In an MSNBC exclusive Wednesday, “The Beat” host Ari Melber aired what appears to be a damning video of longtime Donald Trump aide and advisor Roger Stone plotting a Republican win in 2020 by overriding various states’ election results.
In the video, recorded Nov. 5 by Danish documentarian Christoffer Guldbrandsen, Stone said, “We must be prepared to lobby our Republican legislatures by personal contact and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in each state that this may need to happen” — “this” being the election results “illegally” denying former President Trump an electoral win “through fraud.”
In full, Stone said: “Although state officials in all 50 states must ultimately certify the results of the voting in their state, the final decision as to who the state legislatures authorize descent to the Electoral College is a decision made solely by the legislature. Any legislative body may decide on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud to send electors to the Electoral College who actually reflect the president’s legitimate victory in their state, which was illegally denied him through fraud. We must be prepared to lobby our Republican legislatures by personal contact and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in each state that this may need to happen.”
In his breakdown of the video in Wednesday’s exclusive segment, Melber said that the fact that the video was recorded on Nov. 5 is a particular blow to the ongoing argument from Trump’s camp over two indictments regarding his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection — one by “the DOJ’s Jack Smith and the other out of Georgia, “where DA Fani Willis just charged several Trump lawyers and aides for these types of plots.”
“That timeline hurts the Trump defense that we’ve heard so much about, that these individuals pushing these plots were acting in a good faith belief they had won,” Melber said. “Indeed, this particular piece of evidence, this video, shows quite the opposite for Stone. He was pushing the plot not because he had believed Trump had won or was looking at numbers or looking at the results as they were called, which hadn’t happened yet — no. Regardless of the results that were not even in, he was already pushing this plot.”
The MSNBC host did emphasize, however, that the footage from Guldbrandsen “does not address if or how Stone took any actions beyond what he said there.”
“In other words,” Melber posed, “was he just talking, was he just writing, or did he also join what Jack Smith calls a ‘conspiracy’?”
Watch the full segment from “The Beat” in the video above.
