On Nov. 2, 2020, a Danish film crew captured convicted felon Roger Stone, then President Donald Trump’s longtime advisor, telling a companion, “I said fuck the voting. Let’s get right to the violence. We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.”
Trump was polling 10 points behind then Senator Joe Biden at the time.
Stone has said that the video is either a “deep fake” or that the footage, if real, pertained to the social justice protests that Summer, not the election.
One of the filmmakers later informed the Beacon that the young man grinning next to Stone in the video is MAGA rapper Glock Dara. He and Stone were at the Atlanta airport en route to a Nov 2 rally in Buford, Georgia at the time. (FN1)
Stone repeated the phrase “Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” during a conversation that night, as shown in a video aired by CNN. This second iteration occurred during a car ride after the Atlanta rally, per one of the Danish filmmakers.
The rally supported the U.S. Senate campaign of then Representative Doug Collins, a gun-loving former pastor and ally of Roger Stone. (Collins lost the race.)
In a Facebook video from the Collins event, Stone introduced Dara by name and called him “an international recording star … from New York City.”
Three days later (on Nov. 5), Stone launched “Stop the Steal” 2020, the nationwide campaign to overturn the 2020 election using falsehoods, unsubstantiated claims, and physical intimidation.
Stone phoned disgraced retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn that day to discuss his plans, as reported by the Washington Post.
It was also on Nov. 5 that Dara released a soundtrack titled “Red Insurrection.”
The soundtrack, which has not been reported on previously, harmonizes with Stone’s promotion of violence in the “fuck the voting” clips, undermining Stone’s “deep fake” allegation. Here are some of the lyrics:
Launch a weapon no concession, no retreat, red insurrection. *** TTS. Train to shoot. We gonna shoot when Trump say to shoot. *** Four more years. Insurrection. Militia gang Three Percenters. Proud Boys standing down. Standing by. High alert. 100 round MAGAs. Rat tat tat Boom. We’re here. The storm is coming. We are the fucking storm.
Like so many of Roger Stone’s closest allies, Dara seems to embrace a militant version of Christianity. In 2015, he released a soundtrack titled “Fear of God.” The promotional image featured Jesus wielding an assault rifle.
Dara’s use of the word “insurrection” (in his Nov. 5, 2020 soundtrack) is noteworthy. Stone himself had suggested as early as Sept. 10, 2020, that Trump could use election fraud as a basis to invoke the Insurrection Act, which enables the U.S. President to deploy the military to quell domestic uprisings.
During a videotaped conversation on July 9, 2020, Stone had hinted how this might play out on Jan 6, 2021, declaring maniacally:
“If the electors show up at the Electoral College, armed guards will throw them out. I’m the president. Fuck you! *** You’re not stealing–I’m challenging all of it. And the judges we’re going to are judges I appointed. Fuck you.” (Emphasis added.)
The next day, Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month criminal sentence on 7 felony counts.
In late December, Trump would pardon Stone as well. (A pardon is broader than a commuted sentence in that it deletes the conviction.)
Trump also pardoned Flynn and political consultant Paul Manafort, Stone’s former lobbying partner who had served as Trump’s 2016 convention manager and campaign chairman. Flynn needed a pardon because he had pleaded guilty to perjury involving his discussions with a Russian ambassador in 2017.
Manafort needed a pardon because he had been convicted of financial crimes, including “failing to pay taxes on millions of dollars in income,” per CNN. Manafort had reportedly “earned some $60 million in Ukraine and failed to report a large portion of it to U.S. authorities.”
Trump liberated this treacherous trio (Stone, Flynn, and Manafort) just in time for them to help him try to overturn his 2020 election loss.
This is part 5 of our series chronicling the anti-democratic activities of Stone and his malignant network of thugs, propagandists, and assorted extremists.
Here are the links to parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. (Manafort is discussed extensively in part 1.)
Stone’s defenders at Fox News and OANN
Stone should never have been in a position to interfere with the 2020 election in the first place. In February 2020, a court had sentenced him to 40 months in prison. The charges, which we detailed in parts 3 and 4, included five counts of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice, and one count of threatening a witness. A jury found Stone guilty of all of them.
Stone’s influential associates, however, demanded that Trump rescue Stone from the clutches of justice. Those associates included:
– Tucker Carlson, who was employed by Fox News at the time but has since been fired. (Carlson also wrote the introduction to one of Stone’s books),
– Lou Dobbs, who was employed by Fox News at the time but has since been fired, and
– Larry Kudlow, who was and is employed by Fox News and is “good friends” with Stone, according to Trump.
Stone’s cheerleaders also included political operative Jack Posobiec (a Stone protege who claimed to have attended every day of the trial) and Michael Caputo, Stone’s longtime close friend who once boasted that he was “the only American to work for the White House and the Kremlin.”
