The California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell has called for the rightwing activist and Trump ally Roger Stone to be prosecuted over an alleged death threat he also made against Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York.
Asked by Scripps News if he wanted Stone to be prosecuted, Swalwell said: “Yes, I absolutely do. I know [the] aim [of the threat] is to not just threaten and in this case take a specific action, but its aim is to silence Donald Trump’s critics.”
Stone, 71, is a longtime Republican operative and self-proclaimed dirty trickster, long close to Trump and involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Last week, Mediaite said it had obtained a recording from shortly before the election in which Stone told an associate, then a New York police officer: “It’s time to do it.
“Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit any more.”
Swalwell and Nadler were prominent Trump opponents during his time in office. In 2020, as chair of the House judiciary committee, Nadler said he would investigate Trump’s commutation of a jail sentence handed to Stone for obstructing the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.
This week, Nadler said he had been in communication with US Capitol police and the FBI about Stone’s alleged remark.
On Thursday, Swalwell told Scripps: “The message I send to Roger Stone is: ‘I’m not going away.’ We’re not going to be intimidated. We must be a country where we settle our scores not with violence, but with voting.”
Stone says the recording is a fake, while his associate, Sal Greco, has dismissed it as “political fodder”.
Stone’s lawyer, David Schoen – who defended Trump in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress – told Scripps Stone had had “two experts look at” the recording.
“It’s a 92% chance or higher that it’s AI-generated,” Schoen said. “I’m sure that if he said it, that he didn’t mean literally those words. He doesn’t speak that way. He’s got zero history of violence, ever. I know him pretty well, and I think it’s an absolutely crazy charge.”
