Who Is Roger Stone? 10 Times The Indicted Trump Adviser Was In The News
Roger Stone, the former adviser to President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was indicted Friday on seven counts that included obstruction, witness tampering, and false statements, the Inquisitr reported. The indictment, which rose out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, led to a pre-dawn raid on Stone’s Florida home Friday.
The 66-year-old Stone has been a mostly behind-the-scenes figure in politics since the 1970s, serving several different Republican presidents to various degrees. Here is look back at Stone’s greatest hits.
While Stone famously has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, a teenaged Stone was a relatively minor staffer on Nixon’s 1972 campaign, allegedly playing a role in various pranks and “dirty trick” campaigns. After Nixon’s re-election, Stone briefly worked in the Office of Economic Opportunity. Stone was not involved in the Watergate break-in, nor did he face legal consequences for any of his work for Nixon, per the New Yorker.
Stone actually worked as a representative of Nixon in Washington after that president left office, and later did some work on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.
At the start of the Reagan administration, Stone formed an influential lobbying firm along with another prominent Trump campaign and Russiagate figure, Paul Manafort. The firm’s clients included various dictators in different parts of the world, as well as major corporations, per the Washingtonian.
In the 1996 presidential campaign, Stone was a consultant for Republican nominee Bob Dole’s campaign but was forced to resign after the National Enquirer unearthed ads he had placed in swingers publications. Stone, who denied at the time that the ads were real, was then exiled from mainstream Republican politics for the rest of the Clinton era, per the Daily Beast.
Meet the Cheatles: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater at the founding of their DC lobbying firm in the 1980s.
h/t @joshtpm pic.twitter.com/yHdj6PS83t
— Paul Ed Roberts (@Pauledroberts) May 6, 2018
In 1999, Stone was involved with Donald Trump’s proposed campaign for the presidential nomination for the Reform Party, which was ultimately abandoned.
In 2000, during the Florida recount, Stone was retained by the George W. Bush campaign to assist in the recount efforts. Stone reportedly had a hand in the “Brooks Brothers riot,” in which a group of Republican staffers disrupted the recount in Miami-Dade County, per the Miami Herald.
In the 2004 presidential campaign, Stone informally advised the Rev. Al Sharpton in his Democratic presidential primary campaign, the New York Times reported at the time.
Stone, in 2007, had a hand in exposing New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who would resign after it was revealed that he had paid for high-end escorts, the Atlantic reported. Stone, who had reportedly left a threatening voicemail for Spitzer’s elderly father during the previous year’s campaign, wrote a letter to the FBI about Spitzer’s activities.
In the early days of the 2016 campaign, Stone was an official advisor to Trump’s campaign but resigned in the summer of 2015, Politico said. He continued, however, to unofficially help Trump, including the activities alleged in the indictment. Stone also began appearing regularly on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, including on election night.
A documentary about Stone called Get Me Roger Stone, directed by Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme, was released in May of 2017. The film, featuring extensive interviews with Stone and filmed over several years, remains available on Netflix.
