 Raji, you describe yourself as an agent or agent provocateur. Is that a role you saw for yourself early on? First of all, let's define that. I think a lot of people probably don't know what that is. They just say it's French and then it goes over their head. Yeah. Look, I think that in politics, really in life, there are two kinds of people. There are men of action and then there are men of thought. Revolution requires both. You need thinkers, but you also need doers. Sometimes the thinkers can't get out of their own way. Sometimes the doers aren't sure what they should be doing. But I would still put myself in the former category. In other words, being a successful political strategist revolves around understanding the ideas and themes that motivate people to do things, i.e. vote or show up at a rally or whatever action you're asking them to take, write your U.S. senator and therefore understanding how to motivate people for your political cause is what I do. Number of people pointed out to me that agent provocateur implies the sales of false information. I'm not sure I completely agree with that. I understand the role of political rhetoric in politics. The next question is always is, but do you tell the truth? Well, George H.W. Bush said, read my lips. No new taxes. Was he telling the truth? Barack Obama said, if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Was he telling the truth? I would argue at the time those gentlemen said those things, they believed them. They believed they were the truth. They just didn't turn out to be the truth. The good news is, you know, caveat emptor for the consumer, for the voter. The great thing about alternative media, the great thing about shows like this is people can watch them and then make up their own mind about what they believe and what motivates them or does not motivate them. So this believing something is the truth at the time you say it, this is obviously distinctly different than, let's say, your first foray into politics and disinformation back in elementary school. Can you tell us about that? That I thought was hilarious. Well, I come from a non-political family. My parents never had any particular interest or involvement in politics. They were good citizens and they voted. And because my grandparents had been fairly strong Republicans, my parents tended to be Republican but with some kind of an independent bent. For example, in 1960, I know that my mother voted for John Kennedy over Richard Nixon because we were also devout Catholics and my parents felt strongly the idea of our first Catholic president was a good idea. In any event, I was in the first grade and the elementary school that I attended was in a fairly upper middle class suburb of New York City, a Republican stronghold. And the school scheduled a mock election in order to teach kids about democracy in the American election system. I favored John Kennedy over Richard Nixon quite simply because Jack Kennedy had better hair. It was kind of the depth of my political knowledge at the time, but I was a pretty ardent Kennedy supporters wearing Kennedy buttons and so on. So I went to the school cafeteria on the day before the vote and I waited in line and as each kid would come down with his tray of food, I would say, by the way, you know if Nixon is elected, we're going to have school on Saturdays. While this word spread exponentially, and lo and behold, within the first grade, Jack Kennedy scored an upset victory over Richard Nixon among those voters. That was, as I said, my first experience with the concept of disinformation. And of course, I have never used it again since. How different are voters now than they were in elementary school, do you think, in many ways? You mentioned the word non-sophisticates in the documentary as well. And I thought that was a really interesting word that describes a lot of the people that I certainly grew up with and that I speak to about topics like these as well. Well, first of all, not enough people vote. That's a problem in the nutshell. People complain. People are unhappy about all kinds of things, but then when the day comes around when they might actually do something about it, they don't show up. I don't really understand that. I try to vote in every, you know, not only the elections, but the primaries and the party sub primaries and so on. There are, I think, two different kinds of voters. There are those voters who tend to be party primary voters in both parties who are intensely plugged into the debate, who know the candidates, know the issues, have strong opinions, and they have a greater tendency to show up. Presidential elections tend to bring out a larger number of casual voters. These are voters who don't vote in state or local elections because they couldn't be bothered. Feel some civic pressure to vote in a presidential election because it gets so much publicity and coverage. And they tend to make their decision late. They tend to be undecided sometimes right up until the time they go to the ballot box. The importance, of course, is that there are many of such voters in a presidential year and they can have a definite impact on the turnout. So those casual voters also tend to be less educated, not in terms of their overall education, but less educated on the issues. But it's still an important and not insignificant subset of the voting electorate. And is it important, then, to appeal to those people's sort of casualness in terms of the fact that they're going to be voting based on a lot of that, based on a lot of these, as you'd mentioned, non-sophisticated issues or lack of understanding or basic understanding of some of the issues? See, I'm not sure that the average person or even many sophisticates in our society understand the role of the political consultant and the role of the political strategist and how these things work. We don't guess about anything. Every successful campaign begins with a benchmark survey, a poll of voters, with a very large sample so that the sub-samples within your poll are large enough to be meaningful. And you put a very substantial amount of time into crafting your questionnaire. They tend to run as long as 20 minutes, which, in all honesty, is not lucrative for the pollster because to reach, let's say, 1,000 people who will complete a 20-minute questionnaire, you may have to call 10,000 people to complete that project, maybe 20,000. Voters easily board, they get halfway through the questionnaire, and they say, oh, I've got to go shopping from groceries, buy, and they hang up, well, that doesn't do you any good. So that instrument, that initial benchmark survey, which is not designed to tell you who's ahead and who's behind, that's kind of the least important number in the poll. When we think of polling, we have this tendency to think of the horse race, oh, is Clinton leading