Russiagate: Roger Stone Freaks Out!
As the LOLcats say, “Oh noes!”
In a report on Wednesday, CNN revealed that the FBI had learned that associates of the president appeared to have coordinated with Russians during the 2016 campaign.
And although the report did not explicitly accuse Stone of wrongdoing, Tapper said on Thursday that the Trump ally had sent CNN a letter to defend himself.
Stone’s letter begins by accusing House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (D-CA) of running a “Kangaroo Court” and “engaging in demagoguery, red-baiting, fear mongering half truths and innuendo.”
“Neither the president or I have anything to fear from a full and fair investigation of these bogus charges of Russian collusion,” Stone insists. “But now Adam Schiff, having slimed me in public session seems to be backing away from the confrontation. I demand a right to face my accusers. I will deconstruct their lies and spank them like children.”
Sounds like someone needs a hug! But heck, you’d need a hug too if your ex-business partner is up to his ears in treason:
[Paul Manafort] is among the most significant political operatives of the past 40 years, and one of the most effective. He has revolutionized lobbying several times over, though he self-consciously refrains from broadcasting his influence. Unlike his old business partners, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, you would never describe Manafort as flamboyant.
You didn’t know Stone was a business partner with Manafort and the original king of GOP dirty tricks, Lee Atwater? Here’s today’s fun fact:
As Roger Stone has boasted about their now-disbanded firm: “Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find. … Dictators are in the eye of the beholder.” Manafort had a special gift for changing how dictators are beheld by American eyes. He would recast them as noble heroes—venerated by Washington think tanks, deluged with money from Congress.
Jacob Weisberg adds:
Stone’s specialty within the powerhouse consulting firm of Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater is making Republican candidates appeal to traditionally Democratic voter groups: blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and especially blue-collar Catholics. “If you can move them into the Republican coalition, you will have victory in the Northeast,” he says. Because Stone, who managed the Northeast for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, is seen as having wooed these voters away from the Democrats, candidates for Congress and governorships are lining up outside his firm’s lavish Alexandria, Virginia, office to pay him upward of $100,000 to work on their campaigns. “He has tried to appeal outside the usual class of Republican voters,” says Kemp, whom Stone is advising about the 1988 election. “He knows the Republican Party has to drop its country club mentality.”
