By Roger Stone

June 28, 2018

Never in our history has mass media been so thoroughly infested with “fake news” peddlers as it is today. Once-credible, reliable sources for news and public affairs information are now rife with cynical partisan propagandists posing as “reporters” and “journalists.”

Given this reality, is it even the slightest bit surprising that 72% of Americans believe the media knowingly and intentionally reports “fake, false or purposely misleading” news stories?

Out of the hordes of fake reporters demolishing their profession, few are as blatantly-biased and immune to facts as Aaron Blake, a Washington Post blogger who doubles as a millennial attack poodle for his corporate leftist establishment masters.

Anyone who thinks millennials get a bad rap for supercilious superficiality and know-it-all arrogance need look no further than the obnoxiously-presumptuous Aaron Blake to see why this is so.

Not to discount his abilities, Blake has a real talent for churning out flavorless, mediocre posts that nonetheless vividly illuminate Blake’s penchant for fantasy and his apparent mind-reading powers.

In a recent post laughably filed under “analysis” Blake went on a roll showcasing his rather curious (invisible, really) rendition of objectivity.

The title of the post alone virtually screams “non-biased responsible journalism” at the reader: “Roger Stone’s and Michael Caputo’s damningly false denials of contact with Russians.”

Not just false, mind you…damningly false!!!

UNPACKING AARON BLAKE’S DISINFORMATION

With such an unequivocal and, dare I say, damning title, Blake’s post warrants some “analysis” of its own, to see how (or if) Blake’s speculative fantasies and partisan spin bear any resemblance to reality.

Suffice to say my expectations couldn’t be lower. Blake begins his cheap hit job:

“The Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia and Rosalind S. Helderman broke a significant story Sunday that added to the list of undisclosed meetings between Russians and President Trump’s confidants. This one involves informal Trump adviser Stone meeting in May 2016 with a Russian who — you guessed it — was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.”

Of course, we guessed it! We also must guess what sort of “reporter” would be so obtuse and imprecise with his words as to imply that the mere coincidence of “Russians” and “undisclosed” meetings is all that is needed to presume that illicit or illegal machinations must be involved.

But, then, is this not the entire premise of the Russian collusion hoax?

Blake’s use of this sort of purposefully-truncated linguistic imprecision makes his malign underlying motives pretty damn obvious. By blithely and curtly gliding right over a whole bunch of specious presumptions he slyly embeds in his prefatory summary, he is able to insinuate the Russian collusion hoax’s essential deceit into whatever he writes after that, by default.

The essential deceit I refer to lies in the shifty goalpost-moving the hoaxsters employ at every turn, to broaden and dumb down what qualifies as “collusion” (itself an already vague, contrived, and legally-inapplicable buzzword) or whatever analogous term they might use to shoehorn their phony accusations and innuendo into the mix about supposed Russian entanglements with Trump people.

In other words, fake news manipulators like Blake and his fellow Clinton-Obama fluffing media hoaxsters always frame any discussion of their farce around their own bogus presumptions and the hoax’s essential premises.

Where it serves them (which is in all instances), they also make sure to use vague, broad-brush, malleable terms in commenting on and pushing these delusional conspiracy theories. Their vague, slipshod language affords them the needed wiggle (and squirm) room to adjust how they incorporate any developments or newly-fabricated accusations to fit their core false narrative.

Using these fundamentally deceitful tactics, which are literally the essential elements of propaganda, they can perpetually justify, or at least rationalize, their contrived suspicions, histrionic innuendo and defamatory accusations, no matter how insubstantial or ludicrous any or all of it is.

“MEETINGS” WITH “RUSSIANS”: ILLEGAL!

Blake’s smarmy propaganda tactics immediately stand out in how he dares not specify “Russian state agents” or “Russian political operatives” or “Russian hackers” or “Russian emigres” or “Russian” anything. Like he already told us, it’s just “Russians!!!” Apparently all the media jackals need to keep their collusion hoax going is to allude to mere “contact” with any of the 144 million people on the planet who are “Russians!!!!!!”

Likewise, Blake has no interest in being more specific (and truthful) in describing the almost-negligible number of “meetings” with “Russians” and Trump associates by using more accurate terms like unsolicited, inchoate, one-off, aborted, innocuous or the like.

In fact, Blake and his fellow fake reporters are quite purposeful about NEVER describing these meetings with the truthful, more precise terms. They know it would explode their ability to manufacture suspicion and dishonestly imply wrongdoing by pointing to the mere existence of any “meetings” at all as proof of some Russian collusion conspiracy.

Because only the term “undisclosed” serves their ulterior objective of casting suspicion on the “meetings”, that is the only adjective Blake (very disingenuously) uses.

