Roger Stone

Roger Stone

Roger Jason Stone (born Roger Joseph Stone Jr.; August 27, 1952) is an American conservative political consultant, lobbyist 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. The sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump on July 10, 2020.Since the 1975s, Stone worked on the campaigns of Republican politicians Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, 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. 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.A longtime friend of Donald Trump, 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 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. 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 felony counts in November 2019 and was sentenced to 40 months in prison. On July 10, 2020, days before he was scheduled to report to federal prison, Trump commuted Stone's sentence. On August 17, 2020, he dropped the appeal of his convictions.On Thursday, September, 10, 2020, Stone told InfoWars' Alex Jones that if Trump appears to lose the 2020 presidential election, he should consider declaring martial law via the Insurrection Act and, among other things, confiscate ballots, shut down nemesis The Daily Beast and arrest its staff for "seditious" activities.