One of President Donald J. Trump’s longest-serving political advisors told the Star News Network the Feb. 14 latest attack piece in The New York Times is part of a mainstream media attempt to tie him to the Jan. 6 chaos in the Capitol.
“Just because the New York Times says something, why does it mean it’s true? They lied about many things during my trial,” said legendary conservative operative Roger Stone.
The Times article, “First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack,” cites its own review of Capitol security footage to assert that six men providing Stone with personal security were associated with Oath Keepers, a fraternity of men and women with service in law enforcement and or military.
Stone said the connection to the Oath Keepers is more misdirection.
“I can’t find evidence that any of them have been charged,” he said. “CNN brought up the case of a man named Manuta, they showed his picture because he could be seen out in front of the hotel in close proximity to me, and I’d never heard of him before that. According to the CNN, he may have been inside the Capitol. He also may not. His wife says he’s not in a statement.”
The principal author of The Times hit piece is “visual journalist” Christiaan Triebert, a veteran of Bellingcat, the George Soros-backed investigative website. Triebert credits another group, Capitol Terrorists Exposers, with providing critical assistance.
Mr. Stone, a convicted felon who was pardoned by Mr. Trump, has a long history as a self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” political operative who has lived by the edicts of attack, admit nothing, deny everything, and counterattack. He posted a message online denying involvement in “the lawless acts at the Capitol.
We combed through hundreds of videos and photos, and drew on research from an online monitoring group called the Capitol Terrorists Exposers to track the security team that surrounded Mr. Stone on Jan. 5 and 6.
The article also asserts that the same six men took part in the mob that overwhelmed Capitol police while Trump was addressing a rally one mile east in front of the White House’s South Lawn.
“According to The Times, these six men, who, by the way, I’ve never seen their faces or their names before, were arrested in the Capitol,” Stone said. “I’ve seen no news of their arrest anyplace else.”
https://twitter.com/CTExposers/status/1361105147557015552?s=20
Stone said the article that ran in Sunday’s print edition was just the latest in a string of hit pieces attempting to tie him to the mayhem at the Capitol that House Democrats exploited to impeach Trump for the second time.
“Now we’re right back at it,” he said. “ABC starts, then CNN, and now The New York Times, but there is no evidence to support the notion that I knew about or in any way have participated in what was a politically stupid act,” he said.
On his website StoneColdTruth.com, Stone wrote: “I had no advance knowledge of any plan to storm and breach the Capitol. While the attack on the Capitol was illegal and politically stupid, ABC is using my name as clickbait.”
One headline at Salon.com took it a step further: “Six Degrees of Sedition: Was Master Tricker Roger Stone Behind the Capitol Riot?” Here is the sub-head: “Stone was linked to several “Stop the Steal” events, and has ties to organizers behind the Jan. 6 rally and attack.”
Stone said it was an insult to his intelligence to suggest he plotted mayhem at the Capitol.
“What supporter of the president would think that a riot in which you trespassed, destroyed public property, and menaced lawmakers would help Donald Trump’s political cause?” he said. “Who would think that? So, it’s the same fake news.”
The Times was just piling on, Stone said. Yet, Triebert was clever in his wording, because he never makes an outright statement, rather he makes allusions to create an impression of what he cannot prove.
“They’ve now done hit pieces in which they use guilt by association based on, in one case, video, in the other case, still photographs to somehow imply that because the Oath Keepers voluntarily supplied security for me–and I believe most of the speakers on the 5th–that that somehow means that I had advanced knowledge or approved of the attack on the Capitol,” he said.
The former campaign staffer for President Richard M. Nixon and President Ronald W. Reagan said security is paramount, because negative media reports have made him unfairly notorious.
“I normally, because of the many death threats and the threats against my family, it’s impossible for me to travel without security,” he said. “I usually have to pay for it out of my own pocket. Usually, I use off duty DC police officers, as I did during my trial. But there weren’t any available because of the lockdown, because they were all called into work.”
Stone said it was also unfair of The Times to refer to him as “a convicted felon who was pardoned by Mr. Trump,” a characterization that fails to inform the reader that Stone was innocent of the original charges and was instead convicted of unrelated process crimes.
The Florida resident was initially accused of being an agent or courier for Russian intelligence, who acted as a go-between for Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. In this role, Stone was purported to have facilitated the transfer of Russian-gathered opposition research to journalist Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks website.
This height of this mania was when CNN, working off inside information from law enforcement, broadcast live the Jan. 25, 2019 pre-dawn raid on Stone’s Fort Lauderdale residence.
“The hard left, the fake news media, is very bitter over the fact that the president pardoned me–this is really important—on November 3rd, this past election day, at midnight, the Department of Justice released the last unredacted sections of Mueller’s report in which he admitted that he never had any evidence against me regarding the Russians, the WikiLeaks, or Assange, at all,” he said.
“No factual evidence, his words, and, he concluded, even if I had distributed material obtained from WikiLeaks, which they had no evidence of, it would have been legal,” he said.
Stone said despite all the coverage given to the original charges by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, when Mueller’s actual lack of evidence was ignored by the mainstream media.
“None of these bastards reported that,” Stone said.
“They reported when I was accused, they all ignored this. And you’ve been in the news business a long time, who puts out a press release at midnight? Well, that’s the old data dump.”