Also notable is that Blake appears to have adopted the Kristof-Bertrand rule* for characterizing the motives for maintaining any privacy or simple discretion in ANY political activity.

[*Rule applies only to non-leftists.]

This rule holds that if a person does not pro-actively and publicly announce any (or all, as they would have it) of their activities, of any kind whatsoever in any political context, it means 1) the activity is “secret,” 2) it is automatically nefarious, by default, and 3) the person who failed to broadcast their every breath is guilty of purposeful concealment.

This sort of manipulation is so utterly sneaky and dishonest that it truly boggles the mind that these people have the gall to call themselves journalists or reporters.

DIRT IS ONLY DIRTY TO DIG UP WHEN IT IS ABOUT HILLARY

Equally disingenuous are Blake’s and others’ insinuations of the coarse, colloquial, and once-again imprecise term “dirt.”

It is a cheap literary sleight-of-hand used to reinforce their phony “collusion” narrative by casting as inherently illegitimate…as ‘dirty”…any information out there that might have been unfavorable to Hillary Clinton, even if the information is actually said to be incriminating (such as with the Veselnitskaya Trump Tower lure).

Really, it is almost comical, but also undeniably dishonest, how they cast incriminating information on Hillary Clinton as “dirt”, but portray “dirt” on Donald Trump as somehow incriminating (of him).

For fakes like Blake, totally-defamatory garbage about Donald Trump is enough evidence, as far as their nasty little minds go, to incessantly imply criminality, yet miles and miles of actual evidence that undeniably incriminates epic grifter and influence-peddler Hillary Clinton…well, that’s just plain old nasty “dirt” (the poor old gal, so beleaguered and all, don’t ya know).

RUSSIAN CRIMINALS AS FBI LURES? FUGGEDABOUTIT!

Blake continues:

The long and the short of it, according to Stone and Caputo, is that the man, Henry Greenberg, was requesting lots of money for the information — $2 million — and nothing was ultimately exchanged. Contemporaneous text messages back up that contention. So, much like that Trump Tower meeting, whatever the intentions were, it seems the relationship never came to fruition. It’s yet another mysteriously obscured contact with Russians, and it’s perhaps yet another collusion gray area.

That may be the short of it, but it’s certainly not the long of it.

Honest, legitimate reporters, like Blake’s colleagues Roig-Franzia and Helderman (who deserve credit for their balanced, complete coverage of this story), would not simply gloss over key points like the fact that nothing came of my brief one-time meeting with “Henry Greenberg” and the fact that everything I have said about it has now checked out.

A reporter with any credibility would really really want to know much more about this Russian felon’s work as an FBI informant for 17 years.

A real reporter would have lots of questions about why this murky Russian with Hollywood connections used one of apparently several aliases (likely known to, if not provided by, the FBI) when he sought out a Trump associate (Michael Caputo) to set up an opportunity for “Greenberg” to solicit me to purchase information “helpful to the Trump campaign”, now characterized as “dirt on Hillary.”

At minimum, a real news person would immediately have a lot more questions (if not suspicions) about the obvious connection between this supposedly-random Russian, who we are expected to believe just randomly decided in May 2016 to offer “dirt” on Hillary to Donald Trump’s longest standing supporter, and the powerful federal agency that is being exposed, almost on a daily basis now, for being lousy with partisan bias and political corruption at its highest echelons.

A real reporter would want to explore the suspicious circumstances of how this Russian national could have been admitted to the United States in 2016, or any other time, on a standard visa, despite his having been convicted and imprisoned in Russia for serious violent crimes, also once held in U.S. custody for a significant period, and who as recently as 2015 had received special visas for working as a federal government stooge.

Even a half-witted gumshoe would know what an impossibility it would be for someone with a criminal past anything close “Greenberg’s” to gain routine entry into this country, UNLESS they had serious U.S. government intervention making it happen.

An honest reporter would actually try to connect the real dots and think it possible that there were, in fact, Trump-hating partisans working in a certain federal bureau that supposedly exists for “investigation” and that might actually have been working to torpedo Trump by setting up his allies with fake Russian “collusion” meetings.

The only “reporter” who would have no interest in such unexplained contradictions about supposed “contact” between a Trump associate and “Russians” would be one driven solely by an ulterior partisan agenda and harboring a sleazy ulterior intent to twist and spin any and all developments to protect the Clinton crime machine and the deep state operators that were doing its dirty work.

Clearly Aaron Blake is such a “reporter.”

STONE FUGGODABOUTIT? COLLUSION!! SHAME!!! TREASON!!!!