Trump? Is Trump leading Clinton or whatever? That's the least important number. What you are looking for is or are themes and ideas when introduced within the laboratory have the tendency to move voters from undecided to your candidate or from the opposition candidate to undecided, which generally means that they can be moved next to you. And you try to be as creative as you can in terms of depicting, in a motivational way, as many issues as you can think of based on history, based on your own experience, to try to find those two or three, what we call, hot button issues that motivate people, that change their minds, that move them from one place in the electorate to another place. So to go back to your question, the casual voter is taken into consideration in those calculations, because one of the things the poll is supposed to do is to help you decide who's actually going to show up and vote. So right up front, you say, Mr. Stone, how likely are you to vote in the upcoming special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama? Special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. Well, if the voter says that he is unlikely to vote, you'll probably throw him out of your sample or you will take that sub-sample with a grain of salt. Primary voters, both Republican and Democrat, almost always have a greater tendency to vote, a greater intensity, greater knowledge of the issues, greater interest in the overall question, and therefore you generally can project with some certainty who's going to vote. General election voting is an entirely different thing. One of the great mistakes of Hillary Clinton's campaign, and I think of many of the professional pollsters who were watching the 2016 race, was an assumption that the make-up of the electorate would be identical as it was in 2012, that the same people who turned out to elect Barack Obama over John McCain would be coming out for this election. And if you step back from that, you realize that was never likely. Barack Obama is an iconic historic figure among people of color, among African-Americans. Hillary Clinton was never going to get the same turnout, nor the same percentage of those voters as Barack Obama. She would win among them, but she was never going to duplicate exactly what he got. Rural areas turned out for Trump in a way that they did not for McCain, or pardon me, for Romney, I guess would have been the previous, and that was in many cases not taken into consideration. So it's not that the polls were wrong when they showed that Hillary was going to run, it's that their sample was wrong, and therefore they reached the wrong conclusion. It seems like you saw that coming because you have such a zoomed out timeline. You've been doing and thinking about this since you were a kid. I read a story about how you built all these alliances and put all of the serious challengers for your senior year of high school presidency on your ticket. So all the people who might take your seat are on your ticket, and then you recruited somehow the most unpopular guy in school to run against you, which was super sharp and brilliant in a way that some people might think that to mean. I don't know about that, that we can leave up to people to decide, but it's even further, when you were the junior and you were a vice president of that same student government, you actually manipulated the ouster of the president and succeeded him in that. So it's almost like House of Cards. Either they're asking you questions about your stories or they're reading all your books. I don't know which one it is, but it seems remarkably similar, and you can't really make that stuff up. Well politics is about addition, not subtraction. Politics is about getting people to join you and to work in a common cause. Everybody in politics, by and large, is looking for something for themselves just because they can't be the candidate for president. Maybe they can be the candidate for vice president, or maybe they can be the candidate for secretary or treasurer, or maybe they can be the new chairperson of the party, or maybe they can be the campaign spokesman since what they really like is to read their name in the newspaper. I really think that one of the first steps is to look at others who aspire to the office that you aspire to and determine how they can be co-opted and how they can become beneficial to you. Now this obviously works much better in a high school or college politics, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work. I'm having lunch with a congressional candidate tomorrow who I hope to talk out of a party primary and induce them to take some other role in the 2016 or I should say 2018 election to clear the way for a better candidate and thus not spend a lot of money on an expensive brutal primary that will not only suck up dollars that we need for a general election against a Democrat, but also have a tendency to drive our candidate too far to the right on some social issues in a Republican primary, leaving that candidate unable to get elected in the fall. So you've got these stone's rules that you live by, you advise your clients to live by I assume, and I'd like to get through some of those because I think that's where the psychology of what we're dealing with is laid out here. How did you come up with stone's rules? Where did these originate? Over the years, I would just come up with observations or statements that have generally speaking held me in good stead and I would just kind of say them as a rhetorical advice. And then when Matt Labash of the weekly standard did a profile of me, he printed a number of them because if you hang out with me for three days, you're going to hear them. I just kind of spit them out. For example, if you're wearing a white suit, don't order the spaghetti. Okay. A lot of them are common sense based. Not all of them obviously are political. So he began writing them down. He featured a number of them in the profile piece he ended up writing and that began a public clamor is going on now for a number of years to produce the actual volume. So very shortly I will be producing kind of like Chairman Mao's little red book right. Right. In handbook form, we're going to have stone's rules and they're rules of combat. They're kind of like Sun Tzu. In other words, they can be applied to a career in business or advertising or marketing or politics. And then there's just general rules, what I call style rules that are uniquely mine. One of them that stuck out to me was it's better to be infamous than never famous at all. And that sort of dovetailed into this question about so-called dirty tricks and things like that. And you have a great quote from this which was, look, politics ain't beanbag and losers don't legislate. Does that mean that it's in theory okay to use pretty much anything no matter how dirty as