“Stone Plan”: During insurrection Trump’s oldest political ally contacted indicted Oath Keepers leadership
The former president’s longest-term political advisor and pardoned convicted felon Roger Stone let a film crew shadow him for two years, including last year’s MAGA insurrection to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory by Congress.
Now, the movie “A Storm Foretold” is coming out from a Danish camera crew, and their footage of Stone’s communications with the leader of a far-right group charged with seditious conspiracy could become critical evidence to House Select January 6th Committee investigators.
The filmmakers have firsthand evidence of those communications in their footage which includes texts to the jailed head of the Proud Boys hate group Enrique Tarrio, indicted Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes who is being held without bond on seditious conspiracy charges, and even with Joel Greenberg, who gained notoriety as Matt Gaetz’s wingman when he pled guilty to sex trafficking charges in an ongoing case against the Florida man. Only two days ago, a man who served as one of Roger Stone’s Oath Keepers bodyguards from the day of January 6th, pled guilty in federal court to charges of seditious conspiracy.
Amazingly, the footage shows that Roger Stone completely predicted the outcome of the 2020 election four months before the votes were cast, which would be Donald Trump declaring that the race was a fraud and using his official powers to fight the ballot boxes. The Washington Post reports:
“It’s going to be really nasty,” Stone said at home on July 9, 2020, predicting that Democrats would try to steal the election. “If the electors show up at the electoral college, armed guards will throw them out,” he said, apparently referring to ceremonial meetings of electors in state capitals.
“‘I’m the president. F— you,’” the Post reports Stone said, mimicking Trump’s future remarks. “‘You’re not stealing Florida, you’re not stealing Ohio. I’m challenging all of it, and the judges we’re going to are judges I appointed.’” His remarks would prove prophetic, just as his predictions about Wikileaks impacting the 2016 election, but this prophecy ended with an insurrection. Then, as now, his predictions were based on receiving text messages with political intelligence.
In addition, the documentary footage confirms that Roger Stone was a prime mover behind the “Stop the Steal” concept and movement though it’s unknown if he specifically communicated with the former president about the fundraising aspects of lying about election results, he was certainly aware of its potential for a massive grift, according to the Post:
Dictating text messages, Stone told an aide to resurrect his Stop the Steal campaign. He predicted to another aide that his brand was about to be “quite a bit hotter” as a result, adding, “We’re going to raise money from Stop the Steal — it will be like falling off a log.”
Two days after the 2020 presidential election, Roger Stone drew up an elaborate Stop the Steal plan to pressure state officials to reject the legitimate vote, the filmmakers’ footage of his assistant’s laptop reveals. President Biden was only announced as the prospective winner on the fifth day after voting took place.
Trump’s team only tweeted the #StopTheSteal hashtag that day after Stone had a call with pardoned ex-felon former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn.
That night when Trump gave a speech, he even parroted Stone’s lines about the need to “count every legal ballot” as a more positive message for the public.
It should come as no surprise that Roger Stone was deeply entangled in whatever Donald Trump and his MAGA insurrection leaders were doing on January 6th, because he’s got a history of being a behind the scenes player even when he’s denying it to the public as he has for the last year in this instance.
This author conducted an interview with Roger Stone in 2017 about his Stop the Steal PAC and about his connection to Donald Trump during Russia’s hack and dump attack on America’s 2016 election, which helped him get elected. In that instance, he admitted to clandestinely speaking directly with then-candidate Trump even though shouldn’t have when he was running a SuperPAC which is supposed to be an independent expenditure group.
Filmmaker Christoffer Guildbrandsen shared the incendiary material with the Washington Post, which published the bombshell report excerpted in this story, (no paywall) detailing how Trump’s former campaign manager and the progenitor of the “Stop the Steal” campaign acted as a communications hub during the Capitol insurrection.
The pre-release of newsworthy material in advance from The Ark, which is not a news company, is unusual. But this material arrives on the heels of severe criticism of legendary journalist Bob Woodward who taped conversations where Donald Trump admitted the coronavirus pandemic he later downplayed would be deadly.
More recently, there was a critical outcry at the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman who reported that Trump flushed presidential records down the White House toilet. However, the criticism of Haberman – who covers Trump world almost exclusively – appears to be unwarranted because she explained that this was something discovered after Trump had left the White House. Therefore, her report wouldn’t have sounded a prospective warning to anyone trying to stop the former president’s lawbreaking.
In the end, as President Biden’s inauguration loomed, Stone struck a different done about his longtime client and the recipient of his political advice. The Post reports:
In an Inauguration Day call with a friend,Stone directed his rage at the man who had confided in him and consulted with him for decades, denouncing Trump as “a disgrace” and expressing support for him to be impeached. “He betrayed everybody,” Stone said.
Trump’s former campaign manager and consultant voluntarily appeared for 90 minutes before the January 6th Committee last December where he pleaded the 5th Amendment invoking his right to remain silent rather than give self-incriminating testimony.
Last week, Roger Stone sued the January 6th Committee seeking to block their subpoena seeking his phone records.
Nobody knows if Stone will face criminal charges for his role in the January 6th insurrection, but it is possible that his written note to a Trump-supporter colleague while brokering pardons to the White House could be prophetic: “See you in prison.”
