Roger Stone update

My faithful correspondent Alfredo Garcia has been mailing me regular updates on the case of Mary McCarty and Roger Stone. McCarty is a Republican County Commissioner from Palm Beach who was cited for election law violations as chair of a PAC called the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary, which was formed in the aftermath of the Florida election circus of 2000 with the intent of unelecting three state Supreme Court judges who had had made a favorable ruling to Al Gore in his effort to get a statewide recount. Stone is the man who allegedly financed the PAC; McCarty claims she did nothing knowingly wrong but merely followed Stone's bidding. You can read some background here, here, here, here, and here.

All along, Stone has refused to give up any information about the source of the $150,000 that was used to fund Take Back Our Judiciary, and the state laws are essentially toothless to compel him to do so. Now comes the kicker: Stone was personally recruited by James Baker to "help the Bush-Cheney post-election campaign in Florida".

“Shortly after Election Day, Stone received a call from Baker aide Margaret Tutwiler, who said, “Mr. Baker would like you to go to Florida,” [author Jeffrey] Toobin wrote in “Too Close to Call,” his 2001 book on the presidential election meltdown.

Toobin also reported that on Nov. 22, 2000, Stone was a leader at a noisy protest outside the Miami-Dade County election division’s offices in the Stephen P. Clark Center in downtown Miami. The protesters were upset about the recount that was ordered to continue the day before by a unanimous Florida Supreme Court. The protest disrupted the recount.

“From a building across the street, Roger Stone communicated with his people on the ground by walkie-talkie,” wrote Toobin, who interviewed Stone for the book.

I do believe he's referring to the so-called bourgeois riot, in which paid GOP activists were flown in to shut down an ongoing recount. Amazing how cozy these working relationships can be, isn't it?

This is yet another piece in a larger pattern of grabbing power by the national Republican Party. I can joke all I want to about tinfoil hats, but at some point one has to wonder if it's crazier to believe or not to believe. Teresa's words, first spoken here, ring more and more true: "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 21, 2003 to Scandalized! | TrackBack