Roger Stone Buries Himself in New Interview

A series of major confessions by Roger Stone and Alex Jones on InfoWars includes Stone telling his friend, per Jones, "This is serious. They [DOJ] will probably come after us both [over January 6]."

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Introduction

I know from representing thousands of criminal defendants in three jurisdictions over nearly a decade that the first thing a good defense attorney tells a defendant about their case is that they must never, ever talk about it with anyone but their legal counsel.

As Alex Jones and Roger Stone are—besides Donald Trump allies—nightmare clients who don’t listen to attorneys’ advice, their penchant for self-incrimination means that lately they’ve been talking (a lot) about the pending federal criminal investigation into their actions on and before Insurrection Day. Indeed, a recent chat between the two men on InfoWars has quickly become a veritable goldmine for federal investigators.

This article is a summary of what we learned from Jones’s recent interview with Stone, which was published on InfoWars just under a week ago but remains “breaking news” because the words of two strange men speaking on the equivalent of an independently produced cable-access program take a long time to penetrate major media. {Note: the outlets covering the ongoing federal criminal investigation of the three primary Stop the Steal organizers—Jones, Stone, and Ali Alexander—would nevertheless do well to pay attention to what these three men are saying in public, as they indict themselves with almost every word.}

I say this as someone who all but lived in courtrooms for many years: Jones and Stone are absolutely killing themselves with their public statements about January 6. And if a journalist needs to document the many ways in which that’s so, I’m happy to volunteer.

{Note: At points in the analysis below I draw upon my training, education, and experience as a former federal criminal investigator and longtime criminal defense attorney. As those who read Proof and have read my biography are aware, I’ve offered expert legal analysis to major-media outlets for years, including CNN, the BBC, CBS News, the CBC, NPR, Bloomberg, and many, many others. I’m excited to bring this expertise to Proof as the January 6 investigation unfolds.}

Alex Jones on Roger Stone

The first thing America learned from Jones’s recent interview with Stone is that Jones intended to create a cover story for Stone—with this interview—regarding Stone’s activities during the insurrection, but because the two men didn’t synchronize their stories in advance, Jones’s lies about Stone’s movements on January 5 and January 6 do nothing but draw additional attention to those movements and the lies Stone has told about them.

For instance, Jones told his InfoWars audience that the only reason Stone didn’t attend Trump’s speech at the White House Ellipse on January 6—a major question for federal investigators, as Stone surely was invited, so his decision to stay away from the event (as well as the big speech Stone had promised to give on the Capitol steps thereafter) suggests possible foreknowledge of where January 6 was headed—is that, per Jones, “the VIP entrance [to Trump’s speech at the White House Ellipse] was too crowded.”

Before you note out how obviously untrue this is—given that insurrectionist leader Jessica Watkins was easily able to access the VIP area at Trump’s Ellipse event despite having no known connection to Trump himself, and showing up to the Secret Service checkpoint both armed and armored—realize that it doesn’t really matter what lie Jones told on this point on InfoWars because, minutes later, Roger Stone categorically and unambiguously contradicted everything his friend had just said, apparently without fully appreciating that he was doing so (as the pair had switched to a different topic).

Indeed, in addressing the entirely separate matter of why he was accompanied by off-duty police officer Sal Greco while he was in D.C. during the insurrection, Stone said, of Greco, that “He was never involved, in any way, in the events at the Capitol [on January 6]. He [Sal Greco] was with me the entire time. And we never left our hotel.” (Emphasis supplied.)

There are almost too many aspects of this statement that will be of interest to federal investigators for me to readily enumerate them all here, but I’ll try to offer a few:

1. Stone is lying. There is video of him, from Business Insider, leaving the Willard Hotel near the White House on January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection. We do not know where he went.