Caputo had recently produced an anti-Biden documentary, reportedly with the assistance of Kremlin proxies. The documentary was called the “Ukraine Hoax” and aired in January 2020 via the One America News Network (OANN), which employed Posobiec.
By then, Posobiec was infamous for spreading an anti-Clinton pedophilia hoax known as “Pizzagate” (see part 1), for planting a “Rape Melania” sign at a left-wing demonstration (to make liberals appear depraved), and for declaring in 2017 that he worked “very closely” with the Oath Keepers.
In February 2020, Posobiec promoted Caputo’s “Pardon Roger Stone”organization on OANN.
Stone’s Christian Right defenders
Stone’s influential defenders also included Christian Right leaders Ed Martin (president of the Schlafly Eagles) and Tom Fitton (president of Judicial Watch).
Martin has called himself an “old friend” of Roger Stone.
Martin would later assist the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign, which preceded the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Martin was listed, for example, as a “person in charge” on the permit for the Dec 12 Jericho March (“Hear the Church Roar” rally) in DC. During the rally, Christian Right leaders shared a stage with Flynn and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who called upon Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act (as Stone had proposed as well).
Martin also joined with far right operative Ali Alexander (who handled “Stop the Steal” logistics) in threatening retaliation against Republicans who refused to go along with “Stop the Steal.”
As for Fitton, he had drafted a proposed statement for Trump to use to preemptively declare victory on November 3, before all of the votes were counted.
Fitton and Martin belong to the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive and highly influential umbrella organization for the “Christian Right” and wealthy financiers. Fitton is the CNP’s current president.
The CNP has long been a thorn in the side of democracy. Alexander belonged to the CNP in 2018. Posobiec is listed in the CNP’s 2020 directory.
Jerome Corsi, Stone’s Wikileaks intermediary from the 2016 election (see part 4), is a longtime CNP member.
So is Michael Farris, who would ghost write the U.S. Supreme Court brief signed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in an attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Ditto Bill Dallas, a convicted felon and founder of United in Purpose (UIP), a Christian nonprofit that was closely tied to a massive voter data leak in 2015, as detailed in our expansive UIP report last year.
The voter data had made its way to a Russian hacker’s “elite forum” in late 2015.
In June 2016, a UIP director with ties to Stone (CNP Executive Director Bob McEwen), met with a wealthy pro-Putin Ukrainian, Borys Kolesnikov, who had financed Manafort’s work in Ukraine, as discussed in our UIP report.
By this time, Manafort was working for the Trump campaign upon Stone’s recommendation. It was Manafort who persuaded Trump to choose Mike Pence, a CNP ally, as his vice president.
Four years later, the CNP wanted Trump to win a second term because, during his first term, Trump had given the Christian Right unprecedented power within the executive branch and on the bench.
The CNP was so keen on a second Trump term that they held a closed door meeting in February 2020–nine months before the election—where they began plotting to overturn a potential Trump election loss.
The CNP’s plan for 2020 seemed to include ensuring that Stone, Flynn, and Manafort would be free to help Trump, as they had helped him in 2016.
Stone and Manafort’s efforts to elect Trump in 2016 are detailed in parts 1-4 of this series. As for Flynn, he boasted in November 2016 about his “army of digital soldiers” and how their efforts to elect Trump had constituted “irregular warfare at its finest.”
On Feb. 13, 2020, Ed Martin tweeted that, “It’s time to pardon patriots Roger Stone and Gen. Mike Flynn.” In April 2020, Tom Fitton called upon Trump to pardon Stone, Flynn, and Manafort.
Trump pardoned all three of these miscreants after he lost the 2020 election. If anyone could “fix” Trump’s defeat, it was the same lawless threesome who had helped him ascend to the White House under dubious circumstances in 2016: Stone, Flynn, and Manafort.
Flynn assumed some sort of role with the CNP on Nov 25, the day he received his pardon, as observed by extremism researcher Brent Allpress.
Stone, who had coined the “Stop the Steal” slogan in 2016, played an especially important role as a 2020 “Stop the Steal” connector and strategist. He had cavorted with the Proud Boys (for years) and with the Florida Oath Keepers on Dec. 12, 13, and 14, 2020. (Link to tweet.)
The leaders of both groups have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The attack was preceded by a Jan 6 rally at the Ellipse in DC where Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol, without instructing them to respect the protective barricades around the building and Capitol grounds. Ed Martin sat in the rally’s VIP section. You can see him in the background of a photo tweeted by his wife from the event.
According to sworn witness testimony, Trump knew that some of the Jan 6 rally goers at the Ellipse were armed.