long as it'll get to victory? Of course, as long as it's not illegal. No, I think it is the legality that is the bright line. That's the line you do not cross. But it would be unrealistic to think that our American politics is some uplifting civic experience. One of our presidents was accused of being a cross dresser. Abraham Lincoln was accused of fathering multiracial children. Grover Cleveland was ridiculed for having an illegitimate daughter while in the White House. This list goes on and on. It is, I'm reminded that rock song Dirty Laundry. People like the purient. They like the rough and tumble. They like the interesting. Put it another way. Run for office. Release a 50 page, white page, white paper on the environment. See how many people read it and how much press coverage it gets. None. So the same voters who tell you we're interested in issues, we're not interested in these personal attacks. Well, they absorb all the personal attacks because combat is like a price fight. It's fun. And although they say they do not like it, they do like it. Politics in our country is hand-to-hand combat. It's a contact sport. Always has been. Always will be. And you seem to be quite fine with a lot of folks saying, oh, that Roger Stone, he's a dirty trickster. He's got all kinds of things up his sleeve. He have no problem with that from the look of it. Well, one man's dirty trickster is another man's freedom fighter. One man's dirty trick is another man's civic participation. Everything is via the eye of the beholder. Yeah, there's a lot of liberal Democrats across the country, particularly after the defeat of Al Gore, who think I'm a dirty trickster. But stopping the Miami-Dade board of elections from recounting a sheaf of ballots that they had already recounted twice. And we're going back for the third time in a desperate effort to find additional votes for Al Gore. That's not a dirty trick. That's common sense. Enough already. You've already counted those ballots twice. Why do we need to count them again? And the only thing, of course, worse than being talked about negatively is not being talked about at all in that case, because the power comes from being talked about whether it's good or bad, right? Well, I think all publicity is a good publicity. Go try getting a table at a great restaurant if nobody knows who you are. Sure, you could wait a couple hours at the bar. It's not why I got into politics, but it's certainly, shall we say, a side benefit. Controversy breeds opportunity. I admit that my approach to politics is controversial. But in truth, dirty tricks, appellations aside, I have practiced my craft within the rules of the way it is practiced at the time. I don't do things that other political operatives don't successfully do, and they don't do things that I don't successfully do. So there is a norm. And of course, if your strategy involves tactics or activities that cross a line in the voter's mind of fair play, you're going to do more damage than you are good. And I think one of the most famous, or one of my favorite, I should say, caricatures or characterizations of you is that the sinister forest gump of U.S. politics, and I think what they mean by that is wherever there's intrigue, you seem to be there. You had this minor role, if you will, in Watergate at age 19, all the way up until now, where it's been said that it was your idea for Trump to run for president, and you've been bugging him for 30 years to do so. Is that true? I'm just like a bad penny. I just keep popping up. Well, this dovetails nicely into Stone's rule number two, or at least the one that I saw as the second one, which is the past is prologue. And this is diving into the value of disinformation, the mock election with Kennedy's hair, your obsession with goldwater early on. Why do you have a Nixon tattoo on your back, though? Let's take a little detour on that one. All right. Well, first of all, let's delineate what the importance of past is prologue is. Yeah, sure. Others far more learned than me, I think, said those who do not study the past are determined to repeat it. I think studying political history, studying the presidential campaigns of the past, studying successful elections even in the modern age is an invaluable tool to understanding how things will work in the future. That said, there's a tremendous tendency by some political consultant, some political strategies, to try to relive their last race when the situation and dynamics of their last race is not the same as the race that's before them. In other words, the same cookie cutter campaign does not work twice because you never have the same candidates, the same voter registration, the same socioeconomic aspects of the district, the same media influences. Every campaign is entirely different. Yet, I see practitioners try to stick a cookie cutter formula that worked in Sausalito. Maybe it'll work in Sandusky. It just doesn't work that way. The second part of your question. Yeah, the Nixon tattoo on your back. You've got to be a member of a single digit number of people that have a giant Nixon-faced tattooed on their literally, I think the only person on the face of the country that has a dick on the front and the back. Probably. This is easily explained and it's not even an ideological or a political thing. I had the opportunity to meet Richard Nixon, who is really the man who played a role in motivating me to get into politics. My first political infatuation was with Barry Goldwater. It was reading the books of Goldwater that helped me figure out that I was and am a conservative. I found that conservatism was based on common sense. Low taxes, limited spending, a strong but muscular national defense that was meant as a deterrent for people picking fights with you. Quite different than going around the world looking for fights. A government that protected your privacy rights. A government that would stay out of the bedroom and out of the boardroom. A government that was based on maximum individual personal freedom. A government that didn't care what you smoked, what you ate, who you loved, and all of those things that I think are your personal rights. I was a Goldwater zealot. I followed the campaign. I wore a Goldwater button. I had a Goldwater bumper sticker on my bicycle. I went to the Goldwater headquarters, not far from where I live by bicycle every day, and I would lick envelopes and seal them to voters until the place closed day after day. I was emotionally invested in Goldwater's candidacy. I persuaded my parents to let me go to the convention in San Francisco because a neighbor where I lived was a very active woman Republican. It was an alternate for Goldwater from New York State to that convention. She was driving across country. I persuaded my parents to let me drive with her. I got a hotel room that was so small that if you put