2. Stone’s reason for lying is obvious—up to a point. Stone doesn’t want federal investigators to know his movements on Insurrection Day, which is why he’s falsely claiming that he never left his hotel, even though we know for certain he did. But the question now, of course, is not whether he left his hotel, but where did he go and/or who did he talk to on January 6 that he must now invent a preposterous cover story to hide it? Given that we know who Stone’s most important contact in D.C. was at the time (Trump, per the transcript of Stone’s federal trial); who funded Stone trip to D.C. (Jones, per his interview with Stone); who Stone orchestrated the events of January 5 and January with (Alexander, see prior Proof articles here, here, and here); who guarded Stone in D.C. (the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, see Proof articles here, here, and here); who he spoke alongside at the two pre-insurrection events he was featured in (see Proof articles here and here); and the fact that Stone says Greco never left his side (see below), the list of people that Stone could have seen and/or spoken to while he was in Washington is not an interminably long one. As a convicted criminal known to have participated in Trump’s most dangerous and illicit schemes, the list of those willing to treat with Stone in general isn’t nearly as substantial as we might think.

3. Jones is either covering for Stone or was lied to by Stone. By claiming that he knows Stone was at the VIP entrance to Trump’s speech trying to get in on January 6, Jones makes a critical error. In a sense, it doesn’t even matter what the truth is: Jones is compromising himself by revealing that either (a) Stone told him one story and others a different story—to Jones, that he tried to get into Trump’s speech; to others, that he stayed in his hotel—or (b) Jones honestly has no idea where Stone was on January 6, but is trying to concoct a cover story for him because he knows that whatever the truth is, it isn’t good or at all helpful to Stone. This “projected” consciousness of guilt underscores that Jones either knows or believes that Stone has information about January 6 that he could give to the FBI.

4. Stone establishes Greco as a key witness. While Greco is already under a media spotlight for shadowing Stone during the insurrection, Stone has now put Greco in an impossible position: either Greco echoes Stone’s story and says he never left the Willard Hotel on Insurrection Day—in which case Greco has lied to FBI investigators, a federal crime—or Greco concedes that Stone is lying about staying inside the Willard on January 6, in which case he both burns Alex Jones (as Jones must now reveal the source of his own claims about Stone) and far more importantly, is forced to detail where Stone did or did not go on January 6. And if Stone gives a different story than Greco does to the FBI, Stone has an immediate legal problem. By saying “he was with me the entire time”, Stone also ensures that Greco—a cop who might not want to throw away a lengthy career in law enforcement (presumably including a generous pension) for the sake of the now allegedly penniless Stone—must either call Stone a liar or admit that he knows everything Stone did during his stay in Washington, including everyone who Stone spoke to directly or by telephone from the Willard or outside it. That list may include Trump himself—and if it does, it could break the January 6 probe wide open. Why? Because if Stone told Trump to avoid the Capitol or vice versa, it’s significant evidence in the allegedly promising sedition case the DOJ is now developing against Trump and/or his allies.

5. Stone is lying (redux). Not only did Stone leave the Willard Hotel on January 6, but he also left it, of course, on January 5—when he spoke at two separate Stop the Steal rallies, the Rally to Save America at Freedom Plaza and an earlier event in front of the Supreme Court building. We know that at both events Stone was flanked by (and in one case driven by) Oath Keepers, including some who later stormed the Capitol, confirming that Stone’s lie about the Willard Hotel is in part intended to protect him from having to explain how he ended up using the Oath Keepers as a protection detail. Did Greco set it up? Did Stone? Someone else?

6. Jones is lying. Jones says that he “never ended up getting with [Stone]” during the latter’s trip to D.C. because D.C. was too “mobbed” (an interesting choice of words) for Stone to locate him. The problem with this is that both men spoke on the same stage at the Rally to Save America on the night of January 5—and not even that far apart in time, either. And both men were pre-listed as speakers at the event, so if they’d wanted to find each other, they could have easily done so. So either they did meet up and are now lying about it for unknown reasons, or they didn’t want to meet up despite Jones (per the interview) having paid for Stone’s trip to D.C. and offered him the use of his (Jones’s) personal security—which Stone apparently declined so that he could use the Oath Keepers, instead. The story behind this second possible chain of events would almost surely be even more inculpatory than the alternative, as it positions Stone as a willing and entirely voluntarily Oath Keepers associate during the events of the insurrection.

