Me and Roger Stone

No this headline isn’t clickbait. I really did have an interlude with Roger Stone, the man with a pineapple-sized tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, who has been with Donald Trump since the wild days. To hang out with Stone is to smell the essence of Trumpism — resentful, brooding, dark and always trying to get one over on whoever is in the way. “Elites are soft — they don’t have the belly for the long fight,” Stone told me in a Lunch with the FT in New York shortly before Trump was elected.

I mention this now, of course, because Stone is in the middle of a highly consequential tug of war between Trump and the rule of law. For those who haven’t been following, Trump on Monday railed against Stone’s recommended nine-year jail sentence on seven counts of obstruction of justice, lying and witness intimidation. “This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” Trump tweeted at 2am. “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Sure enough a few hours later, the Department of Justice said it would intervene to reduce the sentence, prompting the resignation of all four of the department’s prosecutors on the case. In any other presidency, this would trigger a constitutional crisis. The US president is overtly meddling in the machinery of justice to help a friend who has kept omerta. In post-acquittal Washington, however, it’s just another piece of crashing masonry. I am still trying to digest the import — and subtext — of the remarkable public complaints about Trump’s tweets by attorney-general Bill Barr on Thursday. You can read Barr’s meaning on several levels.

I have no idea whether Judge Amy Berman Jackson will be swayed by the DoJ’s pressure tactics. But it is clear, contrary to Mr Trump’s media Greek chorus, that Stone was convicted fairly and painstakingly by a jury of 12 of his peers. Anyone who doubts that should read this account by one of the jurors. Do so in the context of outfits such as Breitbart and Fox News scouring social media to find evidence of bias on the part of any of the jurors. The aim is to declare Stone’s trial a mistrial. “To denigrate that process is undemocratic and dangerous,” the juror writes. “While I know not everyone will respect the outcomes that I played a part in, I also know that does not matter. What matters is the truth and the process for discovering it.” That, in essence, is what this fight is about. Is America’s rule of law strong enough to withstand these headwinds?

When I met Stone, who began in politics as a self-declared “dirty trickster” for Nixon’s notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President, he left me in no doubt he would do anything to defame Trump’s enemies. Their relationship goes back to the swinging Studio 54 days in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, Stone set up a lobbying outfit in Washington, DC. Trump was his first client (to get tax breaks for his Atlantic casino operation). The one time they fell out was when Stone, a self-confessed libertine, met a woman in a Miami swingers’ club who had been a call-girl for Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York. He used the information against Spitzer, who was then a friend of Trump’s. Doubtless there was poetic justice in the outcome (Spitzer resigned). Anyway, Stone is that kind of guy. 

When we met, it looked like Hillary Clinton would win, or so the polls said. This was Stone’s prediction: “We’ll be overrun by hordes of young Muslims, like Germany and France, raping, killing, violating, desecrating . . . If Hillary wins, there will be widespread unrest, civil disobedience, badly divided government in which half the country believes she, her daughter, and her husband belong in prison. There’ll be no goodwill. No honeymoon. There will be systematic inspection of all of her actions.” As it turned out, Trump won. There has been deep scrutiny of his actions but to no avail. Democrats aimed at the king and missed. Now it is payback time. Stone was at the centre of the Russian collusion operation (it was his repeated and egregious lying about that to Congress that partly resulted in his conviction). I have little doubt that Trump will pardon Stone whatever sentence he receives.

Over the years I have interviewed a number of crooks, dictators and bad people. Almost everyone has some redeeming feature. In Stone’s case I couldn’t find it. Rana, who was your darkest interviewee? Or is that a bad question? Meanwhile, have you noticed any market impact from Bernie’s latest victory?

Recommended reading

• Talking of which, here is my take from the New Hampshire primary, which I wrote from Sanders’ victory rally in Manchester. My column this week is on the establishment’s habit of crying wolf too soon. Now that Trump is overtly assaulting the rule of law, America seems unshockable.
• While I’m on the subject of wolves (highly collegiate ones, I should add), my colleague Martin Wolf this week issued an incisive warning of the consequences of Trump’s re-election. Strongly recommended. Michael Fullilove, head of Australia’s Lowy Institute, wrote a passionate screed about the America he once knew is vanishing. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s worth a read.
• Also in the Atlantic, McKay Coppins has an eye-opening tour of the kind of deepfake tricks we can expect in the forthcoming election. Four years is a long time in the dark arts of technological manipulation.
• If you want cheering up, my colleague Gillian Tett has a riveting take on how Wall Street is finally beginning to take climate change seriously. Gillian’s column is worth reading in conjunction with Anjli Raval’s piece on how BP — BP! — is planning to hit carbon net zero by 2050.

Rana Foroohar responds 

 Ed, what a story! It’s true that even crooks have redeeming features. In terms of the psychological complexity of my own interview subjects, what comes to mind is a profile I once did of Carl Icahn, when I worked at Time magazine. The news hook was Icahn leading the charge for more stock buybacks (he was tweeting every 10 minutes or so that Apple should hand back more money), and what that signalled for financial markets.

I spent about five hours dining with him in the privacy of his duplex apartment on 53rd Street, and during the course of the meal, we got into his family, working-class Jews from Queens that seemed a lot like a very dark version of the clan in Woody Allen’s Radio Days. His father, a narcissistic, frustrated cantor who wanted to be an opera singer, gave Carl no breaks, forcing him to play poker in a Rockaway pool club to earn his board at Princeton. In the most memorable moment of the interview, Icahn proved to me that even robber barons have Daddy issues; see excerpt here: 

I ask him if his father ever acknowledged what a success he’d become. Icahn nods, sips his second martini and tells a story of how his dad, who knew he did complex arbitrage deals, came to him a few years before he died with a yellow pad and pencil. He pushed them across the table and said, “Show me what you do, son. Show me how you do it.” Icahn tears up. “I said, ‘You finally admit it, huh?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ He wasn’t a demonstrative man, but he came over and hugged me.”

I half wondered if Icahn cried mainly to one up Warren Buffett, who had also done so in an interview I’d done the previous year. Either way, the two weepy conversations made me feel like the Barbara Walters of old, white billionaires. 

Source: Economy - ft.com