a key in the door, you broke a window. It was a very small but clean room, and I attended my first convention at age 12. I was all in for burying Goldwater. Of course, I had no idea that he was going to be crushed. I had no idea that he was headed for one of the greatest defeats in American political history. After that, even though I defiantly continue to wear my Goldwater button for two weeks after the election, I began to look at his election, and I concluded that he had made a number of foolish mistakes, almost going out of his way to ensure that he lost, advocating the sale of the TVA when visiting Tennessee, advocating the privatization of the social security system when he visited Florida, wistfully suggesting that perhaps we should use nuclear weapons to defoliate the jungles in Vietnam, which fed into the warmonger theme that the Johnson people, the Lyndon Johnson people, were very actively putting out. They essentially convinced the American people that Barry Goldwater was a mentally unbalanced nut job, probably a neo-Nazi, but a man that we could not count on to have his finger on the button, a complete caricature of the real Barry Goldwater. In any event, based on that study, I determined that Richard Nixon, who had been cheated out of the presidency four years previously, was a more pragmatic and, I think, more skillful candidate. I wrote Nixon, then practicing law on Wall Street and out of politics a letter telling him, if he ran again, that I was in, that he could count on me. I don't think he knew I was 13 years old. I think he thought I was much younger, much older. Then I didn't hear anything for a number of years, but to show how meticulously organized the Nixon people were, that letter went into a file of people to later be contacted and contact me they did. I went to New York City for an interview. They found that I was quite a bit younger than they expected, but I got a job as a gopher driver working with Pat Buchanan and John Sears and some of my seniors out of the then New York-based Nixon campaign. It is there that I met Governor John Davis Lodge, the former Governor of Connecticut who really became a mentor to me and from whom I learned a great deal about retail politics in any event. Fast forward to many years, I was in Venice Beach, California, and I decided to get a tattoo of Richard Nixon on my back. It's about the size of a grapefruit halfway between my shoulder blades. This is really not a political statement. What it is for me is a daily reminder that in life when you get knocked down, when you're defeated, when something you're really counting on doesn't come through, when you strive but you fail, and even when you have serial losses, when you're dejected, depressed, ready to give up, well, that's the time to get yourself up off the canvas, to dust yourself off and get back in the game. The story of Nixon's a story of resilience. It's a story of persistence. He not only has the 1960 election stolen from him, after a series of enormous mistakes in that campaign, one after another after another, he still manages to close fast at the end and most probably won a narrow victory. He then, in order to keep his political prospects alive, decides to run for governor of California, a job I don't think he ever really wanted, and he is crushed in that election. Now, at a very young age, he's done. He's finished. He's a national joke. No one takes his candidacy seriously. By dint of hard work and circumstances that include the assassination of John Kennedy, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam War, that confluence of events has the tendency to resurrect the political candidacy and viability of Richard Nixon. He's an eight-year vice president who even his critics admit has vast foreign policy experience, having traveled the globe as an ambassador for Eisenhower and having first name relationships with most of the major world leaders. He's viewed as solid, experienced. He's the right guy at the right time and he makes the greatest political comeback in American history. He does so and gets nominated in a way that Goldwater could not, meaning he has a united Republican party behind him. He has the support of the Goldwaters and the Thurmans. He also has the support of the Rockefellers and the Purseys, and he still is in a situation in which he has to run in a three-way election in which he has George Wallace, an independent, cutting into him from his right, while Hubert Humphrey has theoretically a united Democratic party, but really not so. He's got problems on his left because of the war. It's a complicated race because it's a multi-candidate race. He wins. That's the story of persistence. It's that persistence that persuaded me, that resilience that persuaded me to put his visage on my back. Back to Stone's rules. I love these things. They're so eye-opening and so telling in so many ways. One, attack, attack, attack, never defend is something we're seeing a lot in the current landscape, if you will. This is something that maybe you've pioneered, maybe not, but you certainly get credit for pioneering negative publicity in massive doses to win elections. The NIC PAC adds super PACs and things like that. You've been quoted as saying something like, we could elect Mickey Mouse to the Senate because of PACs and super PACs. Where does this attack, attack, attack, never defend from? Is this something you use in every area of your life or is this very specifically political? First of all, the Mickey Mouse quote, which sometimes gets attributed to me, was actually said by the late Terry Dolan. I never said that. Not sure it's right either, by the way. Attack, attack, attack, of course, is borrowed from Winston Churchill. The point of this is in politics, you never win on defense. You only win on offense. That's why the current Russian collusion, delusion, as I like to call, I think is taking its toll on the Trump White House because they have been consistently on defense. There's still no evidence, at least not evidence that would hold up in any US court of law that indicates that there was any meaningful collusion between Trump, or Trump associates, or the Trump campaign, and the Russian state. Yeah, I understand that 17 intelligence agencies like Pavlovian dogs repeat over and over again. It is our assessment that the Russians interfered in the election. Well, first of all, there's a tip off. Anytime they use the word assessment, they're lying. Assessment means we don't know. Here's what we'd like you to think. Or assessment means it is our guess that this is what's happening. So that's tip off number one, but instead of spending your time defending and denying, we know that the super secret FISA court condemned the Obama administration for the wholesale, illegal, unconstitutional surveillance of tens of thousands of Americans and that this was