These are just a few of the investigatory implications of this one statement by Stone.

Alex Jones on Alex Jones

The second thing America learned from the Jones-Stone interview is that the FBI is very seriously looking at Jones and Stone for a federal criminal indictment. How do we know? Well, because Jones is conceding it—which is very much against his interest, as at this point he’s essentially conceding an indictment and (if anything short of that) at a minimum daring the FBI to indict him. So one can only imagine that statements like this are true, as it’d be catastrophically self-defeating for Jones to say them, otherwise:

1. “My medical doctor got a visit [from the FBI] because [my doctor was] in D.C. for the [January 6 Trump] speech.” I’ll tell you from experience in criminal investigations that if the FBI has already made a personal visit to anyone who was in D.C. on January 5 and 6 who knows Jones in any capacity—presumably, with an eye toward cataloging all Jones’s movements and intentions during that period—it is almost certain that they’ve also spoken to every member of his entourage, including his bodyguards. And a bodyguard’s loyalty can safety be presumed to end at an interrogation room door, at least when the FBI is involved.

2. “I have gotten letters and subpoenas telling me not to destroy anything.” While it would be preferable if the FBI had done more than simply sent letters to Jones (I’m less sure of whether they actually sent a subpoena)—e.g., executing a search warrant would be far more effective—we can nevertheless take two things from this: (a) the FBI may not yet be at the point in its investigation at which it feels it can secure a warrant, and (b) if in fact a subpoena was issued, it means the FBI has nevertheless have already scheduled some sort of meeting or hearing or grand jury proceeding or other artificial deadline that could in theory be the subject of a subpoena (as subpoenas tell a recipient to produce certain documents by a date certain or face the possibility of court-ordered or other sanctions, so presumably the FBI has given Jones a deadline for document production or, failing that, demanded his appearance at a predetermined time or place to explain to a judge why he is contesting the document production the subpoena he holds requires).

3. “[Bill Barr-appointed January 6 prosecutor Michael Sherwin] is gunning for us [me and Stone], demanding they [the FBI] cook up cases on us.” Ignore here the bluster and focus, instead, on the level of certainty Jones has that the FBI is now moving on him aggressively. While we can’t know what actions by the FBI would have provoked this feeling in Jones, it’s clear he has it. One possible explanation is that the scope of the document demands in the “letters and subpoenas” he has received (see above) is so onerous and legitimately unsettling that Jones feels legitimately unnerved. And he should, if, as was the case with both Erik Prince and Steve Bannon during the Special Counsel investigation by Robert Mueller between 2017 and 2019, he has already destroyed (or tried to destroy) any of the documents the FBI requested. {Note: The same goes for Roger Stone, of course, who in 2019 was indicted in part for knowingly attempting to tamper with testimonial evidence.}

4. “We wanted a ten-day investigation [of 2020 ballots before Biden’s win was certified]….[and] we probably had the [Congressional] votes to get it.” This claim by Jones is fascinating on so many different levels that they require enumeration:

   1. Jones, a Stop the Steal co-organizer, is admitting that the group’s goal on January 6 was exactly what Rudy Giuliani had claimed Trump’s goal was. Namely, the goal of both groups, which we know were in contact with one another in both December 2020 and January 2021—according to the public statements of Jones and Alexander—was to force an unprecedented ten-day delay of the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win. {Note: I discussed Team Trump’s twelve-point Insurrection Day plan in great detail here.}

