Roger Stone, whose sentence for lying to Congress and witness tampering during the Russia investigation was commuted by President Donald Trump, said that Trump should declare martial law and arrest the Clintons, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook of Apple and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity,” should the president lose re-election in November.
The comments came Thursday during a call to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones‘ Infowars show, citing largely debunked claims of potential voter fraud that could alter the results of the election.
Trump himself has toyed with the possibility of re-doing the election due to mail-in voting fraud.
“It’ll end up being a rigged election or they will never come out with an outcome,” Trump said. “They’ll have to do it again, and nobody wants that. And I don’t want that.”
However, numerous studies and fact checks have shown voter fraud is not as rampant as Trump and Stone are making it out to be.
The rate of voting fraud overall is between 0.00004% and 0.0009%, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice. And a database by Arizona State University found 491 cases of postal ballot fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes from 2000-2012.
Stone also told Jones that the Daily Beast could be shut down over its report about a coalition of leftwing activist groups that “has been meeting to game out what happens if Joe Biden doesn’t win by a landslide.”
The article was not an endorsement by the Daily Beast on the activities of the groups.
“If the Daily Beast is involved in provably seditious and illegal activities,” Stone said, “their entire staff can be taken into custody and their office can be shut down. They wanna play war, this is war.”
Stone also said Trump should consider “forming an election day operation using the FBI, federal marshals and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections [to results] and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.”
Trump told Fox News Saturday that he would “put down” any leftwing protests on, or after, Election Day.
“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that,” Trump said. “We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in and we, we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that, because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes.”
The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows a president to “call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion” in certain circumstances, according to Cornell Law School.