certified by the court in the closing days of the Obama administration. Thus, it's not a conspiracy theory. The government admits in writing that it happened. Now, who knew? Did Admiral Rogers know? Did James Clapper know? Did Susan Rice know? What did the president know? And when did he know it? These are felonies. These are jailable offenses. These make Watergate look like a milk-fed puppy. And I don't understand why all of those national security figures involved in this illegal surveillance have not been brought before a grand jury to explain what they know and when they know it. Of course. If I were Attorney General Sessions or if I were the president, that would be my response to the Russian allegations because here we have actual evidence of crime as certified by a court. We're on the Russian question. All we have is assertion, allegation, rumor, and claim. Still no proof. Now, you've got the attack part down pretty well. I mean, some of your books slam. The Clinton family has some slammed. The Bush family. So you're at least an equal opportunity character assassin when it comes to that. And this works. I mean, I look at what Ted Cruz and this, you're going to have to explain to me. Ted Cruz stated, I would note that Mr. Stone is a man who has 50 years of dirty tricks behind him. He's a man for whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent. Is Ted Cruz trying to call you a ratfucker without saying ratfucker? What is his deal? He's got it out. Yeah. Well, I mean, Ted Cruz is a phony from day one. I mean, this guy is a country club Bush Republican. You know, frankly, the idea of him as some constitutional conservative is a self invented image that's only a couple years old. He was in fact, George W. Bush's brain. And I find the illegal loans that he took to finance his U. S. Senate campaign from Goldman Sachs, loans that he did not report as required by law, give you some idea of his operating style. Here's a question for you. Why do people take an instantaneous dislike to Ted Cruz? Simple. They're merely saving time. In fact, the appellation ratfucker does not apply to me and had nothing to do with me. It's a term that was developed in Southern California fraternity politics as practiced by Bob Haldeman and Dwight Chapin and others who were much older than I was in the Nixon entourage. They tend to be sophomoric, meaning if your idea of a dirty trick is ordering 30 pizzas and sending them to the Democratic headquarters, what would be the point of that? To aggravate the Democrats that you didn't move any votes. You didn't do anything that changed any votes. That's just, that's harassment. That's stupidity. I don't understand the point of that. But Donald Segretti, who I never met, but who I put in this Southern California fraternity political box with his colleagues, they thought that kind of stuff was hysterical. I thought it was a waste of time. Right. This is all about sort of the Machiavellian get it done better to be feared than love. Pizza is just, like you said, I did that in middle school. I actually pulled that similar stunt, ordered pizzas to the school. And this, again, falls in line with one of Stone's rules, which is business is business. Essentially, you created modern lobbying. You kind of crossed that line of what Air 24 was considered proper or improper, peddling that influence, if you will. And you've worked with, represented some pretty shady government Zamalia Zaire in Washington. They call it the torturer's lobby. What do you say when people say, Hey, man, what's the deal with the torturer's lobby? Why do something like that? Why, why is that necessary? Is that not over the top? But let's take these one at a time. Yeah. I certainly did not invent lobbying. In fact, the thing I, the gentleman I think did invite it was Tommy Thomas, the court, Thomas Corcoran, an intimate of Franklin Roosevelt. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, there were most certainly a thriving lobbying business dominated by Democrats in Washington, DC. The difference between, say, Tommy Boggs, who was a good friend of mine and an excellent lobbyist, but a hardcore Democrat, and my partners in IR, Boggs would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for your campaign to the United States Senate. Then he would come back and lobby you. We would give you sweat equity. We would work to elect you sometimes on a paid basis, sometimes on a non-paid basis, because we weren't wealthy. And then we would come back in some cases to lobby you all perfectly legal. Some liberals and some on the left found this distasteful, the idea that you would lobby people you actually know. But frankly, it was quite efficient and quite legal. And we did quite well at it. But to say that we invented the modern lobbying industry would be a vast overstatement. Gotcha. Okay. Well, I stand corrected. Thank you for that. During the time of Black Manafort and Stone, we represented governments and movements that were pro-western, pro-United States. And in many cases, they had critics on the left. We represented the Angolan freedom fighters. There were liberals in the United States who were opposed to the resistance in Angola. These are very sharply partisan divided questions, but the Reagan administration, the Reagan State Department, the Reagan Defense Department, was providing aid to the Angolan rebels. I never worked for any country or any political movement that was antithetical to the United States ever. Yeah, it's hard to criticize that. I struggled with that when I was researching you and prepping for this interview, which is a lot of people say like, well, you know, he represented Somalia and Zaire and UNITA and all this stuff. And I thought, well, yeah, I mean, that is something where a lot of people might say I'm not doing that. But on the other hand, there were U.S. weapons and consulting and money going to some of these groups. It's not like they weren't allowed into the United States. It wasn't like we weren't connected with them in some other way. So it is kind of a touchy subject because it's really hard to say shame on you and then say, well, you know, if our government does it, then it's different. It really is tough to make that moral decision in some way. Well, I also think if you went back and looked at those individual governments that were represented by Black Manafort and Stone, in many cases, at the same time, they were represented by a democratic based firm. And we worked together because policy is bipartisan. In other words, you have Democrats in the decision making process in Washington who you must also influence in their thinking to get the assistance or focus on the problems that your client has. Lobbying is very much a bipartisan endeavor. The only difference is that the party in power usually takes the lead. But most countries, the Saudis, I