   2. Jones outrageously claims that “we probably had the votes to get it [a ten-day certification delay]” as part of an attempt to bolster his improbable claim that he never would have supported a storming of the U.S. Capitol. This is as classic a lady-doth-protest-too-much scenario as you’ll encounter. Because Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate on January 5, there is no way Trump had the votes to postpone the January 6 joint session of Congress certifying Biden’s win. Indeed, by falsely claiming the opposite, Jones is projecting his consciousness of guilt to FBI investigators—drawing their attention to the fact (and it is a fact) that the Stop the Steal movement and the Trump campaign “wanted a ten-day investigation” of 2020 ballots but had no way to achieve that unless something happened at the Capitol on January 6 that was so extraordinary that Congress would have no choice but to adjourn for ten days. No wonder the Wall Street Journal reported, just a few days ago, that the far-right social media website Parler attempted to warn the FBI pre-insurrection that some of its users were planning to storm the Capitol on January 6; as one Parler user helpfully summarized Trump’s plan, “If Congress does the wrong thing [and moves toward certifying Biden’s November 2020 win on January 6], expect real chaos [at the Capitol] because Trump needs us to cause chaos to enact the Insurrection Act.” Now you understand why Jones preposterously claims that he, Stone, and Stop the Steal co-organizer Ali Alexander were sanguine about their chances of delaying the joint session via a vote. Because the truth is that an insurrection was their only option, as only Trump invoking the Insurrection Act because of chaos at the Capitol would have stood even the dimmest chance of provoking a ten-day delay in the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

   3. Given that more than 60 federal judges had already rejected Trumpists’ claims that there were any irregularities with the 2020 election, Jones’s insistence that a “ten-day investigation” was the goal of the Stop the Steal movement and Team Trump is a dead giveaway of their true intentions. Understand that there was no investigative body available, on January 6 or at any time thereafter, to conduct any such ten-day investigation; that any such investigation would first have required new legislation to create such a body; and that if any such investigation were to happen at the state rather than the federal level, that is, overseen by pro-Trump legislatures rather than an independent investigative body authorized by Congress, it would already, at the moment of its conception, be near-universally understood as a political plot rather than a legitimate investigation. In other words, the only way for a “ten-day investigation” to have occured would have been if Trump had done what his advisers Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Michael Lindell, Sidney Powell, and Peter Navarro were demanding as of January 6, which was for Trump to seize ballots under the supposed authority granted him under the Insurrection Act of 1807. So every reference to a “ten-day investigation” by Jones or others is an implicit reference to the invocation of the Act by Trump—with or without an ongoing insurrection to justify it.

Roger Stone on Roger Stone

I wrote in the title of this article that during his conversation with Alex Jones, Stone “buried” himself. I meant it. While much of Stone’s contribution to his discussion with Jones is his usual whining—falsely complaining about the investigation of his conduct as proceeding under a “guilt by association” premise; falsely declaring that “I’d have turned whoever was involved in [if I’d known anything about the insurrectionists’ plot in advance”; falsely decrying any inquiry into his behavior in D.C. in early January as part of “the latest attempt of the Deep State to silence their most effective critics” (which at least acknowledges that he is under federal criminal investigation)—there are additional details that Stone gives Jones that provide a cause for glee inside the FBI.

Here are the three main takeaways for the FBI in Stone’s statements about himself:

(1) Stone reveals that he was in contact with the D.C. Metropolitan Police prior to the insurrection. Proof has raised the question—in too many articles on this website to link to (see the archives)—of why Roger Stone and other top Trump allies suddenly abandoned their plans to march on the Capitol (indeed, in the case of Stone, to speak at the Capitol, alongside Trump, at the so-called Wild Protest on the Capitol steps after Trump’s midday speech at the Ellipse) before the march on the U.S. Capitol had begun.

One possible explanation for Stone’s dramatic about-face on January 6 could have been his contact with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (the two groups we now know led the insurrection) on and prior to that day. But in Stone’s interview with Jones, he offers another possibility, one that opens up a promising new avenue of investigation for the FBI: per Stone, his usual protective detail on trips to Washington “always” included (a) “two off-duty D.C. police officers”, and also (b) a “retired [police] officer from Prince George’s County [in Maryland].” Stone claims that he spoke to his longtime contacts in the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department prior to January 6 and discovered that they would not be able to protect him while he was in the city. The substance of that conversation—and the reason for the officers’ inability or refusal to work with Stone on January 5 and 6—remains unclear, but I bet the officers would tell the FBI if asked.

