Roger Stone, NXIVM, Russian Collusion and the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol

By Frank Parlato

Many who follow the Frank Report know that my politics are nothing like Roger Stone’s.

He might say I lean left [as compared to him] – and the reality is that I do distrust the never-ending professions of integrity and altruism of government officials, and I want to limit their powers in support of freedom.

I think many politicians and government officials are a blend of fulsome excrement, stupidity, cupidity, and self-serving, naked greed, unbridled egoism and obsession with their own vanity. Many of the rest are just fulsome excrement. Their powers need to be checked.

My own brush with the US Justice system, and the Orwellian-named Department of Justice, educated me as to how corrupt, politicized and malicious that process can be.

When combined with the power of corporately-owned news media, they have the power to frame a false narrative, coverup murder, and send an innocent person to prison, while ignoring serious crime by elites.

I learned this first-hand in my difficult early (but ultimately successful) efforts to expose the multimillion-dollar con and sex-cult of a self-styled guru named Keith Raniere.

Raniere was not the self-help apostle or genius I had been told he was when I went to work for NXIVM, which billed itself as a totally new, once in an eon, self-improvement “way of thinking” as taught by Raniere. It was “the greatest invention since humans invented writing” was how his teachings were sold.  I was also told he had the highest IQ of any human ever tested.

In fact, it was a hugely profitable scam in which Raniere and his psychopathic henchwomen recruited the sons and daughters of wealthy children from wealthy families with bulging trust funds.

Raniere and his minions took in millions of dollars which they invested in real estate, which was put in the name of Raniere’s enforcer, Nancy Salzman. Raniere systematically drained the trust funds of the scions of one of the great American fortunes – the House of Bronfman.

They also looted the trust funds of the offspring of the long socially-prominent Cafritz family in DC – and took more through the children of Mexico’s former president, the fabulously wealthy Carlos Salinas, among others of Mexico’s elite families.

As I was coming to work, handling public relations and other issues for NXIVM, and at a time I knew nothing about the inner workings of Raniere and his group, the controversial Republican consultant, Roger Stone, was just leaving his brief consulting gig with the organization.

In fact, it was Stone who first warned me about Keith Raniere and the NXIVM set-up.

“His course is some kind of mind control bullshit,” Stone told me back in 2007. “It’s clear that Raniere has lifted millions of dollars from the trust funds of his marks,” he told me.

Stone also told me about his own brief interaction with Keith and his crew.

“They hired me to advise them on a strategy to gain political access through their large contributions, but I could never get them to understand how the system worked legally,” Stone said in exasperation. “I explained to them repeatedly that one could not condition a large contribution to a politician on the government official performing some kind of governmental chore or providing some benefit in return.

“I explained to them that all they were buying with their political contributions was ‘goodwill’ and a fair hearing, if they had some legitimate governmental problem or issue. However, the trading of specific things – such as the criminal indictment of one of their enemies (the ex-girlfriend and partner of Keith) could not be ‘purchased’ and that you would be prosecuted and go to prison for bribery if you even tried such a thing,” Stone said.

Stone urged me away from the cult repeatedly. He would often begin phone calls to me with, “How’s the world’s smartest man today?” meaning Raniere.

I would say “I’m doing fine.”

Stone would go into a tirade. “This guy Raniere is full of shit and the whole thing looks like a financial scam to me, but I say get the hell away from these people because they’re playing with millions of dollars which they stole from somewhere,” he said.

Stone would tell me years later, “That in the three months that I worked for them, I never saw any evidence of the secretive sex cult that Raniere built to feed his own depravities. All I saw was rich middle-aged housewives and divorcees getting fleeced by this prick.”

I can well understand that he did not see anything depraved. I worked closely with the group and I never saw it either. It was well hidden. It was not revealed to outsiders.

In my early struggles to expose how evil and corrupt Raniere was, I was hampered because law enforcement and the media refused to examine the truth, in part, I think because the cult had the credibility of the Bronfman support.

Oftentimes, whistleblowers wound up being indicted. Bronfmans hired attorneys well-connected to the law enforcement agencies handling the matter and Raniere escaped prosecution for decades.

Because of this, I was able to get little traction in my early, one-man effort to expose the truth about Raniere, his highly lucrative financial hustle, and his sex-cult where he was attended to by a harem of personal sex slaves.

It’s the reason I started the Frank Report [to tell the story directly, independent of the mainstream media] and begin laying out the shocking facts about the upstate New York-based cult and the secret sexual rituals of a small, elite harem of concubines whose fidelity and allegiance to Raniere were ultimately marked with a brand in their pubic area with Raniere’s initials.

