“F*ck the Voting, Let's Get Right To the Violence.”

Caught on film before the 2020 election, Roger Stone explained the political strategy that erupted on January 6: it's surprisingly like the strategy in Bush v. Gore

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“We won. You’re wrong. Fuck you:” Roger Stone’s pre-election strategy about what to do in the even that Trump lost the 2020 election. Image credit: screenshot from film introduced in evidence by the J6 Committee.

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Long before the 2020 election, according to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, there was a plan. First, regardless of the outcome, Donald Trump should declare victory.

In film footage shown in yesterday's televised hearing, political consultant and long-time Trump advisor Roger Stone predicted the vote would be close. “Let’s just hope we’re celebrating,” Stone said in an outtake shown by the Committee in yesterday’s televised meeting. Then, pumping his fist at two anonymous, handsome young men, Stone continued: “I suspect it will be—I really do suspect it will still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law." Then, as if addressing the Biden campaign, he snapped: "No, we won. Fuck you. Sorry, over. You’re wrong. We won. Fuck you.”

In the next outtake, Stone is walking in the airport, on his way to join the Trump team gathered in the Willard Hotel to manage the election results. “I say, fuck the voting and let’s get right to the violence,” Stone says conversationally.

A young aide, this one in a suit, walking next to Stone, chuckles: “That’s what I’m fucking saying.”

“We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean,” Stone responds as if he is really talking to himself.

“Oh yeah,” the bro affirms.

Stone’s response to this video being used against him in a public hearing was predictable. For over two years, he has insisted that he is being persecuted by the federal government. He denies that he has done anything wrong. Instead, Stone frames his legal troubles (which led to seven judgments against him in 2019 and a Trump pardon) as "guilt by association." Prosecutors, he maintains, are only trying to pressure him into testifying against Trump. "Any claim, assertion or implication that I knew about, was involved in or condoned any illegal activity on January 6 at the Capitol or any place else at any other time is categorically false,” Stone wrote on his blog last May. "There is no document, communication, or witness who can claim otherwise.”

In other words: You’re wrong. We won. Fuck you.

And yet, when given the opportunity to testify before the J6 Committee that he had no role in planning the insurrection, Stone declined to do so. Instead, like others who were part of the plan to overturn the election, such as John Eastman, Jeffrey Clarke, Michael Flynn, and 26 other witnesses from Trumpworld, Stone pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

Yesterday, Stone seemed to have been genuinely caught off guard by footage in which he seems to implicate himself in a planned coup d'etat and resorted to whataboutism. On the social media platform Telegram, he whined that "In 2000 when the Bush v. Gore election was still in doubt, James A. Baker III urged Bush to claim victory which he did and was hailed as a genius. When I said Trump should do the same thing (in public but to not to either Trump or anyone around him) and I am accused of criminal conduct. Total BS."

It won’t surprise you to learn that this, too, is not true.