A left-wing documentary filmmaker appears to have captured Roger Stone spitballing potentially violent and illegal ideas to ensure former President Donald Trump returns to power next month, saying he’d like to deploy “armed guards” to voting sites on Election Day.
In undercover audio and video from August provided to the Daily Beast, the pro-Trump political operative can be heard responding to a question about how to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the election.
“We have to fight it out on a state-by-state basis, but you have to be ready,” Stone gamely replies. “When they throw us out of Detroit, you go get a court order, you come in with your own armed guards, and you, and you dispute it. Instead, our guys just left.”
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Stone did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone, who first reported the undercover tapes, and did not immediately reply to the Daily Beast.
Stone was apparently referring to an infamous incident during the 2020 presidential election in which angry hordes of protesters descended on a Detroit vote-counting center, laboring under the mistaken and conspiracy-fuelled belief that election workers were inside committing voter fraud.
Despite Trump’s unceasing insistence that widespread fraud occurred, experts—including one hired by the former president’s campaign—failed to find any evidence of systemic election-fixing, either in Michigan or anywhere else.
Stone can also be heard suggesting in the audio that Team Trump will target his political enemies should he be re-elected, griping that former Attorney General Bill Barr deserved to be imprisoned.
“Trump read a law review article, never checked his background, and made him attorney general,” Stone says. “Once we get back in, he has to go to prison. He has to go to prison, he’s a criminal.”
Barr publicly turned on his former boss in 2022, gruffly rejecting Trump’s claims of election fraud as “bulls---,” “crazy,” and “total nonsense” in testimony before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. The former president and his friends, including Stone, have openly loathed him ever since.
“Bill Barr is a traitorous piece of human garbage,” Stone spits. “... He’s a piece of s---.”
The footage was recorded by an undercover reporter affiliated with Lauren Windsor, a guerilla documentarian and self-professed “progressive pugilist swamp-slayer.” Windsor attracted attention earlier this year after she released a tape of Samuel Alito in which the Supreme Court justice and his wife—believing they were speaking to a Catholic conservative—spoke candidly about politics and religion.
“One side or the other is going to win. There are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised,” Alito said on the recording, rhetoric that raised questions of political biases on the high court’s bench.
Windsor has also previously tricked Stone into falling for one of her sting operations, capturing him making similarly blunt comments about Trump in March. Saying he believed the election could “be stolen again,” the operative assured Windsor that he and his allies were “working on this,” and that they were ready with “lawyers, judges, [and] technology” to challenge the results if necessary.
Stone later dismissed his words as having been “twisted by the media.”