The permit for that event listed “Event Strategies” as the production vendor.
Manafort had “previously worked with … Event Strategies Inc. for Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych,” per the website Open Secrets. We discussed Manafort’s work for Yanukovych (who fled to Russia in 2014 and was later convicted of treason in Ukraine) in part 1. Manafort may also be a current or former executive with the company.
After Jan 6, Martin tweeted that, “Oath Keepers are all of us.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported soon after that a board member of Fitton’s Judicial Watch is a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers organization.
***
As far as I can tell, Stone was the first person from Trump’s inner orbit to suggest that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act or martial law based on alleged election fraud.
(Flynn would later promote a similar concept, the notion that a 2018 Executive Order regarding foreign election interference provided the necessary pretext for military intervention.)
Stone first raised the prospect of the Insurrection Act (martial law) in September 2020. He claimed at the time that they could already prove fraud in Nevada, an incendiary and baseless allegation that was later echoed by Ric Grenell (a Stone ally and former acting Director of National Intelligence under Trump), as well as Matt Schlapp, who had participated in Stone’s astroturf Brooks Brothers riot in 2000, which we discussed in part 1.
When journalist Jakob Soboroff requested details from Grenell and Schlapp, the two men provided none and piled into a van.
The Nevada GOP later acknowledged that the alleged fraud had not been confirmed. Politifact rated the allegation as “pants on fire.” A lawsuit filed by the Nevada GOP (based on alleged fraud) was dismissed, with the judge explaining that there was “no evidence to support voter fraud across Nevada.”
Stone raised the prospect of the Insurrection Act again in early December 2020, this time declaring that he had seen “incontrovertible evidence” that North Korea had delivered ballots to Maine by boat, a geographically laughable allegation. The supposedly “incontrovertible evidence” never materialized.
Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes also supported Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act, including the notion that the invocation would have “given the Oath Keepers the legal standing as a militia to use force of arms to support the president,” as reported by the New York Times. (Emphasis added.)
According to prosecutors, Rhodes “placed a ‘quick reaction force’ of heavily armed Oath Keepers at a Comfort Inn in Arlington County, Va., ready to rush their weapons into Washington if their compatriots at the Capitol needed them [on Jan 6],” as further reported by the Times.
During a Nov 2020 planning meeting, Rhodes had reportedly said, “If things go kinetic, good. If they blow bombs up and shoot us, great. Because that brings the President reason and rationale” for invoking the Insurrection Act.
In the runup to Jan 6, Rhodes belonged to a so-called “Friends of Stone” chat group, as did Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a close friend of Stone. (Both of them have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.)
Michael Caputo, Stone’s longtime friend, also anticipated potential violence. “When Trump refuses to step down on Inauguration Day, the shooting will begin,” so “buy ammunition,” he told his followers during a videotaped rant on Sept 14, four days after Stone proposed that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act.
In the same video, Caputo promoted a group called the New York Watchmen, which he said was “not a militia,” even though the group would launch a GoFundMe for weapons and medical supplies in October. Eek.
A few months later (on Dec. 16), the Three Percenters militia would announce their willingness to go into battle with Flynn as their general.
Soon after (on Dec 19), the leader of the Florida Oath Keepers, Kelly Meggs, would declare that he had recently formed an alliance with the Proud Boys and the Florida Three Percenters to “shut this shit down.”
You know what else Meggs had done recently? Meet with Roger Stone.
It certainly appears that the plan was for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act (and to deputize violent, right-wing extremist groups to quell left wing resistance) based on alleged election fraud and/or a violent clash with Antifa. Trump seemed to lay the groundwork for the latter when he issued a Memorandum on Jan 5 warning about “terrorist acts” by Antifa.
Trump never did invoke the Insurrection Act, however, perhaps because Antifa stayed home and because, despite Trump’s best efforts, neither the DOJ nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced a report confirming that widespread election fraud had occurred.
Although Stone has long maintained that he (Stone) “did nothing wrong,” he’s also a convicted perjurer who pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself to the January 6th Committee.
His lifelong motto is to “admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.” It’s no coincidence that the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign was itself premised on this same depraved modus operandi.
“Fuck the voting” indeed.
Footnote 1
According to one of the filmmakers, the other young man in the Nov 2 video with Roger (“Fuck the Voting”) Stone is Anthony Pascarella aka Tony Manolo. Stone reportedly told Pascarella the next day that, “We’re relaunching ‘Stop the Steal.’”
Pascarella belongs to the Army National Guard and has “Secret Level Clearance,” according to his LinkedIn profile.
Pascarella and Dara were included in the long list of nerdowells thanked by Stone after Trump commuted Stone’s sentence. Dara had previously released a soundtrack calling upon Trump to pardon Stone.
