ROGER STONE

Did New York GOP operative Roger Stone place a threatening phone call to the father of Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer? Allegedly, although Stone denies it. Stone's contract was terminated by Senate Republicans, who had their hands full trying to get to the bottom of Spitzer's "Trooper-gate" scandal. (The governor is accused of using questionable tactics and state resources to dig up dirt on GOP Senate leader Joe Bruno.) Below is a column published in Lower Hudson Online by a Stone critic.)

Stone's latest 'dirty trick' shouldn't have come as a surprise
(Original publication: August 25, 2007)

What, exactly, did Senate Republicans expect when they hired Roger Stone as a political consultant in June? Didn't someone caution them that the move was likely to blow up in their faces eventually? That's exactly what happened this week, when the one-time alleged Nixonian dirty-tricks practitioner was accused of making a threatening telephone call to Gov. Eliot Spitzer's 83-year-old father, Bernard, who suffers from Parkinson's disease.
And yes, this is the same Roger Stone who was fined by the state Lobbying Commission in 2000, along with real-estate developer Donald Trump, after it was discovered that Trump was secretly paying for newspaper ads trying to torpedo plans for gambling casinos in the Catskills.
The fact that the ads were paid for with his credit card undercut his denials that he had nothing to do with placing them.
This is also the man given credit for organizing a street demonstration that helped to shut down a recount of votes in Florida after the 2000 presidential election. And in 1996 he was forced to quit the Robert Dole presidential campaign after provocative photos of him and his wife appeared in "swinger" magazines.
Shortly after Stone was hired in June, Spitzer-bashing activity on the Web picked up, and Bruno seemed to take a more aggressive stance toward his political foe.
But then on Aug. 6, Stone apparently crossed the line.
The caller to Barnard Spitzer, whose words were captured in a voice mail, warned that he will be dragged to Albany and "forced to testify" about controversial loans he made to his son during his 1994 campaign for attorney general. The caller adds that "there is not a g - - - - - n thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-s - - - son can do about it."
The call was traced to Stone's apartment in Manhattan, and the voice sounded familiar to anyone who has heard him on radio or TV.
He said it wasn't him - that he was the victim of the "ultimate dirty trick" by Spitzer or his aides. He said someone must have recorded his voice at some other time, and then spliced the words together to deliver the message. And, oh yes, the building he lives in is owned by a Spitzer fund-raiser, so he could have easily gained access to it when he wasn't there. And, besides, he recalled, he attended a play the night in question. Unfortunately for Stone, a check of the schedule of the Broadway show he said he attended that night, "Frost/Nixon," revealed that the theater was dark that Monday.
And the landlord said Stone's claim that he broke into his apartment was nonsense.
The excuses apparently didn't wash with Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, who ended Stone's $20,000-a-month contract with the GOP Senate members the day after the phone-call tape became public.
But Bruno wouldn't answer when asked if he believed Stone's excuses, and insisted the scandal wouldn't distract him from trying to get Spitzer to answer "Troopergate"-related questions.
"Troopergate," the scandal involving Spitzer aides leaning on the State Police to try to get politically damaging information on Bruno, has been a godsend to the Republicans. After more than six months of mostly trying to fend off attacks from the state's hyper-aggressive chief executive, they finally have gotten the chance to attack him. Bruno, likely coached by Stone, has been aggressively criticizing the governor for not answering all questions raised by the scandal, and pointing out that polls show a majority of New Yorkers don't believe the governor's contention that he didn't know what his aides were up to.
But Bruno can no more ignore or wish away the Stone scandal than Spitzer has been able to banish Troopergate. Likewise, Democrats' attempts to equate Stone's apparent offenses with Troopergate won't wash with most people. If charges that he made the phone call are true, Stone was a political consultant run amok. That's different from top state officials using the State Police for political purposes. But there certainly is some symmetry here. Stone did a bad thing. Bruno says he didn't know about it and won't talk about it any more. At least two Spitzer aides also sinned. Spitzer says he didn't know about it and won't talk about it any more either.
In tandem, the scandals have managed to do what seemed unthinkable just seven months ago: It makes the Pataki administration, and its hyperpartisanship, cynicism and strained ethical climate, seem like the good old days.