Excerpt From DeepCapture.com
Roger Stone recently gave an interview where he discussed me. He says that he believes that in October 2017 I engineered meeting him and “grilling” him about matters Russian. He is a 67 year old man being sent to prison, so one cannot blame him for putting some pieces together incorrectly, as he has done. I will lay out the truth here. The bottom line of it is: We all have experienced chains of events that seem too coincidental to be true but are anyway. This is one of them.
Though I try in general to keep my own politics out of DeepCapture, since they are relevant to the following story I will explain that (as Milton Friedman described himself) I am a small “l” libertarian and a small “r” republican. This often leads me to brush up against Libertarians, whose company I enjoy.
In August-September 2017 the Libertarian Party of Utah asked if they could hold an evening soirée in our then recently-completed Peace Coliseum. I wanted to say “yes,” but consulted my colleagues, asking them to agree that we were not going to open the doors to Democrats and Republicans. That is because, though I agree it would be wrong for a CEO of a public firm to extend such a courtesy to either of the major parties, I feel that when it comes to Libertarians, or Greens, or Constitutional Parties, or other fringe parties… well, it seems unlikely to tip the balance and give one of them the White House, so is therefore less objectionable. My colleagues assented, and so I gave permission to my fabulous assistant of many years, Kirstie, to inform the Libertarian Party of Utah they were free to use to central “Nucleus” of the building for their reception in October.
Around about the same time, Netflix or iTunes started recommending to me a then recently-released documentary, “Get Me Roger Stone”. I had heard the name years before, as some kind of high-level Republican fixer, and knew that in the Trump campaign he and Steve Bannon had emerged as the guys who had pulled off the victory. I did not watch the movie when it was recommended, but made a mental note that I should someday.
About a week before the Libertarian Party event, Kirstie came to me and said, “Have you heard of a documentary, ‘Get Me Roger Stone’? You should watch it. That is who is coming to speak at the Libertarian Party event coming up next week, and he wants to take you to dinner afterwards.”
If this sound strange, please understand that from time to time such things happen to me. DNC Chairman Howard Dean once came through Utah and sent a message asking if I would meet him and ride in a car with him for 30 minutes as he was driven someplace, just so we could get to know each other. Another year, Utah Democratic Party leader Dominick Dunn showed up for lunch, asking if I would run for Congress as a Democrat. Various Republicans candidates and pooh-bahs coming through Utah have shown up on my doorstep for similar reasons. Someone close to Bernie Sanders has repeatedly told to me that if he won he was considering me to serve as his SEC Chairman. So an invitation such as Kirstie was conveying is not such a strange thing to me. In any case, I told Kirstie to let Roger Stone’s people know that I would keep my evening free, and I watched the documentary “Get Me Roger Stone” that night in preparation.
A week later, the Libertarian Party had a reception in our headquarters. Roger Stone showed up and spoke. Afterwards, he and I went out and had a long dinner.
Here is my best recollection of the dinner, in three parts:
1. We spent some time just getting to know each other. I told him I had heard of him years earlier, seen the documentary about him, etc. I congratulated him on his upset victory in the election a year previously (he knew that I had not voted for Candidate Trump, but for Gary Johnson, Libertarian).
2. He brought up what was on his mind, and the reason he had asked to take me to dinner: He wanted me to run for office. I don’t want to go into what he proposed and how he suggested it might come about, but I heard him out. I told him, “I need to run for office like I need a hole in my head.” He asked me not to say “No” outright, but to think about it, and I promised him I would.
Read More: https://www.deepcapture.com/2020/05/roger-stone-me/
