MSNBC’s The Beat on Monday aired more clips of Roger Stone from the final weeks of the Trump administration. This time, the right-wing operative criticizes the then-president’s campaign for being “extraordinarily fucked-up,” and also acknowledges on Jan. 6 that Trump lost the presidential election.
In one video from A Storm Foretold, a documentary from this year that has not yet been released in the United States except for a portion that was aired on MSNBC, Stone has a phone conversation in which he describes his role in trying to get Trump re-elected.
“I’m doing that unofficially and informally,” Stone says, “because his campaign is so extraordinarily fucked-up.”
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In that conversation, Stone also predicts the election to be “a 2000-like result with a long, drawn-out squabble over who won.”
“This is not a campaign structured for a dog fight. And that’s what we have now. So independent action is required, you know,” says Stone, a key figure in the Brooks Brothers riot that disrupted a ballot recount in Florida during the razor-thin presidential election in 2000.
The kind of “independent action” Stone possibly referred to was aired last week on MSNBC, in which Stone dictates a strategy for state legislatures to send pro-Trump electors to the meeting of the Electoral College.
A second clip aired Monday from Jan. 6, when the Electoral College met, shows Stone learning that he will not be speaking at the “Stop the Steal” rally that afternoon.
“I don’t understand how they want us to lead the march but can’t even tell us where to go. So it doesn’t make sense,” he says. “If we were speaking, we would have transportation as [Rudy] Giuliani did. It’s fine. Let’s go upstairs and watch this on TV.”
Once in his hotel room and watching Trump speak, Stone claims that it’s “very clear that I was never on their list.”
“The whole thing was a con job,” he continues. “It’s just childish and it’s amateurish. That’s why they lost. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Stone has denied that he is one of the 30 unindicted co-conspirators in the RICO indictment unveiled last week of Trump, Giuliani, and 16 others for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
