The Roger Stone Connection to the Jan. 6 Seditious Conspiracy Charges

Photo Courtesy of CBS News

It’s been months since the January 6 Committee last conducted live hearings, and in that time a lot has happened to pull focus from the insurrection at the Capitol, not the least of which was an FBI search and seizure of top secret and classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. As the hearings resume, there is one area in particular I hope to see explored: Was the White House somehow involved in the seditious conspiracy now being prosecuted in federal court?

By no small coincidence, the trial of Oath Keeper leader Stuart Rhodes opens the same day as the hearings resume. The Justice Department has charged Rhodes with the most serious crime so far: seditious conspiracy. In a write-up of the pending trial, legal commentator Joyce Vance reminded us that this charge is historically notoriously hard to make stick, and there frankly isn’t much legal precedent to support it. In a 2010 case involving another domestic terrorist group, for example, the judged dismissed the charges because of the lack of any firm evidence of the group’s plans to attack, saying famously that the government’s case was “too far left of boom” because the conspiracy had not advanced far or long enough.

We don’t have that issue here because the “boom” in fact happened and very nearly led to an overthrow of our duly elected government. My question, though, isn’t about whether Rhodes and the other Oath Keepers and Proud Boys defendants are guilty of sedition. My question is whether their conspiracy included any advisors to the former president, and therefore whether the White House had advance knowledge of the attack.

One interesting newish piece of evidence took the Committee’s investigators all the way to Denmark this summer to review footage from a documentary. The filmmaker had been following Trump ally and political trickster Roger Stone around and documenting his activities and speech for quite a while, including the period leading up to and including January 6. While the existence of the film has been known for some time, it wasn’t until an international subpoena issued from the Committee and investigators made the trek to Denmark that they learned what was actually in it. There are a key few minutes of the film that are of great interest to investigators.

The film apparently captures Stone saying aloud on January 5, “Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.” This statement of course leads to a host of questions, particularly since Stone had surrounded himself with Oath Keepers bodyguards and has long been a member of the Proud Boys, even taking their initiation pledge and entrusting them with access to his phone and his social media. So what exactly did Stone know in advance about “the violence”? Was he part of its planning or just a bystander and witness to it? Importantly, did he communicate the plan for violence to anyone in the White House? To know this, it may take one of the defendants charged with seditious conspiracy to turn on Stone and provide evidence and testimony against him. Some have already pled guilty and are cooperating with the authorities.

Stone was the Trump advisor who first launched the “Stop the Steal” idea back in 2016, when he was getting ready to deploy it against Hillary Clinton should she have won. He then resurrected it with the help of right wing extremist Ali Alexander in 2020. Trump had to pardon Stone once already to save him from a long prison sentence.  Of possible interest to the Committee is that Stone was also captured in the Danish documentary saying that Trump should prematurely claim victory on election night. “I really do suspect it'll still be up in the air,” Stone can be heard saying. “When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of the law. ‘No, we won!’” This asserted strategy aligns with what Steve Bannon was captured on tape saying earlier: “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon told a group. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.” 

The puzzle for investigators, of course, is how to tie Stone solidly to the seditious conspiracy, and then how to tie his involvement to the White House. What publicly known evidence there is so far is admittedly scant. Stone communicated with Rhodes and Tarrio in a group chat with others via an encrypted communications app, but the contents of those communications aren’t public. Star witness for the Committee Cassidy Hutchinson testified that on January 5, 2021, Trump told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows directly to ask Stone and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn what was going to happen on January 6, and that Meadows in fact did call them and tried repeatedly to go to the Willard Hotel war room that night. Hutchinson warned him against going, and ultimately Meadows did not make the journey over, but he did call into a meeting with the group that night. What we don’t know is what was said during those calls. Mark Meadows could provide that piece of the puzzle to investigators, if he decides to flip on the former president, but there’s no indication yet that this will happen.

Stone seems worried enough about the documentary footage that he is busy seeking to discredit it as fake. “I challenge the accuracy and the authenticity of these videos and believe they have been manipulated and selectively edited. I also point out that the filmmakers do not have the legal right to use them. How ironic that Kim Kardashian and I are both subjected to computer manipulated videos on the same day,” Stone said in a statement to CNN.