think, have 40 different lobbyists, Republican and Democrat. Is that stupid? No, that's smart. You play the game as the rules are written is something that you'd mentioned in Get Me Roger Stone on Netflix. So when they change the rules, you change the way the game is played. So essentially as long as you're within the rules of the game, all is fair. So wouldn't it then make sense to, within the current rules, which may allow for this type of play as you put it, make it harder to change those rules so that everything you do is above board? In other words, if some of this stuff is considered dirty tricks, but it's still within the rules, isn't it also within the rules to change the rules and make sure that the so-called dirty play continues to happen? Or do you think that it's better to clean it up and make sure that you can't do this type of thing? You can't do this as much Machiavellian maneuvering inside the government? See, I think the U.S. Constitution is what allows it. It's very hard to change the Constitution. The Constitution guarantees us free speech. It guarantees us free assembly. It guarantees us free expression. The other thing that will not change is human nature. Human nature does not change. People have aspirations, but people also have dislikes. And that is not going to change. It's how people are made up. You can change the campaign finance laws, but as we have learned the hard way, whenever you change them, the system will find some legal way to circumvent those changes. Water always seeks its own level. So in 1974, as a reaction to the excesses of Watergate, the rules became much tighter. Anonymous money became impossible to move around. Limits were put on how much money could be donated. Prohibitions later blown off by the courts were put on corporations who were excluded from politics. Money from foreign nationals was made illegal. But everybody played under the new rules. Well, under the new rules, you also had disparities. In other words, if you wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, you had to finance your campaign, let's say it's 1975, by going out and finding as many $1,000 contributions from U.S. citizens as you possibly could, unless you were John Hines or some millionaire, in which case it was perfectly okay for you to write a $10 million check to yourself to run for the Senate. How is that fair? Why would Mr. Hines not be limited to the same $1,000 limit as any other candidate? That was the great disparity in the law, and it gave rise to a number of millionaire candidates, John Warner, Herb Cole, Howard Metzenbaum. These guys purchased U.S. Senate seats for themselves in a way that the average citizen could not. The average citizen was put at a disadvantage. Citizens United would ultimately change all of that. P.S., a wealthy person can still put as much money in his campaign as he wants. Individual contributions to a campaign are still limited, but at least the Super PAC now exists so that if someone wants to make an unlimited contribution to candidate X in order to even the playing field, they can do so. Do you see playing at a certain, let's call it, moral level as a synonym in some way for weakness, or are the morals completely dictated by the laws and the rules themselves? Do I look like a Catholic priest to you? Look, politics is about winning, and you do whatever it takes to win within the bounds of the law. If you are, as I am, accused of being over the top or being outrageous or being controversial, in our fast-moving society, with thousands of cable TV channels, with hundreds of talk radio stations, with millions of websites, you have to be provocative. You have to be interesting to get anybody's attention. The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring, and when you bore the voters, well, they start looking elsewhere for a candidacy that is not boring. Why do you think what you do is necessary? Do you ever, well, actually scratch that. Do you ever feel like you go over the top with it at all? No. I'll take that. So it appears as though you're a guy who believes the ends always justify the means, and that as long as you win, you did the right thing. Is that accurate? As long as you take into consideration the aforementioned desire to stay on the right side of the law, there's a lot of things you could do that would be provocative, but would backfire, that would hurt you. I do think it takes some judgment. Something that Bill Clinton once told me about his friend Dick Morris, he says, yep, Dick's brilliant. This guy'll come up with 10 brilliant ideas. Nine of them would blow you up immediately if you tried them, but one is actually genius. I think that kind of sums it up. So not every strategy that you concoct on paper or in the laboratory of polling will work in reality. But as you quoted earlier, losers don't legislate. You have no impact whatsoever on the tides of history. If you don't win in public office, if you lose, being known as a good loser is still being known as a loser. Do you think then doing anything to win the ends justify the means within the bounds of the law, do you think there's any fundamental limits to that, or is the limit what is legal and what is illegal? Well, no, I think it's self-limited because there is such thing as taste, and that has to be taken into consideration. You have to introduce information to voters in a way that is palatable. Look, I'm pro-life at this point, having made a long odyssey on the question of abortion. And I, being a libertarian and being a lapsed Catholic at one point, I've had to think and pray about this issue a long time. I do not think going to a public building and holding up photos of bloody fetuses helps the pro-life movement. I think it's counterproductive. It doesn't mean that I don't understand the frustration and anger of the person holding the sign, but I think there are better ways to achieve their goal. That's all I'm saying. You had a scandal a few years back, and did that scandal, and I'll let you explain it in your own words if you want to, did that scandal in some ways help create who you are today? I mean, did that cause you to reinvent yourself in the way into the Roger Stone that we see today instead of maybe some other goal that you had at the time? I don't think so. You see, there's this assumption that if you're a conservative that you must be some kind of an evangelical Christian moral majority Republican. I never thought that social issues was the way to build either the Republican Party or the or the conservative movement because within the movement, social issues divide us. They don't unite us. What does unite us? Economic issues, low taxation, less spending, a muscular national defense. If you look at polling, those are things that all Republicans, more libertarian Republicans, more social issue Republicans, can agree on. So this is not a question of hypocrisy. I have always been for gay marriage. It is now the law of the land. I have always been for the legalization of marijuana. I still am. I'm involved with the United States Cannabis Coalition, a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, progressives and libertarians. And we seek to hope to persuade President Trump to stick to his pledge to allow the states to decide whether marijuana shall be legal in some form in their states. 