‘Lawyers, Judges, Technology’: Roger Stone Touts Plan for Trump Win in Secret Recording
If there’s anything more alarming than Donald Trump and his allies’ plans to wreak havoc on the 2024 election, it’s how comfortable they are telling anyone who asks exactly what they plan to do. In an undercover recording obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor, longtime Trump consultant and professional electoral agitator Roger Stone brags that the former president and his cadre are on “offensive footing” ahead of the election, and are better prepared to challenge election results in November than they were in 2020.
“At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge — his home phone number standing by — so you can stop it,” Stone says at one point. “We made no preparations last time, none … There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done.”
The audio, which was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, includes two conversations — one between Windsor and Stone and one between Windsor’s colleague Ally Sammarco and Stone — recorded at a Catholics Prayer for Trump event on March 19 at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida club. Stone was the keynote speaker at the event.
In candid conversations with the two women — who posed as fans — Stone expresses cautious optimism about Trump’s election chances while painting a rosy picture of his legal troubles. At one point, Stone predicts that Judge Aileen Cannon would soon dismiss the Justice Department’s classified documents case against the former president.
“We are beating them,” Stone tells Sammarco. “[Trump’s] trial in Georgia is falling apart. I think the judge is on the verge of dismissing the charges against him in Florida. They’re delayed in New York City and they’re now delayed in Washington.” Trump has since been convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York hush-money trial. Judge Cannon has made decisions that have benefitted Trump in the classified documents case, although just last week she rejected his bid to have the case outright dismissed.
Stone also indicates that the MAGA movement is fully prepared to pull a variety of levers to ensure Trump defeats Biden this November. When Sammarco asks Stone what would stop Trump’s opponents from committing “voter fraud” like “ballot harvesting,” Stone replies that “in some states, it’ll be easier to stop. In other places, it won’t.”
“We should be suing in half a dozen places,” Stone adds. “I mean we’re finally now on an offensive footing.” Stone goes on to tell Sammarco that — now that the Republican National Committee is under MAGA control — they can spend “lots more” money on election monitoring. He also points to “changes in state law, real-time voter list monitoring, going to court as we just did to challenge some of the vote laws,” and that “we went into court to sue in Michigan over the hand [written] ballots.”
In a separate conversation with Windsor — who has been working on a documentary, Gonzo for Democracy, which will chronicle the growth of Trumpism, election denial, and religious extremism — Stone affirms his belief that the election “can be stolen again,” going on to describe the various criminal cases against Trump as a way to “suck up his money, suck up his time, and create the reason why their theft is plausible, believable.”
“We’re working on this,” Stone assures Windsor, telling her that he worries about “overconfidence” amongst Trump’s supporters depressing voter turnout. He adds that the former president’s allies are prepared with “lawyers, judges, [and] technology,” to challenge election results if needed.
Reached for comment on Tuesday, Stone said: “All of the election integrity provisions that I suggested are perfectly legal and should be part of any ballot Security effort.”
Last week, Rolling Stone published separate undercover recordings Windsor and her team made of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife Martha-Ann during the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3. Justice Alito in the audio discusses how the battle for America “can’t be compromised” and adds that “one side is going to win.” When told the country needs to return to “a place of godliness,” he says he “agrees.”
Stone echoed this sentiment in his keynote address at Mar-a-Lago in March, warning the crowd gathered that the Democratic Party has been taken over by “a group of radical, atheist, Marxists, who plan nothing less than the full destruction of this nation and our constitutional freedoms.”
“Don’t think that this is a fight between Republicans and Democrats, liberals, and conservatives. This is nothing less than an epic struggle between good and evil,” Stone says. “A struggle between light and dark, a struggle between the godly and the godless.”
Stone — a self-described “dirty trickster” — was a critical figure in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement, and his involvement in generating challenges to election results can be traced all the way back to 2001, when he played a key role in the Brooks Brothers Riot that helped shut down the 2000 election recount in Florida in service of ensuring George W. Bush would take office.
Last year, a video obtained by MSNBC showed Stone explaining plans to undermine the Electoral College days before President Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, as several states continued to count votes. “Any legislative body may decide on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud to send electors to the electoral college who accurately reflect the president’s legitimate victory in their state, which was illegally denied him through fraud,” Stone said.
“We must prepare to lobby our Republican legislatures, by personal contact, and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in their states — in each state — that this may need to happen,” he added.
The efforts to replace votes in the Electoral College and undermine the certification of the election culminated in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. On the day of the attempted insurrection, Stone was spotted in Washington, D.C., with a contingent of Oath Keepers acting as a personal security detail. Several members of the group were later convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States.
As previously reported by Rolling Stone, Trump and his allies are devoting a vast amount of time, money, and logistical energy to preparing challenges for this year’s election outcomes. In Georgia, where Trump lost by a single percentage point — and whose governorship and legislature are controlled by the GOP — Republicans have turned the state into a sandbox for potential mechanisms to wrest electoral outcomes from the hands of voters.
“Everybody is gearing up for full-blown warfare,” one Republican close to Trump who has worked on “election integrity” efforts told Rolling Stone. “The campaign, the RNC, everyone is going to be fighting Biden’s team over every single inch, and each bit of process.”
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