Having glossed over incredibly-relevant details about this mysterious (now missing, by the way) FBI informant from Russia, Blake turns to his real agenda: to distract from the real story with mindless, irrelevant gotcha musings about Caputo’s and my amending our disclosures to Congress to include this staged meeting. Of course, we also included our near certainty that this whole encounter was more likely than not engineered by the FBI itself.

After Blake witheringly (and grudgingly) downplayed that as best he could, he goes on the attack:

But unlike other previously undisclosed meetings, this one was very, very clearly denied — and repeatedly — by both parties. It was also apparently denied in or at least omitted from their testimonies to congressional investigators.

These denials so contradict what we just found out, in fact, that neither man is trying to parse them to square them with the new information. Instead both — rather remarkably — contend that they simply forgot about the Greenberg proffer until special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reminded them last month. And now both are amending their testimony.

So now it’s nothing about how this meeting came about, about what (or who) was behind it, or even if there was some sort of actual “Russian collusion” involved.

Now it all comes down to the irrelevant fact that neither Caputo nor myself had recalled this farce meeting, over a year after it happened, in the middle of an incredibly-dizzying campaign, followed by the equally-frenetic launch of a new presidency out of that campaign’s success.

This campaign whirlwind was then followed by dozens of months of being harassed and probed and spied upon by an illegal federal witch hunt, on top of being incessantly defamed by the static duo of deceitful Congressional waterboys for Hillary and the Russia hoax: Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.

As one of their pliant media minions, Blake should know all about this.

AARON BLAKE: MIND-READER AND MEMORY JUDGE

Blake goes on with his fake news distraction piece:

It’s impossible to get inside either man’s head, but the idea that both forgot about this meeting warrants skepticism. Both men interviewed with the House Intelligence Committee about Russia, under penalty of perjury, and they didn’t even do an inventory of their contacts with Russians? Greenberg was apparently a colorful enough character for Caputo to remark, “How crazy is the Russian?” and to refer to him as “Russian” twice, but he then forgot about the whole thing?

“It’s impossible to get inside either man’s head”……(but here I go!)

Blake might clue in to the fact that Michael Caputo has worked with Russians since the Soviet Union fell and has countless contacts and relationships with Russians (which, I know it’s difficult for Russian collusion delusionals to grasp, is neither illegal nor even inherently questionable).

For Caputo not to remember some failed contact with some random Russian referred through him over a year before he was asked is hardly a stretch.

For those of us actually “in the arena”, life doing politics (as opposed to writing cheap smack about those who do), especially in a presidential campaign, is more often than not a dizzying if not mind-bending stream of action.

It involves literally non-stop calls, meetings, discussions, personal introductions, public appearances, campaign events and an almost incomprehensible volume of emails and text messages.

Such an exhausting pace and volume of work is understandably inconceivable to a lazy, sedentary fake news 9-5er, vegetating in a cozy cubicle in the bowels of some corporate media monolith (like the Washington Post), when not contriving cheap, phony pot shots to lob from his greasy keyboard.

My not remembering a single 20-minute meeting, out of which nothing came, that I called a waste of my time after aborting the meeting, never mentioning it again, and which took place well over a year before I was formally questioned about it as part of what I firmly believe to be a malignant Democrat party hoax, is absolutely probable and, given the pace of my own activities in 2016, more than likely.

Above all, it means squat whether Blake and his muse Adam Schiff believe it or not. The fact is that my not recalling the Greenberg meeting is the stone cold reality of it.

HEY, MY HOAX IS FULL OF SCHIFF!!

Of course, Blake, like every Russian collusion water carrier in media, couldn’t go on for long before channeling the ultimate Russian collusion hoaxster and America’s Schifftiest politician of all time. Frankly, it is hard to tell where Schiff’s mouth ends and Blake’s keyboard begins:

Whether either man actually lied under oath and whether they might be held accountable are two very significant questions — and ones that could have different answers. The testimony at issue here was delivered to the House Intelligence Committee, which has been conducting the friendliest investigation to Trump. Ranking member Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) is trying to get its transcripts sent to Mueller.

Schiff adds the testimony of Stone appears to be “inaccurate or deliberately misleading. Similarly, Michael Caputo’s testimony omitted mention of this interaction with a Russian offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, something which could not plausibly have escaped his recollection.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 17, 2018

Schiff, the serial leaker on the House Intelligence Committee and the Democrats’ lead fabricator and fluffer for their collusion hoax revenge and distraction campaign, has been a sycophantic Clinton minion for as long as he has been a partisan parasite perpetually parked in an ultra-safe seat in Congress from one of California’s farthest of far left districts.