29 states, as you probably know, have taken this position. This is creating hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, pardon me, in state revenue. It's probably balancing the budgets in Colorado and California. Millions of people are counting on this for their medicine. And I think many voters took President Trump at his word. Now comes along Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, who seems to be planning a 1960s reformadness style crackdown on people who are dispensing or utilizing marijuana for medical reasons, as approved by the states. This is an enormous mistake, in my opinion. But I've always had that position. In other words, I'm a libertarian Republican. I've made no bones about the fact that my wife and I are libertines. That may not fit your model for perfection, but I'm not a candidate for public office. I'm not holding myself out as an example. I'm merely a political strategist. If you want to criticize my candidate's lifestyle, well, I guess that's your right. But my view is that my life is nobody's business because I'm not seeking your approval as someone running for political office. Can you define libertine? I've actually never heard that term, but I know what the scandal is about, so maybe I'm on the right track with that. But I'll let you do it. Looking up in the dictionary. Got it. Loud and clear. Probably be the best way to do it. I can do that. So being accused slash outed, if you will, as a libertine, that was something that sent you, at some point, reeling a little bit because you weren't expecting it, is having your life put on blast like that just table stakes for the game that you're playing? Well, I didn't think so at the time. I also understood the hypocrisy of it because my wife and I would attend certain parties, and when you got there, you'd say, oh my God, there's US Senator so-and-so with his secretary. Why, there's an admiral so-and-so with his executive assistant. Why, there's the deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management and his girlfriend. In other words, people are people, and I think a more, shall we say, cosmopolitan sexual situation has always existed around the corridors of power. Lyndon Johnson had at least three illegitimate children. There was one junction when five different women in the White House secretary pool were pregnant, all of them at the hand of Lyndon Baines Johnson. John F. Kennedy was a notorious womanizer, deflowered an 18-year-old intern in the Mimi Beardsley, who I actually met two summers ago and interviewed for my book. So Dwight Eisenhower had a mistress. Richard Nixon had a girlfriend in China, very attractive. Many of our leaders are the perfect paragon of virtue that their PR campaigns seek to depict them. The only guy I know who wasn't getting some on the side was Jimmy Carter, and you know how that worked out. Yeah, I suppose we do. I suppose we do. So look, you're going to lose respect for me if I don't ask, but you testify in less than a week. What is going through your head about that? Are you going to be applying Stone's rules to the testimony in front of the Senate? I'm very anxious to testify because a number of the members of the committee have made allegations against me in a public hearing which are flatly demonstrably, provably not true. So for example, a Congresswoman says, quote, Stone is on the Kremlin payroll. We know that, close quote. That's just not true. That's defamatory. That's a lie. Never had any Russian client whatsoever, have never been to Russia, have never worked for any Russian entity, government or private, don't have any Russian friends that I know of, had no contact with Russians in the run-up to this campaign. Now, unfortunately, although there are some loopholes, a member of Congress can tell any lie they want about an American citizen and by and large they're protected from lawsuit. There are exceptions to that as some members may find. All I seek to do is to go before the committee in a public setting, since they smeared me in a public setting. I think it's only fair. It's only American that I should be able to respond in a public setting and read back the actual words of these members, whether they were in the hearing on committee or on CNN and then address them on an individual basis. I also hope to clear up a number of the questions regarding John Podesta's emails being hacked. Know I had no advance notice of that. Know I never said I did and know you have no evidence whatsoever to the contrary. So you can repeat stone new and advance, stone new and advance, just because you say it does not make it true or the idea that I was somehow coordinating with Julian Assange on his release of data on Hillary. WikiLeaks tweeted on July, I think it's 26th that they had the goods on Hillary and they would release them in October. A source only days later told me the exact same thing. I reported it. That does not mean that I learned it directly from Assange and it does not mean that I was privy to a secret. It had already been tweeted for the world to see. So we're going to go through those sequences. They seem to have some fairy tale delusion that the hacking of the DNC by the Russians, they can't prove that, or by Guccifer 2.0 was done via a conspiracy that involved me. The problem with that is my one and only limited exchange with Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter comes almost six weeks after WikiLeaks has already published the controversial material. Therefore, for us to have conspired, I would have required a time machine. Not possible. Even Vladimir Putin has not yet perfected the time machine. So the sequence of events when laid out correctly, Congressman Schiff has conflated a number of things that happened to create a false impression in his testimony, I think will demonstrate that there was no collusion with the Russians to help President Donald Trump get elected, at least not by Roger Stone. Do you think that the disinformation, as you say, or the misinformation that those people, Schiff, etc., are using against you, is that fair given that they more or less follow Stone's rules? Well, if they don't mind being corrected, they're welcome to say whatever they want. