An audio clip released Friday by news site Mediaite appears to feature Donald Trump ally Roger Stone plotting the assassinations of two Democratic leaders, Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. MSNBC host Joy Reid talked about the leaked recording with a panel including activist George Conway, political strategist Cornell Belcher and columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr, describing it as “stunning and disturbing.”
Before opening up the conversation, Reid said, “We are at the political assassinations phase of this hideous video game that we’re trapped in apparently, and I can’t believe I’ve now talked about political assassination twice in one bloody week.”
Reid noted that the audio has not been authenticated by NBC News and that Mediaite admitted to “lightly” editing the recording to protect the identity of the person who provided it. She also said Stone has denied the allegations entirely and claimed that the audio is the work of artificial intelligence.
As Atkins Stohr put it, the audio is an example of the danger that could come with a second Trump presidency. She explained, “We say, OK, democracy held during the first Trump administration. It was in part because there were at least some guardrails in place, like there were lines that even Bill Barr wouldn’t cross.”
“Well, now [Trump] is totally surrounded by people like Roger Stone, people who will not be a guardrail, people like his attornies,” she added. “And that is what is so incredibly dangerous about this. Another term is not just him hypothesizing about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.”
Atkins Stohr warned, “Another term is him full of grievance. He said what he wants to do — he wants to purge the federal government of anybody except those who are loyal to him, he wants to weaponize the DOJ.”
Of Stone, Reid explained, “Roger Stone is the guy who in the summer of 2020 looked at the polls, saw that his guy was losing, that Donald Trump was losing, and said ‘You know what we’re going to do? We’re just going to declare victory and say we won anyway.’ So this is the guy who was in on the idea beforehand that they were just going to lie. Now you’ve got him talking with a cop, a former cop, about killing two Democratic representatives.”
When asked if there will be any fallout from the audio, Conway shrugged and said, “Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what you can do to Roger Stone. I mean, if he’s just talking about it, I don’t know if it suffices for a conspiracy or anything. You need an agreement to put somebody in jail.
“But it just goes to show that, I mean, if this is real, the fact that we can even think it’s real tells you a lot about the people that surround Donald Trump,” Conway added.
Watch the panel with Reid, Conway, Belcher and Atkins Stohr in the video above.