Had I never begun laying out the facts at the Frank Report, the New York Times [which credited me for breaking the story] would never have taken the time or interest in investigating an organization so heavily funded by the entirely respectable and politically-correct Bronfman family.

Roger Stone and Randy Credico  

Because I knew Roger Stone, I took a keen interest in the mainstream media frenzy that grew out of the Russian collusion allegations that alleged that Stone, who was a political adviser and associate for Donald Trump for over 30 years, was working with the Russian State to interfere in the election and was, allegedly, the recipient of stolen data which the Russians allegedly hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

I decided to look at the evidence and decide for myself what I thought.

Stone insisted at the time that the only source of the limited information he had – that WikiLeaks had obtained detrimental data on Hillary Clinton, which Julian Assange himself admitted as early as June of 2016 – was one individual.

Stone said the tip that WikiLeaks would drop their report on Hillary in October, just prior to the election – and that it was devastating” – came from longtime anti-drug law activist Randy Credico who was a friend of Stone’s.

Stone had been a major critic of New York’s draconian, racist “Rockefeller drug laws”.

I decided to interview Credico.

In fact, I was the journalist for ArtVoice.com who interviewed the government’s chief witness against Stone, Randy Credico, who admitted to me – on the record – that he was, indeed, the source of what little information Stone had regarding the plans by WikiLeaks to release data in October 2016 about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

This seems to be the direct opposite of what Credico testified to during Stone’s trial.

I recall seeing pages of text messages that show Credico telling Stone when Assange would drop his load of information.

I understand that at least three witnesses told the Grand Jury convened to indict Stone that Credico admitted to them directly that he was Stone’s WikiLeaks source – and that Credico bragged about having an ‘in” with one of WikiLeaks lawyers.

Despite this being entirely exculpatory, Robert Mueller’s prosecutors didn’t care.

Credico’s testimony at Stone’s trial appears to be perjury and appears to have been suborned.

For two years, virtually every major mainstream media outlet – including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and others – insisted that Stone would be proven to be the “access point” for the Trump campaign with WikiLeaks and its publisher, Julian Assange.

When Stone was indicted for “lying to Congress” rather than for any crime associated with the WikiLeaks disclosures, these same reporters insisted that Stone’s trial would ultimately reveal more extensive crimes involving WikiLeaks.

The Washington Post and the New York Times it seemed to me pushed this narrative.

That Stone’s trial was a one-sided travesty is beyond dispute. The granting of a motion by the Government prohibiting Stone’s defense attorneys from raising the question of misconduct by the Special Counsel’s Office, the Department of Justice, the FBI, or any member of Congress is not only patently unconstitutional but any reasonable person might ask why the prosecutors would make such a motion if there was no misconduct to raise.

The Special Counsel’s misconduct in General Flynn’s case, which ultimately led to a move by the Department of Justice to dismiss the charges against him, certainly makes one wonder if prosecutions are entirely political – it being more a question of who, than of what was done.

The first nine pages of Stone’s indictment written by Mueller’s “deputy,” Andrew Weissman, insist that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and gave the stolen data to WikiLeaks. The trial judge, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, prohibited Stone’s lawyers from using either expert testimony or forensic evidence to disprove the entire underlying premise of Stone’s indictment.

Stone’s lawyers got the FBI to admit that they never examined the DNC computer servers and that CrowdStrike, a private company hired by the DNC, was the source of the entire Russian hacking story. The report was later discredited because CrowdStrike told the FBI that they had no evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC, but that only became known when Acting Director of National Intelligence, Rick Grennell, got the DOJ and FBI records declassified and the origins of the Russian collusion investigation exposed its political purpose and the hoax collapsed.

When FBI Director James Comey said to Congress under oath that the Steele Dossier was but one piece of evidence “in a broad mosaic of evidence” justifying the FISA Court warrant, and when Roger Stone’s lawyers got the Government to admit that was a lie, all hell broke loose.

It became imperative that Stone be silenced.

When an image Stone posted on Instagram was incorrectly reported as posing a threat to the Judge overseeing Stone’s trial and a media feeding frenzy ensued, Judge Jackson used it to justify a gag order under which Stone could not defend himself from the avalanche of invective coming his way.

The gag-order was also likely unconstitutional, but an appeal to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals languished for months before that court threw the decision back to the trial judge. By that time, the point was moot because Stone’s trial, and lynching, was imminent.

The misconduct of the jury forewoman is the most outrageous and egregious example of the corruption of Stone’s trial. The jury forewoman posted direct attacks on Stone and praised the Mueller prosecutors, as well as multiple attacks on President Trump on both Facebook and Twitter in 2019.

