Roger Stone calls for ‘armed guards’ at polling spots in leaked video

The longtime Donald Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send "armed guards" to the polls in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist.

The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president's legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.

"We gotta fight it out on a state-by-state basis," said Stone. "We're already in court in Wisconsin, we're already in court in Florida."

When the journalist, posing as a member of a rightwing voter turnout organization, pressed Stone for details on efforts to make sure Trump wins in 2024, Stone told him that the campaign has to "be ready".

"When they throw us out of Detroit, you go get a court order, you come in with your own armed guards, and you dispute it," said Stone. In Detroit in 2020, there was a chaotic scene at a ballot counting center when GOP vote challengers pounded on the walls of the center and demanded to be let in. Filmed at an August event in Jacksonville, Florida, called A Night with Roger Stone, the footage also reveals Stone's lasting anger toward former attorney general Bill Barr, who he calls "a traitorous piece of human garbage".

While in office, Barr acted as a staunch Trump ally, even pushing for a lighter sentence for Stone, when the operative was found guilty of witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with a congressional inquiry into Russian interference during the 2016 election. Barr lost favor with the former president when he declined to publicly back Trump's false claims of a stolen election, drawing outrage from Trump's closest allies.

"Once we get back in, he has to go to prison," Stone exclaimed. "He has to go to prison, he's a criminal."

Stone's apparent lust for legal retribution echoes Trump's own vow, which he has stated repeatedly to the press and at his rallies, to prosecute his political opponents. It is a promise that Trump could more likely make good on, given the supreme court's rulings this year to expand the powers of the president.

The journalist in the video was posing as someone involved with Lion of Judah, a rightwing effort to recruit election-skeptical Christians to enlist as poll workers in swing states in order to collect evidence of voter fraud.

Joshua Standifer, who leads Lion of Judah, describes the effort as a "Trojan horse" strategy to get Christians in "key positions of influence in government like Election Workers". In the video, Stone appeared unfamiliar with Standifer or his work.