January 26, 2019

Did Donald Trump Ever Really Fire Roger Stone?

Amy Beth Bennett/Sun Sentinel/TNS via ZUMA

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How many of your remember this story from three years ago?

Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday it has fired top political adviser Roger Stone — who promptly denied being let go and insisted he had quit.

….“Mr. Trump fired Roger Stone last night. We have a tremendously successful campaign and Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity. He has had a number of articles about him recently and Mr. Trump wants to keep the focus of the campaign on how to Make America Great Again,” a campaign spokesperson said in a statement.

Stone, however, told CNN that he “categorically denies” being fired, and provided what he said was his resignation letter.

Allegedly, Stone quit because he was unhappy about Trump’s “food fight with @megynkelly” taking attention away from “core issue messages.” Please raise your hand if you ever believed this. Roger Stone lives for televised food fights and has less than zero interest in policy messaging. I know that Trump and Stone had supposedly been bickering for weeks, but even if that were true, it’s hardly credible that the Megyn Kelly affair would have been the thing to finally tip him over the edge.

Anyway, that’s what I remember thinking at the time: that this whole thing was a prearranged sham. Stone was more comfortable and more effective doing his thing while being able to claim that he had no connection to the Trump campaign, so he and Trump arranged a loud parting of the ways that no one could ignore. From that point on, Trump could disclaim any knowledge or connection to anything Stone did.

In the end, that didn’t help Stone, who was arrested and indicted yesterday over charges of lying to Congress about WikiLeaks, tampering with witnesses, and obstructing a House investigation into possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia to tip the election. But will it protect Trump? Stay tuned!

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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