Vanity Fair: Roger Stone is About to Have His Time in the Barrel
This article was published on July 21, 2017. A link to the article can be found here.
By Chris Smith
Enter Roger Stone, throwing punches. For the past two weeks, the spotlight has been (correctly) trained on Donald Trump Jr. and the ever-expanding cast of Russian characters who met with him at Trump Tower. But now Stone, the dandified dirty trickster and sometime adviser to Trump Sr., is muscling his way back into view.
The House Intelligence committee will soon be grilling Stone about his teasing reference last summer to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's upcoming "time in the barrel," plus his communication with the Russian-affiliated hacker Guccifer 2.0. "What was Stone's relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? What did he know and when?" asks Mike Quigley, an Illinois congressman and a Democratic member of the committee. "Was he given advance warning? He's going to be under oath, so let's assume for a second he has to tell us the truth. General [Michael] Flynn, Roger Stone—these people can connect a lot of dots. Maybe a majority of them."
In an interview, Stone denies facilitating the WikiLeaks release or being a part of any Russian conspiracy. "I believe I have been denigrated, and false statements have been made about me in public session," he says. "I never had any Russian clients, never worked for the Russian government, never been to Russia, don't have any Russian contacts."
Stone, however, is already battling with the committee's members. He announced that the committee canceled his scheduled July 24 appearance, saying "these hapless Democrat simps . . . will not give me my day in court." A committee source, however, says the delay is because Stone hasn't yet turned over requested documents. "We have provided everything we have been asked to provide," a lawyer for Stone says. Stone has also threatened to sue California Democrat Jackie Speier for, Stone claims, falsely accusing Stone of being on the Kremlin's payroll (in March, Speier suggested Stone and others were entangled in a "spiderweb" spun by Vladimir Putin). He has taunted Eric Swalwell as "a yellow-bellied coward," "a lightweight," and "a mannequin." And Stone, a patron of swingers' clubs, has promised to "spank [the Democrats] like children."
The cartoonish pugnacity is in keeping with Stone's theatrical personality. A House Intelligence insider believes it is also calculated: "He is trying to distract from the fact that he's at the center of a serious investigation." Another motivation may be Stone's mixed history when under oath. He has had plenty of practice, starting at the age of 19, when he was called before the Watergate grand jury to talk about a pro-Nixon demonstration he had helped arrange for Nixon's CREEP. In 2000, David Grandeau questioned Stone for two hours in a prior Trump-related case. Grandeau was the executive director of New York state's temporary commission on lobbying, and he grew suspicious about an expensive advertising campaign attacking proposed casinos. The media blitz was attributed to something called the Institute for Law and Society, a front group that turned out to have been set up by Stone—and financed by competing casino owner Trump.
"He's a lousy witness," says Grandeau. "He just couldn't help himself: he's got to show you what a genius he is. Which would be O.K., if he was a genius. If you're well prepared, he shouldn't get away from you. He's not good when you get him off-script." Trump paid a $250,000 fine. "That was a settlement," Roger Stone says. "We settled without admission of wrongdoing. Mr. Grandeau is an asshole and a self-aggrandizing bureaucrat. Read the transcript. I destroyed him."
Most recently, Stone has been deposed as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit springing from his role in a lunatic fringe chapter of the 2010 New York governor's race. Very briefly: Stone was the campaign manager for the "Manhattan Madam," who had a minor role in Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal. He is being sued for allegedly orchestrating a mailer that labeled another marginal candidate, Libertarian Warren Redlich, "a sick twisted pervert."
"He wasn't belligerent in the deposition—he was remarkably forgetful," Redlich says. "Strangely, a guy who remembers conversations, in his book and his blog posts, with third-tier political figures from 40 years ago doesn't remember talking to people from [2010]."
Stone is fighting the suit. "I have no idea what he is talking about," Stone says. "What he means to say is, ‘Stone didn't fuck himself in the deposition.' He can't even prove that a mailing was made, let alone that I had something to do with it."
Swalwell, a former prosecutor, laughs off Stone's baiting of him as a "pretty boy" in advance of the House Intelligence session. "My wife disputes that one," he says. "I don't want to make him as important as he thinks he is. His significance in American politics starts and ends with the question whether he was working with Russians at the time they attacked our democracy."
Perhaps Stone does possess damning, detailed knowledge of collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign agents. Maybe an invasion of privacy lawsuit, filed last week against Trump's campaign and Stone on behalf of D.N.C. hacking victims, will show him to be a key actor. Still, Stone's most important contribution to this whole saga is likely to be as a mischievous catalyst, an embodiment and an enabler of the anything-goes, rules-are-made-to-be-broken, winning-is-all-that-matters spirit of Trump's campaign. The only sure thing is that it's a shame Stone's House Intelligence testimony is scheduled to be in closed session. "Roger was demanding an open hearing, so that the American public can know the truth and not rely solely on the accusations and innuendos of the members of the committee," says one of his lawyers, Grant Smith. "That will be the theme of Roger's testimony: ‘This is fact. It can't possibly have happened the way you suggested it happened.'"
Quigley can't wait. "There is a pattern of conspiratorial acts [in the Trump campaign], which leads you to believe there was cooperation or collusion, say it however you want," he says. "If Stone and his band of misfits want to go at it, bring it on. I'm from Chicago, where this is softball shit. The more Stone talks, the more the American public gets to understand who he really is, and hopefully, we can find out what the hell happened."