Indeed, perhaps these two officers might know how Stone suddenly went from being protected by three members of law enforcement to being protected by an even larger number of now-suspected federal criminals. This certainly represents quite a reversal, especially as Jones reveals, during his interview with Stone, that sometime in the midst of Stone losing his right-side-of-the-law security detail and ending up being guarded by insurrectionists instead, he was offered the use of Jones’s private security detail. This confession puts even greater pressure on the question of how or why the two men “never ended up getting with [one another] in D.C.,” getting to the truth of which open question is something I maintain is of critical investigative significance to the FBI.

(2) Stone puts in question his past contacts with the Oath Keepers who protected him. If the matter of how Stone went from being protected by cops to protected by people who cops would normally arrest at gunpoint is an interesting one—and it is—one reason for the intrigue is that either Stone had a contact with the Oath Keepers he could reach out to pre-insurrection, the Oath Keepers had a way of getting in touch with Stone, or the two camps had an a middleman acting as a matchmaker for them.

And here’s where things get really interesting.

According to text messages sent between insurrectionist leaders Jessica Watkins and Donovan Crowl—both Oath Keepers, and, incidentally, also romantic partners—on January 1, at a time the militia members couldn’t have known their communications would be discovered by federal law enforcement (see this Business Insider report for more), Watkins texted Crowl, “Looks like we might be security for Roger Stone, if we end up rolling with the Oath Keepers.”

This timeline presents a significant problem for Stone, as it suggests he either put out feelers to the Oath Keepers in December 2020 or vice versa.

For the call for Stone to be protected by Oath Keepers to get from the high command inside that organization, for instance Stewart Rhodes, to Watkins and Crowl, it seems likely that Stone’s need for such protection would have to have been communicated by Stone—or, alternately, confirmed by Stone upon the Oath Keepers reaching out to him for some reason—well before Stone recorded this very odd video requesting donations for “protective equipment” for certain “professional security” personnel for Stop the Steal’s “Wild Protest” on the Capitol steps. {Note: This sort of pre-insurrection fundraising is the very same conduct for which Stone associate and Proud Boy Ethan Nordean has already been arrested, under the federal “aiding and abetting” statute that would appear to apply with equal alacrity to Stone.}

In other words, Stone had apparently determined by the time he recorded the video linked to above that (a) he could not afford his own security (Jones confirms this in his interview with Stone, and Stone tacitly agrees with Jones); (b) his usual security detail wasn’t available (for reasons that remain unclear, but one wonders what these two D.C. Metropolitan Police officers friendly with Stone knew of the plans for the insurrection in December 2020); and (c) either hadn’t yet been offered Jones’s private security detail or else had been offered it and refused it.

Stone’s problem, of course, lies with the last point. Why would he opt for Oath Keepers over a private security detail? And if in fact he didn’t, and Jones simply hadn’t offered that detail to Stone as of late December, how did it turn out that, as of January 5, Stone was still being protected by Oath Keepers rather than Jones’s by-then-offered guards? For that matter, what happened on the evening of January 5 such that Stone suddenly realized he needed to drop the Oath Keepers as guards and—though he could have gone to Trump’s speech to try to find a new option for protection via Jones—stay away from even Trump’s speech and the events thereafter altogether?

In short, if Stone found himself without a security detail on January 6 it was by choice.

Which means that he’d decided, by January 6, that he couldn’t use the Oath Keepers.

Which certainly suggests the possibility that, during his lengthy contact with the Oath Keepers on January 5, he became aware of their plans for January 6, and decided that he’d better stay away from all the events scheduled for either the Ellipse or the Capitol on the following day—even though he was scheduled to speak at the Capitol and had explicitly raised money for that purpose.

