In 2019, federal law enforcement charged Roger Stone with a variety of felonies, including obstruction, lying to investigators, and witness tampering. The case, at least initially, was a success: A jury found the Republican operative guilty, and Stone was sentenced to 40 months in a federal prison.
He did not, however, see the inside of a cell: Donald Trump, late on a Friday in July 2020, commuted Stone’s sentence. It was among the most brazenly corrupt steps Trump took while in office, featuring a then-president rescuing a convicted felon who lied on his behalf as part of a broader cover-up. A Washington Post editorial called Stone’s commutation “one of the most nauseating instances of corrupt government favoritism the United States has ever seen.”
The editorial board added, “If the country needed any more evidence, Friday confirmed that the greatest threat to the Republic is the president himself.”
After Trump’s election defeat, he took the additional step of pardoning Stone.
More than three years later, the operative appears to have drawn the attention of law enforcement once again. The New York Times reported:
The Capitol Police and the F.B.I. are investigating remarks reported to have been made by Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime Republican operative and informal adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, in which he expressed a desire for the deaths of two Democratic lawmakers in the weeks before the 2020 election, a government official familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
The Times’ report has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News. Nevertheless, the story has been percolating since last week, when Mediaite first published a report with an apparent audio recording, featuring someone who sounds like Stone talking about Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler of New York and Eric Swalwell of California.
“It’s time to do it,” the speaker can be heard saying ahead of Election Day 2020. “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message.”
According to Mediaite’s reporting, which also has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Stone was speaking to Salvatore Greco, a former New York City police officer, at a restaurant in Florida. (The Times’ report noted that Greco “was dismissed from the Police Department in 2022 after an internal inquiry into his relationship with Mr. Stone.”)
Time will tell, what if anything, comes of the reported investigation, though I was struck by Stone’s denial. The GOP operative — who has described himself as a “dirty trickster,” and who is on record endorsing violence after Trump’s election defeat — not only denied discussing assassinating Democratic members of Congress, he also dismissed the recording as “a deep fake.”
I am not in a position to say whether the denial has merit, and presumably investigators will reach their own conclusions. But Stone’s response touches on something that the political world will soon have to grapple with in earnest.
We’re already seeing politicians and their campaign teams produce computer-generated images, which have been presented to voters as if they were real. But generally speaking, that same dynamic will likely become just as common in reverse: Political figures caught making controversial comments will claim that the recordings were generated by computers and AI, even when they’re real.
