Johnson adviser Roger Stone: ‘Republican blood will run in the streets’

Alexander Burns at Politico quotes Roger Stone from the previously mentioned New York Times article – which PeterO points out in comments was on the NYT front page:

The Republican efforts to impede Mr. Johnson’s candidacy have drawn charges of spying and coercion from Libertarians and countercharges from Republicans that the party had resorted to fraud while accepting secret help from Democrats.

Democrats and Obama campaign officials deny any such involvement. But Mr. Johnson has been receiving critical help from Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative once so committed to his party that he has a tattoo of President Richard M. Nixon on his back.

Mr. Stone says he has become so frustrated with the party’s attempts to shut down Mr. Johnson, whom he says he is advising at no charge, that he vowed in an e-mail last month, “Republican blood will run in the streets b4 I am done.”

Stone’s threat may have some weight. Excerpted from his wikipedia entry:

In the first grade, Stone claims, he broke into politics to further John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign: “I remember going through the cafeteria line and telling every kid that Nixon was in favor of school on Saturdays,” Stone says. “It was my first political trick.”

When he was a junior and vice president of the student government at a high school in northern Westchester County, New York, he manipulated the ouster of the president and succeeded him. When he ran for election as president for his senior year, he later said, he “built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket. Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that’s mean? No, it’s smart. ”

Stone’s political career began in earnest with activities such as contributing money to a possible rival of Nixon in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance — then slipping the receipt to the Manchester Union-Leader. He also got a spy hired by the Hubert Humphrey campaign who became Humphrey’s driver. By day, Stone was officially a scheduler in the Nixon campaign. “By night, I’m trafficking in the black arts. Nixon’s people were obsessed with intelligence.”

John Sears recruited Stone to work in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1979-80, coordinating the Northeast. Stone said that former McCarthyist Roy Cohn helped him arrange for John B. Anderson to get the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York, a move that would help split the opposition to Reagan in the state. Stone said Cohn gave him a suitcase that Stone avoided opening and, as instructed by Cohn, dropped it off at the office of a lawyer influential in Liberal Party circles. Reagan carried the state with 46 percent of the vote. Speaking after the statute of limitations for bribery had expired, Stone later said, “I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

In April 1992, Time alleged that Stone was involved with the controversial Willie Horton advertisements to aid George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, which were targeted against Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis.

Stone has been credited with setting up street demonstrations in Florida to protest the recounts held after the 2000 presidential election; he was also accused of organizing the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” where Republican congressional staff members protested outside an office where ballots were being recounted, a claim Stone denies.

In [the 2004] election, a blogger accused Stone of responsibility for the “Kerry-Specter” campaign materials that were circulated in Pennsylvania. Such signs were considered controversial because they were seen as an effort to get Democrats who supported Kerry to vote for then Republican Senator Arlen Specter in heavily Democratic Philadelphia.

In 2007 Stone, a top adviser at the time to Joseph Bruno (the majority leader of the New York State Senate), was forced to resign by Bruno after allegations that Stone had threatened then gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer.

In January 2008, Stone founded Citizens United Not Timid, an anti–Hillary Clinton 527 group with an intentionally obscene acronym.

In February 2010, Stone became campaign manager for Kristin Davis, a madam linked with the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, in her bid for the Libertarian Party nomination for Governor of New York in the 2010 election. Stone says that the campaign “is not a hoax, a prank or a publicity stunt. I want to get her a half-million votes.” However, he was later spotted at a campaign rally for another gubernatorial candidate, Carl Paladino; of whom Stone has spoken favorably. Stone has admittedly been providing support and advice to both campaigns, on the grounds that the two campaigns have different goals: Davis is seeking to gain permanent ballot access for her party, while Paladino is in the race to win (and is Stone’s preferred candidate). As such, Stone does not believe he has a conflict of interest in supporting both candidates. While working for the Davis campaign, he corroborated with a group entitled “People for a Safer New York” to send a flyer labeling Libertarian Party candidate Warren Redlich a “sexual predator” based on a blog post Redlich had made in April 2008. The move backfired, and Davis finished in last place with roughly half the votes Redlich did while Redlich finished with the highest vote total of any Libertarian gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history. Stone continues to hold ill will against the Libertarian Party of New York.