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to assume in some cases that they're just mistaken that they have been given information by their staffs, which is incorrect, and then they go out there and repeat it. I'm going to try to believe that they are people, at least some of them, people of good will who have made an honest mistake. Others are just ambitious, glad-handing politicians willing to say anything to try to get to the next step, the U.S. Senate, and therefore I was disappointed that they want to have this hearing behind closed doors, even though they malign me in public, that they will not make a transcript immediately available. It will become available at some time, but they won't give you a copy of the transcript. You've got to go to Washington while they'll let you look at it. If I were a member of the working press, instead of just a syndicated columnist doing a syndicated radio show with a weekly show on InfoWars, I would be pretty angry about that. It just seems to me that the answers should have the same circulation as the accusations. That's only fair. Why are you not working with the Trump campaign anymore? Of course, there's some you mentioned that you quit. Of course, Trump says otherwise, what happened there? Well, I mean, first of all, the reason I'm not working with the Trump campaign anymore is because the election is over. The election is over, fair enough. I did resign from the Trump campaign because two things became clear to me. Donald Trump is his own best strategist. Donald Trump had a vision for this campaign that was a non-conventional vision. Donald Trump's campaign was a campaign without polling. We talked about the importance of polling in the beginning of the interview. It's the roadmap of how you get elected. Donald Trump never spent any money in his campaign for the nomination on polling. Donald Trump did not use massive doses of paid broadcast television. That's a staple in our modern political campaigns. Donald Trump believed that he could essentially compete with these massive doses of paid advertising being put forward by Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and others through saturation of the free media by totally dominating the cable networks through his very well-crafted rallies and through as many interviews as he could possibly jam into a day. I was a skeptic that that would work. I did not think it would work. He was right. I was wrong. But just because I resigned from the payroll of his campaign, by the way, at least four journalists, one with the New York Times, one with Politico, saw my resignation letter the evening before I submitted it. I wasn't born yesterday either. I determined that I could be more effective on the outside as a veteran then of nine presidential campaigns and with very strong ideas of my own about how this election could be won. I thought that my book, The Clinton's War on Women, which was to be published shortly, was the definitive oppo dump that anyone would need to wage a campaign against Hillary. I know from a number of things that he said in public that candidate Trump read it and that candidate Trump utilized it. And I never at any time suspended or halted my support for Donald Trump. The day I resigned, I was advocating his candidacy on CNN. I gave literally hundreds of surrogate speeches and interviews talking about why I thought and think he could end up being a transformative president. He could end up being one of our greatest presidents. Justice independence from the two-party duopoly that has won the country into the ground, his feisty nature, his natural skepticism, his courage, all those things add up to the potential for him to be a very great president. It's why I'm still 100% for him and it's why I'm happy to go out and do battle with his critics and enemies every day. What incentive does he have then to say, oh, I fired Roger Stone? I didn't understand that. If you resigned, why not just say, hey, he doesn't work here with me anymore? But it's okay. No one ever leaves Donald Trump. He leaves you. Got it. Okay. I mean, it's best not. I don't care to argue about it. We both remember it differently. It's meaningless. I still have great affection for Donald Trump. He went to my wedding. I went to two of his. I was there for the wake and funeral of both his parents and for his brother-in-law, John Berry, who was a very fine lawyer and an active Republican. I have the highest possible regard for his sister, Mary Ann Trump Berry, who Ronald Reagan appointed to the federal bench, and Bill Clinton elevated on the federal bench. She is an extraordinary woman, a great federal judge, a good friend, and I'm proud of whatever small role I played in getting the Reagan administration to recognize her talents and appoint her to the judiciary. When you look at the lobbying, when you look at the influence, and when you look at the Stones rules and action, the modern-day Machiavellian stuff, principles at work, do you think this is good for politics? Do you think it's good for America, or do you just think it's good for the person who is executing and pulling these things off? If you want to win elections, then you should go out and purchase a copy of my upcoming book, Stones Rules. I think you will find them handy. The problem with politics is it looks easy from the outside. People, I think, don't understand that it is a science and that political campaigns operate on the basis of scientific research that helps you determine what to emphasize and what to de-emphasize in your campaign and helps you become well known to the voters in a way that enhances your position and your chances of getting elected. There is no one kind of text that tells you exactly what to do, but you better read Machiavelli's The Prince. You better read David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, and you better read Stones Rules if you want to know how to get elected in America today. Roderstone, thank you so much. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you're like, ah, I want to get this in real quick? Well, you didn't ask me who made the shirt. Who made that shirt, Roger? I have no idea. No, this is actually something I've had for many years. As you know, I'm a little bit of a clothes horse. I have a men's style blog called Stone on Style, which doesn't get as updated as often as it should. But if you're interested, and it's funny, as I travel, a lot of younger men ask me questions about how to build the wardrobe, and here's the question you get. I'm going to a wedding in New Jersey this summer, you know, and we're going to be wearing white dinner jackets. Should I wear brown shoes or black shoes? That kind of thing. So I'm always, I'm always willing to give sartorial advice, recognizing that the average person doesn't need to dress exactly like me to be well-dressed. You want to cultivate your own style I have, and I think every young man should. Roger Stone, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time. Delighted to be here.