So if you’re a thirty-year friend of Donald Trump, and as of midday on January 5 you are scheduled to speak alongside him on the Capitol steps with Oath Keepers acting as protection, and suddenly you become so wary of the Oath Keepers and what’s going to happen at the Capitol that you and your friend Trump both cancel your plans to speak at the “Wild Protest,” what are the chances that Stone and Trump spoke on the phone on the evening of January 5 (as we know from Stone’s federal criminal trial that the two regularly speak on the phone)? Or what if you don’t want to communicate what you know directly, why not have your Stop the Steal co-organizer Ali Alexander speak with top Trump adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle on the evening of January 5—as did happen—while the latter is attending a massive “war council” at Trump International Hotel to discuss the likely outcome of the events of January 6?

These are the possibilities the FBI will have to confirm or deny in the weeks ahead.

But as the FBI is determining what Stone may or may not have been told by his Oath Keeper guards on January 5, it is certainly likely to focus on this statement by Stone to Jones: “I was provided voluntary security by the Oath Keepers [on January 5]….[but I] didn’t know any of them on an intimate basis.” (Emphasis supplied.)

That’s a very interesting qualification by Stone, and one that would be unnecessary if Stone simply didn’t know—full stop—any of the Oath Keepers who protected his life on January 5. An implicit confession that he in fact knew his protective detail to some degree (if not “intimately”) could certainly help explain how with such rapidity, and so well in advance of his planned speech at the Capitol on January 6, he was in touch with—and raising money for—one of the militia groups that orchestrated the storming of the Capitol (and was also planning to gas Congress in the tunnels beneath the Capitol).

(3) As I know from long experience representing defendants charged with everything from marijuana possession to first-degree murder, one of many potential signs that a prospective defendant is experiencing “consciousness of guilt” is when they express to a third party—I don’t, in this instance, mean their attorney—an absolute certainty that they will be charged with a crime.

When Stone told Alex Jones during his recent interview with him, “This is serious—they [DOJ] will probably come after us both [over the insurrection]”, we know from other statements Jones makes during the interview that “come after” could not simply mean “send letters and subpoenas seeking preservation of documents,” as Jones had already told Stone, and his InfoWars audience, that the FBI had long ago crossed that line. Nor could Stone be equating the FBI interviewing Stone and Jones’s associates as constituting “coming after us”, as Stone speaks of the FBI coming after him and Jones as something he anticipates will happen in the future—and Jones has already told Stone, and his InfoWars audience, that the FBI has begun interviewing their associates.

So what Stone is referring to when he tells Jones that events have turned “serious” and that the FBI will “probably” take aggressive steps against both him and Jones is future federal indictments.

To be very clear, when I was working as a criminal defense attorney I never took a client’s direction or counsel on whether or when an indictment would be forthcoming as gospel unless he or she had a source inside the local police department or county attorney’s office—a vanishingly rare occurrence—so I don’t suggest here that Stone knows, or can know, whether he and Jones will be indicted on (presumably) seditious conspiracy charges. Indeed, that’s my point: lacking any apparent direct information from prosecutors, Stone is willing to tempt fate by publicly declaring, in fewer words, that he believes that he and Jones will indeed be indicted by the Department of Justice.

I can only say that many, many years of working with criminal defendants—and I fully believe my fellow brothers and sisters at the bar who have practiced criminal defense will agree with me here—taught me that if a client is certain he or she will be indicted, it is because they know what evidence is available for law enforcement to find and they know that that evidence is considerable enough for a grand jury to issue an indictment.

In the instances, over the years, in which a client of mine predicted that they would be charged with a crime before any such charge had emerged, they were always correct.

Yes, really. They were right 100% of the time. Presumably for the reason I mentioned, which is that they knew as much or more about the circumstances being investigated by law enforcement as anyone did know or could know.

So when Roger Stone says that he and Alex Jones will be indicted, not only do I believe him, but I believe that he knows precisely why he and Jones will be indicted and what sort of evidence is available for the FBI to uncover that would sustain new indictments.

