Roger Stone

Roger Jason Stone (born Roger Joseph Stone Jr.; August 27, 1952) is an American conservative political consultant and lobbyist.

Stone was born on August 27, 1952, in Norwalk, Connecticut, to Gloria Rose (Corbo) and Roger J. Stone.

He grew up in the community of Vista, part of the town of Lewisboro, New York, on the Connecticut border.

His mother was the president of Meadow Pond Elementary School PTA, a Cub Scout den mother, and occasionally a small-town reporter; his father "Chubby" (also Roger J. Stone) was a well driller and sometime chief of the Vista volunteer Fire Department.

He has described his family as middle-class, blue-collar Catholics.

His ancestry includes Hungarian and Italian.

Stone said that as an elementary school student during the 1960 presidential election, he broke into politics to further John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign: "I remember going through the cafeteria line and telling every kid that Nixon was in favor of school on Saturdays ... It was my first political trick."

When he was a junior and vice president of student government at John Jay High School in northern Westchester County, New York, he manipulated the ouster of the student government president and succeeded him.

Stone recalled how he ran for election as president for his senior year: "I built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket. Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that's mean? No, it's smart."

Given a copy of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, Stone became drawn to conservatism as a child and a volunteer in Goldwater's 1964 campaign.

Since the 1970s, Stone has worked on the campaigns of Republican politicians, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

In addition to frequently serving as a campaign adviser, Stone was a political lobbyist.

As a student at George Washington University in 1972, Stone invited Jeb Stuart Magruder to speak at a Young Republicans Club meeting, then asked Magruder for a job with Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President.

Magruder agreed and Stone then left college to work for the committee.

Stone's political career began in earnest on the 1972 Nixon campaign, with activities such as contributing money to a possible rival of Nixon in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance and then slipping the receipt to the Manchester Union-Leader.

Eventually Magruder and Herbert Porter hired Stone to spy on rival presidential campaigns during the 1972 Democratic Party presidential primaries.

Stone subsequently hired Michael McMinoway to infiltrate campaigns of candidates such as Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey.

He also hired a spy in the Humphrey campaign who became Humphrey's driver.

According to Stone, during the day he was officially a scheduler in the Nixon campaign, but "By night, I'm trafficking in the black arts. Nixon's people were obsessed with intelligence."

In 1980, he co-founded a Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm with Paul Manafort and Charles R. Black Jr. The firm recruited Peter G. Kelly and was renamed Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) in 1984.

During the 1980s, BMSK became a top lobbying firm by leveraging its White House connections to attract high-paying clients, including U.S. corporations and trade associations, as well as foreign governments.

By 1990, it was one of the leading lobbyists for American companies and foreign organizations.

His personal style of achieving his clients' goals have been described as "a renowned infighter", "a seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics", "a Republican strategist", and "a political fixer".

Stone has referred to himself as "an agent provocateur".

He has described his own political modus operandi as "Attack, attack, attack – never defend" and "Admit nothing, deny everything, and launch a counterattack."

Stone first suggested Trump run for president in early 1998 while he was Trump's casino business lobbyist in Washington.

In 2007, Stone indicated he was a staunch conservative but with libertarian leanings.

Stone officially left the Trump campaign on August 8, 2015.

Stone is most remembered for the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation, and his involvement with and connections to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a political consultant for the campaign of 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.

In response, Assange told The Washington Post that he had not met with Stone in the spring of 2016 and WikiLeaks said it had had no contact with Stone.

Stone said he could recall only one occasion on which he mentioned meeting with Assange, and said that mention was made as a joke.

In 2018, two associates of Stone alleged that Stone claimed to have had contact with Julian Assange during the 2016 presidential campaign.

On January 25, 2019, Stone was arrested at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home in connection with Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation and charged in an indictment with witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and five counts of making false statements.

In November 2019, a jury convicted him on all seven felony counts.

He was sentenced to 40 months in prison.

Court documents released in 2020 showed Stone and Assange exchanged messages in June 2017.

Nearly three dozen search warrants were unsealed in April 2020 which revealed contacts between Stone and Assange in 2017, and that Stone orchestrated hundreds of fake Facebook accounts and bloggers to run a political influence scheme on social media.

On July 10, 2020, days before Stone was scheduled to report to prison, Trump commuted his sentence.

On August 17, 2020, he dropped the appeal of his convictions.

Trump pardoned Stone on December 23, 2020.