Roger Stone — a longtime confidant of former President Donald Trump — recently revealed to two undercover journalists that Trump's 2024 campaign is already hard at work planning to challenge 2024 election results in multiple states.
In new audio obtained by Rolling Stone, documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor and journalist Ally Sammarco spoke with Stone at an event at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this year while posing as conservative Catholics who were fans of the far-right activist. At one point in his conversation with Sammarco, Stone told her that Trump's 2024 campaign is far more prepared than the former president's 2020 campaign to dispute election results. He even suggested that Trump has friends in high places who will lend him a hand when election results are litigated.
"At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge — his home phone number standing by — so you can stop it," Stone told Sammarco. "We made no preparations last time, none … There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done."
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While Stone didn't say the name of the judge the campaign is allegedly close with, he did tell Windsor that the campaign was prepared to mount a multi-state offensive to disrupt certification of election results using "lawyers, judges [and] technology." He also hinted that Trumpworld viewed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — whom Trump appointed to the judiciary just months before he was voted out of office — as a fellow traveler, given her repeated accommodations of Trump's delay tactics in the federal classified documents case.
"We are beating them,” Stone is heard saying to Sammarco. “[Trump’s] trial in Georgia is falling apart. I think the judge is on the verge of dismissing the charges against him in Florida. They’re delayed in New York City and they’re now delayed in Washington.”
That event, which happened in March, was held several months before Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in his New York criminal trial, and Cannon last week rejected Trump's attempts to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago case. However, Cannon has been unusually slow in her oversight of the pre-trial process, and scuttled the initial May 20 trial date arguing that she would need until at least July to rule on the various pre-trial motions still pending.
Sammarco asked Stone a leading question about how the Trump campaign planned to stop "voter fraud" like "ballot harvesting," and the Trump advisor assured her that for some friendly MAGA-adjacent state governments, "it’ll be easier to stop. In other places, it won’t."
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"We should be suing in half a dozen places,” Stone continued. “I mean we’re finally now on an offensive footing."
Other parts of Sammarco's conversation with Stone captured him praising the Trump-led takeover of the Republican National Committee and the elevation of his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become co-chair of the GOP's national campaign apparatus. He said this change means Republicans can spend "lots more" money on challenging elections. He then boasted about favorable "changes in state law, real-time voter list monitoring, going to court as we just did to challenge some of the vote laws," and bragged that the campaign "went into court to sue in Michigan over the hand [written] ballots."
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