Donald Trump’s longtime ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage from an undercover journalist.
The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of continued lawsuits to swing the voter rolls states to purify.
“We have to fight it out state by state,” Stone said. “We’re already in court in Wisconsin, we’re already in court in Florida.”
When the journalist, posing as a member of a right-wing voter organization, pressed Stone for details about efforts to ensure Trump won in 2024, Stone told him the campaign needed to be “done.”
Related: A special counsel reveals new details about Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election
“If they throw us out of Detroit, get a court order, come in with your own armed guards and contest it,” Stone said. In Detroit in 2020, there was a chaotic scene at a polling station as Republican vote challengers banged on the walls of the center demanding to be let in.
Filmed at an August event in Jacksonville, Florida, called A Night with Roger Stone, the footage also reveals Stone’s enduring anger toward former Attorney General Bill Barr, whom he calls “a traitorous piece of human garbage.”
During his time in office, Barr acted as a staunch ally of Trump and even pushed for a lighter sentence for Stone when the agent was found guilty of witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with a congressional investigation into Russian election interference of 2016. Barr lost favor with the former president when he refused to publicly support Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, sparking outrage among Trump’s closest allies.
“He’s going to jail when we get back in,” Stone exclaimed. “He needs to go to jail, he is a criminal.”
Stone’s apparent desire for legal retribution reflects Trump’s own vow, repeatedly expressed to the press and at his rallies, to prosecute his political opponents. It’s a promise that Trump could be more likely to keep given the Supreme Court’s rulings this year expanding the president’s powers.
The journalist in the video posed as someone involved in Lion of Judah, a right-wing effort to recruit election-skeptical Christians as poll workers in swing states to gather evidence of voter fraud.
Joshua Standifer, who leads Lion of Judah, describes the effort as a “Trojan horse” strategy to get Christians into “key positions of influence in government, such as election workers.” In the video, Stone appeared unfamiliar with Standifer or his work.
