Roger Stone and the Oath Keepers who attacked the Capitol

Trump needed help whipping up the madness on January 6, and who was there for him? You guessed it!

Photo of Stone and Oath Keepers by Jim Urquhart. Notations by New York Times.

Remember Roger the Dodger?  One of Nixon’s original “dirty tricksters,” Roger Stone has been creeping around in the sewers of American politics for nearly 50 years. When he wasn’t trying to fix elections in this country, he and his partners in the political consulting firm Black, Manafort & Stone were doing the bidding of such masters of dictatorial doom as Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mohamed Said Barre of Somalia, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.  Domestically, they helped elect right-wing Republicans like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Phil Gramm of Texas, and Paula Hawkins of Florida.  One of the first clients of their consulting firm was a political neophyte from New York by the name of Donald Trump, best known at the time for his garish buildings and gaudy wives.

Flash forward a few decades:  who was the first person Trump hired back in 2015 when he announced for president?  Good old Roger Stone, who had been privately advising Trump at least as far back as 2011 when he began his political rise by trumpeting what we might call his first Big Lie, that Barak Obama wasn’t born in this country and was very likely a Muslim.  That’s right.  Stone was at Trump’s side, if quietly and behind the scenes, while Trump hit the hustings with the “birther” campaign that put him firmly in the right-wing pantheon of presidential candidates.

Stone was too controversial, or he had a spat with Trump, or something anyway, and he didn’t go the distance in the Trump campaign.  He was replaced as campaign manager by, you guessed it, his former partner, Paul Manafort.  But Stone remained behind the scenes in the campaign, privately consulting with Trump throughout the primaries of 2016, the Republican National Convention, and the rest of Trump’s run for president.

If you were paying any attention at all during that campaign, you caught little glimpses of Stone.  He was here and there on right-wing radio doing Trump’s bidding, attacking Hillary Clinton and helping to promote her hacked emails which had been released by WikiLeaks.  He popped up claiming that someone called Guccifer 2.0 had hacked the Democrats’ email servers.  By August, he was calling Guccifer 2.0 a “hero,” and writing about him for the right-wing website, Breitbart.  He sent Guccifer an article he wrote on manipulating voting machines to alter the counting of votes, and Guccifer sent him a tweet in reply, “@RogerJStoneJr paying U back.”  Stone continued to help Trump by promoting the hacks of the Democrats, which by late fall included Nancy Pelosi’s private emails and strategy documents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

As we all know, the Democrats’ hacked emails and investigations of Hillary Clinton were expertly deployed as campaign weapons by Donald Trump and played an outsize role in her loss, according to most political experts.  As we also know, the FBI had begun a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign for its connections to Russians in July of 2016.  There were hints of this at the time, but it did not become a major story until just before Trump took office in 2017.

I remember watching the early hearings of the House Intelligence Committee when the investigation of the Trump campaign was first revealed and wondering who was Trump’s cut-out to the Russians.  We knew by then that Michael Flynn, a top adviser to the campaign and subsequently his National Security Adviser, had been in regular contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.  But I remember thinking that the contacts couldn’t have been taking place at that level because it was too high, and as we saw when Flynn was fired 24 days into Trump’s term, too visible. 

The Mueller investigation of Russia’s role in the Trump campaign was exhaustive.  He ended up indicting 13 Russians for conspiracy to defraud the United States for interfering with the election largely by manipulating social media, and 12 Russian military intelligence agents from the GRU for hacking the Democratic Party’s emails.  In his report, Mueller identified Guccifer 2.0 by name as a Russian military agent.  He also indicted, among others, Paul Manafort on various charges unrelated to the Russia investigation and Roger Stone for lying to investigators about the Trump campaign’s connection to WikiLeaks.

Trump recently pardoned both Manafort and Stone for anything they did relating to the Russia investigation.

So Paul and Roger are both free and in the clear, thanks to their patron and co-conspirator, Donald Trump.  Manafort has kept a low profile since his pardon, and so has Stone.  Or so I thought.

I was enjoying a leisurely Sunday reading the New York Times, when there he was again!  “First they guarded Roger Stone.  Then they joined the Capitol attack,” the headline screamed.  And what do you know, it was an investigation of Roger Stone and his connections to the far-right antigovernment militia group, the Oath Keepers.  There was Roger Stone being escorted around Washington D.C. on his way to giving speeches on January 5, the day before the Capitol attack. 

The Times story,  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/14/us/roger-stone-capitol-riot.html, visually identifies six members of the Oath Keepers from photographs and videos taken on January 5 and 6 as Stone moved around Washington during the preparations for Trump’s rally on the Ellipse and the attack on the Capitol.  The Oath Keepers, all of them in various Oath Keeper garb and other makey-fakey military-style hats and vests are seen serving as Stone’s body guards as he gives a speech outside the Supreme Court and later outside the White House on January 5.  On the 6th, at least one of his Oath Keeper body guards is seen escorting him outside his hotel, a block from the White House.  Stone had announced in speeches and social media that he would be appearing at a rally outside the Capitol that day, but he was not seen near the Capitol or at the Trump speech on the Ellipse.  Stone claimed he spent the day in his hotel room, despite appearing on a video outside his hotel with the Oath Keeper body guard.  

The Times however located all six of Stone’s Oath Keeper body guards  during the violent attack on the Capitol.  Inside the Capitol, they were seen on videos meeting up with at least two other Oath Keepers who have been indicted for coordinating the attack in advance and conspiring to obstruct the legitimate business of Congress, which was to certify the votes of the electoral college and declare Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election.

Once again, I wondered who had been the cut-out between Donald Trump and the planners of the attack on the Capitol, and there he was again, Roger the Dodger, Trump’s man on the spot, his most loyal political manservant.  As I watched the videos of Stone on the Times website, I wondered why he would risk being seen in the company of militia members who not only would later attack the Capitol, but be charged with conspiring to plan the attack. 

And then I saw Stone’s face.  He was so pleased that these macho toy soldiers were guarding him!  As they drove him in a golf cart away from his speech in front of the Supreme Court, Stone gave a little wave and tipped his natty bowler to the crowd.  Here was Trump’s man in full doing his master’s bidding as he helped to whip up the Trump crowds who had come to Washington on his orders.

All those indicted by Mueller, from George Papadopoulos to Paul Manafort to Michael Flynn to Rick Gates to Alex van der Zwann had at least briefly cooperated with the FBI except one:  Roger Stone.

Trump pardoned them all, but the first one he pardoned was the one who never talked:  Roger Stone.  

Among the hundreds who have been indicted by federal prosecutors in the attack on the Capitol, at least 21 individuals have ties to right wing militant groups and militias.  Five have been indicted on serious charges of conspiracy to organize the insurrection against the government.  Two are Proud Boys.  Three are members of the Oath Keepers.

There is no special prosecutor in charge of the investigation and maybe that’s just as well, because this time we’ve got Joe Biden’s Department of Justice in charge.  Notably, there is not a friendly president sitting in the White House waiting to pardon everyone.

If I were Roger Stone and the six Oath Keepers who first served as his body guards and then joined the attack on the Capitol, I would be very, very worried.

Watch this space.