Conclusion

It’s important to remember, in all this, that Roger Stone is a convicted (if subsequently pardoned) federal criminal, and Jones is an abject coward. Without Trump’s corrupt intervention, Stone would have been in federal prison in late December and unable to go to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. Meanwhile, the moment Jones gets sued civilly for any reason—not even criminally investigated—he folds immediately, declaring that his whole pseudo-journalistic persona is just a routine intended as “performance art.”

Roger Stone and Alex Jones are what online gamers call “glass cannons.” What this means is that they are loud; excellent at going on the offense; position themselves in ways that are legitimately intimidating to their adversaries; and yet collapse like a wet tissue when actually facing an attack. Stone was bold following his 2019 arrest because he knew with certainty that he would be pardoned by Trump if indicted. Now he faces the possibility of indictment in a post-Trump world, and is acting like a three year-old facing nap-time—speaking of his circumstances without self-possession. In a situation in which he should be shutting up, he’s blathering, whining, and digging a deeper hole for himself.

Alex Jones hasn’t faced arrest—despite a claim in an episode of This American Life that he once legitimately once tried to murder someone in Texas—but we do know that when faced with even a civil suit, Jones collapses into a heap of preposterous, pathetic self-justifications.

My point is that I’ve worked with some very, very tough people. (I’ll leave it at that.)

Roger Stone and Alex Jones are not tough people.

Their catty whinging on InfoWars is a mere prelude to a scenario in which one or both men is—as Stone predicts—indicted on the most serious charges imaginable, with the possibility of escaping significant prison time only if (a) Jones will explain who at the White House he and Ali Alexander spoke with in December 2020 and January 2021 in the run-up to the insurrection, or (b) Stone will concede what I’m reasonably certain the FBI believes: his December 2020 trip to Mar-a-Lago as the appreciative recipient of a Trump pardon did not conclude his business with the then-president, and they thereafter continued to speak regularly by phone, as they have for years. I happen to believe—though the jury quite literally remains out for now on this—what I think the even-better-trained criminal investigators at the FBI also believe: Jones and Stone can give up substantially more powerful targets, and may well do so if they are indicted and have no hope of a pardon (understanding that Stone, at least, might wait to see if Trump runs in 2024 when he’s deciding how to handle a case that might unfold across 2022 and 2023).

Here’s something else that I know from professional experience: when someone who knows they are under criminal investigation tells a preposterous lie that places them in greater danger of criminal liability, they’re protecting someone. The more audacious the lie, the more it’s clear that the suspect considers it absolutely vital that the person in question be protected. When Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama continued lying about the January 5 “war council” even after he’d already been caught lying about the subject once, I said that there had to be a powerful incentive for him to risk himself in this way. By the same token, when Roger Stone is doing his level best to lie about his activities in the days leading up to and including Insurrection Day, he is, of course, interested in self-preservation, and yet the more desperate and easily disproven and markedly dangerous to Stone himself the lies are, the more evident it is that Stone is protecting (or believes himself to be protecting) someone else. I do not think it takes years of investigative and trial-advocacy practice in the American criminal justice system to understand that one of the only people in America anyone might consider worth such an extraordinary sacrifice would be a former President of the United States who also happens to be the de facto leader of a sinister domestic terror movement.

It is self-evident that when Alex Jones and Roger Stone talk about January 6 in a chat replete with lies, those lies have to do with Alex Jones and Roger Stone and the degree to which these men will continue to be free men in 2022 and 2023. Less obvious is that every time these two men speak, they are, based on their past claims and associations, making absolutely critical statements about the potential criminal liability of Donald Trump.

It’s for this reason that every public conversation between Jones and Stone is must-see television—even if it’s aired on a conspiracy-theory website. While certainly nothing either man says be taken at face value, there is not, candidly, any good reason for major media not to be reporting on what two of the chief suspects in the crime of the century are brazenly declaring on a public site. And you can be certain that if Proof is paying attention to what these two men are saying, so is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.