The juror, Tomeka Hart, hid these postings on a private setting during jury selection and during the trial – and deleted them only after Stone was found guilty.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s insistence that none of the actions were indicative of bias against Stone, boggles the mind.

These irregularities in Stone’s trial and the political motivation of his initial indictment moved President Donald Trump to commute Stone’s sentence in July of 2020, when both the trial judge and the Appeals Court ordered Stone to surrender, at age 68, to a correctional facility where inmates had a substantial number of COVID-19 cases – and where none of the CDC protocols to restrict the spread of the virus were being observed.

Stone called it a “death sentence” and the Appeals Court decision appeared to violate all contemporaneous legal precedents, as well as current Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons regulations.

So much for the “rule of law.”

President Donald Trump tracked every move by the judge, saw Stone was not being given a fair trial, and not only commuted Stone’s nearly four-year prison sentence but gave him a full and unconditional pardon on December 23, 2020.

This is why some of the same media members who accused Stone of being in cahoots with the Russians and WikiLeaks – and who were so tickled when it appeared Stone might die in prison – were nearly hysterical when Stone eluded them.

Bannon Looms Large

When the House Intelligence Committee declassified the testimony of Steve Bannon, it was learned that Bannon’s sworn testimony before the Committee completely contradicted his testimony as Mueller’s star witness at Stone’s trial.

George Washington University Law Professor, Jonathan Turley told the NY Post, “There does appear a glaring and irreconcilable conflict in what Bannon stated in testimony before Congress and the court. What is striking is that this was not a peripheral point but one of the main areas of inquiry…He has two diametrically opposite sworn statements in a high-profile controversy with dozens of attorneys in attendance.”

Additionally, Government prosecutors had an obligation to disclose to Stone’s defense attorney that Bannon was under investigation. They did not do so.

Bogus Evidence

Then, at midnight on election day, November 3rd, 2020, the Department of Justice, in order to be in compliance with a court order, released the last unredacted sections of the ‘Mueller Report’ regarding Roger Stone.

Incredibly, the Special Counsel’s report admitted that they had found no factual evidence whatsoever to charge Stone with any crime pertaining to the Russians, WikiLeaks or Assange.

What Government agency releases news at midnight on the busiest media day of the year unless they want to ensure that there will be little to no media coverage of their disclosures?

The unveiled final report sugar-coated their failure to find “sufficient evidence,” when they actually found no evidence whatsoever.

Did CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News report on this shocking proof that all the accusations made against Roger Stone were false?

No, although Buzzfeed did report that the DOJ release vindicated Stone.

Now we see the same phenomena happening again.

Extensive pieces by Mother Jones, Salon and other liberal media outlets insist that Stone was in some way responsible for the riot in the US Capitol on January 6th despite the fact that Stone himself was not present on The Ellipse, did not march to the Capitol, and was not at the Capitol at any time on January 6th.

Then the ‘big boys” jumped in with ABC News, CNN and the New York Times all laying out their baseless, unconfirmed, contrived “guilt-by-association” implication that because the Oath Keepers organization provided voluntary security for Stone in Washington DC  (I can tell you firsthand, from the time I interviewed him in his Fort Lauderdale home, Stone is a constant target of threats, as are his wife and family) does not mean Stone knew beforehand, or is in any way involved with the assault on the US Capitol by an out of control mob on January 6th.

I have independently confirmed that other than a brief appearance at the front of the hotel, Stone never left the Willard Hotel property until 6 pm on the day of the riot.

These same “reporters” who insisted for two years that Stone was a Russian asset who would be charged with treason, espionage, conspiracy against the United States and other major crimes – despite lacking any evidence to prove these charges – now insist just as baselessly that Roger Stone was somehow involved in the unlawful acts of January 6th.

As a journalist who has an obligation to examine the facts, as I did in Stone’s case and trial, as well as today – these contrived attacks on Stone are, in my opinion, just as baseless as the earlier claim that Stone was a Russian 007.

There is no evidence that Stone had anything whatsoever to do with the insurrection on Capitol Hill.

These same media outlets play an aggressive game of guilt-by-association but provide no evidence of Stone’s involvement in the violations of law at the Capitol that day.

In fact, a screenshot of Stone’s Parler account shows that Stone denounced the violence and called for the prosecution of the perpetrators as soon as news broke concerning the misguided actions of those inside the Capitol.

These leftist media outlets, who completely ignored the election day disclosures which essentially proved that Stone’s prosecution was baseless, now hope to get Government investigators interested in a new, completely false narrative, once again.

Based on what I know, Roger Stone did nothing wrong and it appears that his pardon is driving his critics nuts.

Frank Parlato