“THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND THE GOVERNMENT LIE, ALL THE TIME”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Nov. 2, 2018) — On October 25, The Post & Email began releasing the audio from a one-hour conference call held on August 4, 2016 featuring veteran political strategist and longtime Trump ally Roger Stone.
The calls were promoted by Stone on Twitter as a place where interested parties could “get the scoop” on the Trump campaign from “The Ultimate Political Insider.”
Stone was reportedly a “top” Trump campaign adviser through early August 2015, at which time he departed that role, according to Politico. Whether Stone was fired or chose to resign was a subject of some controversy between Stone’s associates and the campaign.
Stone began his career as an aide to then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968 and went on to advise three more Republican presidents and ten presidential campaigns. He is the author of several bestsellers including “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ” and “The Making of the President, 2016.”
As reported by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, The Post & Email was contacted by one of its journalists about the content of the series of conference calls featuring Stone in the final months of the presidential campaign. The calls were open to the public following free preregistration, when questions could be submitted through at least two of Stone’s websites active at the time.
The Journal reported exclusively that recordings of the calls and other documentation were subpoenaed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller this past spring and provided by call host Jason Sullivan.
Mueller and his team of prosecutors are seeking to learn whether or not Stone or any of his associates communicated directly with the government-transparency organization WikiLeaks or specifically with its founder, Julian Assange. Some have interpreted Stone’s past comments to have indicated that he had advance knowledge of the content of the thousands of emails released by WikiLeaks between July and early November 2016.
Stone has denied any direct communication with Assange or WikiLeaks, claiming that any statements he made referencing future releases were gleaned from Assange’s own public dissemination of information.
One week after the firing of FBI Director James Comey in May of last year, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hired Mueller, with whom he was professionally acquainted, to assume the FBI’s investigation into alleged “collusion” between Trump campaign members and Russian operatives. Mueller was also tasked with determining the extent to which the Kremlin or Russian nationals might have played in “meddling” in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Alleged misconduct on the part of the FBI and its parent agency, the U.S. Justice Department, of which Rosenstein is the second-in-command, has been examined and reported by the Justice Department’s inspector general, with a number of now-former FBI officials referred for further internal FBI investigation. Former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was referred for possible criminal prosecution for allegedly lying to investigators about media leaks.
The evidence against McCabe was presented to a federal grand jury for its review, The Washington Post reported in early September.
Text messages exchanged between former FBI Counsel to the Deputy Director Lisa Page and FBI Deputy Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok indicate that the two discussed an “insurance policy” appearing to refer to the possibility that Donald Trump would be elected president. Lisa Page resigned from the bureau in May, and Strzok was fired in August after a 22-year career.
In recent weeks, former Trump foreign-policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who accepted a “guilty” plea last year in response to a Mueller indictment, has claimed that the government withheld key information from him during questioning and that, like Carter Page, he was the subject of a FISA surveillance warrant in 2016.
After reviewing its notes, The Post & Email concluded that there were four calls and not five, as we reported previously. The dates of the calls are August 4, 2016; August 18, 2016; September 15, 2016; and October 13, 2016. While Sullivan announced during the first conference call that the sessions would be held every other Thursday through the election, reported “hacking” precluded the September 1 call, and The Post & Email has no record of one having occurred on September 29, 2016.
This writer listened to each of the calls and provided brief summaries in real time or shortly thereafter.
In the final stretch of the August 4 call, Stone elaborated on his belief that former president and Arkansas governor Bill Clinton has a grown child named Danney Williams who he has never officially recognized. Stone said he has met Williams and described him as a hard-working father of five children who would like to be able to “shake his father’s hand” some day.
A June 18, 2018 report in Newsweek refutes the claim that Clinton is Williams’s father.
We have divided the final segment into two parts in order to withhold the names of individuals Sullivan identified as having submitted questions in order to maintain our policy of never divulging personal information.
At 4:45 in the first audio clip, Stone decried “the media” for mischaracterizing Infowars host Alex Jones and others as “conspiracy theorists.” “‘Conspiracy theorist’ is a derogatory term that they use on anybody who challenges the official version of things as told to you by the mainstream media and the government, and I argue that the mainstream media and the government lie, all the time, about big things and small,” Stone opined.
In response to a question about how the internet might impact the election, Stone again berated the media for failing to report on the claim made by Juanita Broaddrick that Clinton sexually assaulted her in 1978 when he was Arkansas attorney general. Stone named a number of women who claimed sexual harassment by Clinton, some of whom became publicly known. “Those women will be heard in this election,” Stone predicted (8:20), while terming Hillary Clinton “an accessory after the fact” to the alleged assaults by her husband.
The 57-minute call was presented in four previous segments. Parts 1-3 of the conference call can be found here, here and here, respectively.