It looks like Roger Stone is as big of a liar as he always claimed to be.
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, then, for the press to romanticize the longtime political operative as some sort of endearing, puckish “trickster,” especially considering that he has always been exceptionally forthright about his preference for deceit and dishonesty.
Stone was arrested early Friday morning by the FBI. He was indicted by a grand jury Thursday and charged on seven counts, including making false statements to Congress and witness tampering, according to the office of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Stone “was contacted by senior Trump campaign officials to inquire about future releases” of emails stolen by the hacking group WikiLeaks during the 2016 election, according to the indictment. It added that Stone later lied about these communications in testimony that he provided to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The indictment also said Stone directed another target of Mueller’s Russia investigation to alter his testimony so that there would be no contradictions between the two.
“Stone will make an appearance later today at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale,” the office of special counsel announced Friday in a press release.
That Stone’s chosen career as a professional liar caught up to him is not that confusing. He was going to run afoul of the law sooner or later. What’s confusing in this whole mess is that, historically speaking, Stone has enjoyed flattering (if not outright positive) coverage from an admiring media, despite being an infamously unscrupulous “ratfucker.”
In 2004, for example, Salon (yes, Salon) published a headline referring to Stone as a “GOP trickster,” as if the man who has spent most of his professional life destroying careers and campaigns with malicious and underhanded tactics was little more than just a mischievous schoolboy. Later, in 2008, the New Yorker revived the “dirty trickster” moniker for a profile written by Jeffrey Toobin, continuing the trend of ignoring that the nickname is a gross oversimplification of what Stone actually does for a living. In 2012, the Washington Post published a headline titled, “GOP trickster Roger Stone defects to Libertarian party.” And so on.
As disappointing as these headlines may seem, they’re nothing compared to some of the stuff that reporters have written about the man who the FBI arrested Friday on charges that include five counts of providing false testimony to Congress.
“Stone, who worked as a dark-arts political type for Nixon and later Ronald Reagan, is a paradox in wide pinstripes and oval 1930s movie-star shades,” then-Politico reporter Glenn Thrush wrote in 2016. “[Stone’s] known for scorched-earth muckraking … but he desperately wants Trump to make his peace with women and minority voters.”
The report added that Stone is “infamous for his profane tirades and crass Twitter outbursts … but he’s a charming conversationalist who speaks authoritatively about political biographies and pines for lazy Saturdays lost in the stacks of Manhattan’s famous Strand bookstore.”
Oh, please.
CNN’s Dylan Byers wrote a similarly flattering article that same year, titled “The return of Roger Stone.”
“Roger Stone loves resilience,” the story begins. “It’s why the former body builder had Richard Nixon’s face tattooed on his broad back.” It adds, “[A]fter leaving [the Trump 2016 president campaign] in August, Stone is back, in a manner of speaking. With the Republicans potentially facing a contested convention, his brand of political trench warfare is now in greater demand than ever.”
Also in 2016, the Daily Beast’s Jackie Kucinich and Olivia Nuzzi ran to Stone for a concluding quote aimed at mocking then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who had just been nominated as Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate: “When asked what he thought about Pence’s addition to the Republican ticket, Roger Stone, a longtime friend and sometimes adviser to President Trump, replied, ‘Who is Pence?'” Was there no one else in the Trump orbit available for comment?
Lastly, there’s Page Six’s Richard Johnson, who wrote in 2016 that Stone is the “dark lord of political trickery.”
Why reporters have spent the last decade or so giving Stone, a ruthlessly dishonest actor, the kid-glove treatment is anyone’s guess. It’s not that the press has a difficult time calling a liar a liar (see: Media’s coverage of Alex Jones and Trump). It’s that newsrooms for some reason love themselves some Roger Stone.
After Friday’s arrest, I guess we’ll see just how far that love goes.