And it’s pretty clear what’s happening here. This is something that, judging by their conversations with Mueller, they knew was going to come out eventually. And now they have a narrative into which they can insert it, thanks to Trump’s baseless claims about the FBI “spying” on his campaign via an informant. Stone and Caputo are pitching this as a potential setup featuring a man who appears to have worked as an FBI informant in the past (though he denies it in this case).

So, politically speaking, this is now serving a purpose for Stone and Caputo in a way it wouldn’t have even a month ago. It furthers the idea that this was a “witch hunt.” But whatever transpired before or during that apparently strange meeting with Greenberg and whatever legal accountability there may or may not be, it doesn’t change that it looks significantly more like there was a coverup than it did 24 hours ago.

What a load of bullshit this Blake can spin. This nonsense is nothing better than Blake’ presumptuous, speculative fantasizing.

In fact, Blake’s entire bogus “analysis” is nothing more than a partisan-animated, accusatory, manufactured distraction, of the low-grade variety you can find moldering at any of the usual leftist attack sewers like Media Matters and Think Progress.

O ROMEO, ROMEO, BRAVE MERCUTIO’S DEAD!

In Rule #4 of my latest book Stone’s Rules: How to Win at Politics, Business, and Style I point out my astonishment at how disconnected from, if not ignorant of, history and precedent so many of these digital generation reporters seem to be.

Notwithstanding his deceptive job title of “senior political reporter,” Aaron Blake is no reporter, not by a long shot. A more accurate moniker would be “junior partisan propagandist.” Anyone who churns out Think Progress-Media Matters caliber dreck like Blake’s, and laughably call it “analysis,” clearly has the soul of a propagandist.

Above all, Blake is a deceitful special pleader for the Clinton cult and its Russian collusion hoax. His fake news “analysis” is nothing less than an unseemly effort to prop up and give false credence to baseless suspicions about me to give cover to the real criminals and a scandal that involves massive abuses of power by top officials of our government.

Counterfeit “reporters” and fake news peddlers like Blake hearken Stone’s Rule #4 because they give me pause to reflect on what American political life was like before our governing institutions, the national news media and the entire Democrat party had become so thoroughly-riddled with the acidic poisonous cancer of the Clintons and their psychopathically-corrupt brand of “power politics.”

Before the Clinton brand of partisan poison infested and defiled the news media, the vast majority of political writers who called themselves “reporters”, though decidedly left-wing / Democrat party biased and prone to slant their coverage in favor of this bias (or negatively towards conservatives and Republicans), were nonetheless capable of objective analysis, legitimate journalistic skepticism and genuine probity.

If the balance of facts weighed against their innate predilections or partisan suspicions about a circumstance, they would either concede this or, at least, not make a point to torture the facts and disregard logic to indulge their own partisan animus, tempting as it might have been.

They knew that doing so would immediately and irrevocably nullify their credibility as reporters and firmly consign their work to the realm of partisan polemics, unshielded by cheap artifices like calling it “analysis.”

But even the most obviously and predictably partisan reporters would not go out of their way in every single instance to cherry pick facts and insinuate their own partisan spin to promote their ulterior biases, as Blake unfailingly does.

If reporters from the generations that came before Blake’s constantly served up raw partisan special pleading and tried to pass it off as reportage or “analysis” they could count on no longer being taken seriously by either politicians, politicos or other (real) journalists.

The ubiquity of internet-bred journalistic poseurs, like our friendly little partisan “reporter” Mr. Blake, make it clear that the days of quality news reportage, when those in public life could take basic journalistic integrity and minimum reporting standards as granted, are long gone.

It is abysmally clear that millennial age political scribblers like Aaron Blake are totally ignorant of, if not contemptuous towards, the caliber of professional fidelity and restraint that came before them, and certainly have none whatsoever of their own.

Blake’s bland brand of fake news propaganda exemplifies the internet age’s race to the bottom, married to a political environment choked with Clintonian poison, which allows for NOTHING to be off-limits to partisan infiltration in the quest for power and control. Every last traditional or historical institution’s longstanding or earned credibility is fair game for co-opting to impart stolen legitimacy onto debased self-dealing political mercenaries like the Clinton Crime Family has unleashed on America.

The pathological partisan animus that radiates out from the Clinton-Schiff corruption, cover-up, defamation and revenge syndicate, finding its way to the many corporate media propaganda shills like Mr. Blake, is repulsive and disturbing.

It all reminds me of an old adage, which I offer in the form of advice for all reporters (the real ones):

It is better that others merely suspect you to be a partisan hack, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

As for little Aaron Blakey, there is no suspicion left. Our friendly half-clever counterfeit “reporter” long since removed all doubt…