Last month, it was revealed close ally to President Donald Trump, Roger Stone, was wanted for questioning and so was his buddy, former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. Stone swore that he had nothing to do with Russian hacking on the United States.
However, according to the Daily Beast, it was Stone we have to thank for Manafort joining the Trump team. Stone introduced Manafort to Trump and by April 2016, he was on board to help shore up the delegate count for the Republican National Convention. Just a month later, Manafort was named as the chair of the campaign and by June, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was fired and Manafort took over.
Three former Trump campaign officials, who spoke to the Daily Beast, confirmed that Stone pushed hard for Manafort and Manafort confirmed it himself in a new Netflix documentary on Stone.
“It was all Stone. Every bit of it was Stone. Right down to suggesting that he go salary-free,” one source revealed.
Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a friend of Trump’s, became the conduit between the man who would become president and one of many men who would become the target of an investigation. Manafort reportedly sent memos pitching himself and Trump asked for a meeting.
“Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald,” Manafort revealed in the upcoming documentary. “While it will be clearly a Trump presidency, I think it’s influenced by a Stone philosophy.”
Stone apparently hated Lewandowski so much, he was compelled to ensure Manafort took over. The two have known each other since the 1980s when they ran a lobbying firm their clients referred to as the "torturers’ lobby."
“You know Stone has a hard-on like a dog with a bone,” a source familiar with the negotiations disclosed. “He just won’t stop doing something. He hates Corey Lewandowski. He was looking for a thousand ways to undo Corey.”
“Roger had a lot of ideas, and he was frustrated and he knew how to keep Trump in line, and he wanted him to succeed,” one source said of the Lewandowski days. “Roger just wanted to get the thing back on track and Manafort was a perfect answer."
It was only a month ago that Stone admitted he has close ties to the hacker responsible for the DNC hack. A few days after bragging about it, he claimed that U.S. intelligence was trying to assassinate him.
Stone wanted Trump to run for president as far back as 1988. He has always acted with Trump's interest in mind but continues to be in conflict with Trump's more moderate family, the Daily Beast reported.
“They would like him to be more mainstream, more establishment,” Stone said of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief of staff Reince Priebus and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell. “They want him to be popular when he goes to Malibu or the Upper West Side. But I don’t think Donald Trump cares about how he’s perceived in those places. He has no interest in kowtowing or ass-kissing for the establishment. So I think that his advisers are trying to push him in the wrong direction.”
