the Reagan campaign, Stone and Manafort decided to go into business together, with partner Charlie Black, creating a political consulting and lobbying firm to cash in on their relationships within the new administration. Black, Manafort & Stone (BMS), became one of Washington D.C.’s first mega-lobbying firms^[57][58] and was described as instrumental to the success of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign. Republican political strategist Lee Atwater joined the firm in 1985, after serving in the #2 position on Reagan-Bush 1984.

Because of BMS’s willingness to represent brutal third-world dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the firm was branded “The Torturers’ Lobby“. BMS also represented a host of high-powered corporate clients, including Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp, The Tobacco Institute and, starting in the early 1980s, Donald Trump.^[59][60][61]

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The GOP’s highly moral voice of conscience in the Senate (this is a VERY relative term) Mitt Romney (now gone silent for months on end, while voting in lockstep with the GOP to thwart Biden at every step) immediately called Trump’s commutation of Stone’s reduced sentence an “act of unprecedented, historic corruption.” And so it was.

But Stone, to his credit, promptly repaid his debt to his friend the defeated president by helping to organize the January 6 Stop the Steal rally/riot, just as he had with a Stop the Steal movement in 2016, anticipating his boy Trump could well lose that election. Rat fuckers will be rat fuckers.

The elderly leaders of our democracy don’t seem to have the collective spine to challenge Trump’s clearly corrupt quid pro quo pardons in court (let’s say just Stone’s, Manafort’s and Flynn’s, for starters), but if Stone tells Congress to fuck off with their subpoena there should be no hesitation to test the unchallenged legality of the House’s power of Inherent Contempt and lock the rat fucker up in a hotel room until he testifies, under the penalty of perjury.