Roger Stone lashes out in Florida testimony

Roger Stone looked like a man on edge, under extreme stress and struggling to contain pent-up fury.

The GOP provocateur was just days away from finding out his fate from a criminal case that drew nationwide attention, that the president was openly complaining about. And to the world, Stone was largely silent, mostly gagged by the judge who handled his federal trial.

But in a South Florida court reporter’s office in mid-February, Stone was talking — a lot, testifying in a little-noticed deposition for a slate of a civil suits. He seemed largely unconcerned with maintaining the dapper, serene image he cultivated over the last year sweeping in and out of federal court in Washington, D.C., fighting charges he lied to investigators about his actions related to Russia’s 2016 election hack.

With no judge on hand, Stone was free to tear into his enemies as he did in an earlier era. He could be combative and hard-charging if he wanted. He could even spout vulgarities as he spared with his inquisitor.

And he did just that.

In five-and-a-half hours of video recorded over two days, Stone’s hands shake, he bares his teeth, his lips twitch and he repeatedly loses his temper in the face of goading from conservative lawyer Larry Klayman, who has several libel suits pending against Stone and his associates.

“If you want to keep insulting me, this will be over and you can run back to the judge like a little bitch,” Stone said during one particularly heated exchange.

“Did you just call me a bitch?” Klayman asked.

“You’re acting like one. ... You don’t have anything, my friend. You got nothing,” Stone replied, slapping his hand on the table for emphasis.

The heated rhetoric evoked Stone's much more high-profile trial in D.C. Stone’s language was a central topic at that trial as lawyers argued over whether Stone had intimidated a witness with barbed messages. The jury ultimately found him guilty on that charge, as well as six other felony counts.

Last week, the judge sentenced Stone to over three years in prison, in part because of his threatening language. President Donald Trump excoriated the decision and declared the whole trial was a miscarriage of justice, the product of a biased jury and judge.

Days before that sentencing, Stone had been ordered by Florida state court judge, Carol-Lisa Phillips, to sit for questioning after Klayman raised concerns that delaying the session could have led to Stone being sent away to prison before he could be deposed. He ended up testifying over two days, Feb. 12 and 13.

In all, Klayman referenced six different lawsuits at the start of the deposition, including a suit claiming that Stone falsely said Klayman had “never won a courtroom victory in his life,” that “he could be the single worst lawyer in America,” and that his IQ is below 70.

Clearly, both men aren’t fond of the other.

“Let’s go,” Stone said at one point, seeming to gesture at Klayman to come at him. “I don’t have to be badgered by this asshole.”

Stone made it only about an hour into the session before standing up, throwing down the microphone in anger, and telling Klayman: “F--- you!”

On several occasions, Stone’s mild-mannered attorney Robert Buschel stepped in to urge his client to “calm down.”

Stone’s penchant for indelicate language was a topic throughout his high-profile D.C. trial. Much of the dispute surrounding his sentencing length focused on the interpretation of one of his most pointed text messages to another Russia probe witness who was urging cooperation with investigators: “Lets get it on. Prepare to die cocksucker.”

Prosecutors said such threats triggered a higher sentencing guidelines range for cases involving violence or threats of violence, proposing seven to nine years behind bars. Defense lawyers said the comments were colorful bluster. Trump said the proposal was grossly unfair. Attorney General William Barr then overruled his prosecutors, ordering a lower sentencing request. His prosecutors quit in an apparent protest.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately agreed that the tougher guideline applied, but dialed back his sentence given the doubts about Stone’s intent.

The sight of Stone being raked over the coals by Klayman is sure to bring joy, or at least a degree of schadenfreude, to Democrats who recall being Klayman’s targets during the 1990s when the conservative lawyer used his watchdog group, Judicial Watch, to harangue members of the Clinton administration.

Many Clinton aides ran up thousands of dollars in legal bills responding to dozens of suits Klayman filed over a series of alleged scandals, including Travelgate, Filegate and the allocation of trade mission seats to Democratic donors.

Klayman’s questioning of Clinton administration officials at lengthy depositions was at times confrontational and at other times bizarre. No one would dispute it was legendary. The hit NBC series “West Wing” even created a fictional character based on Klayman’s shenanigans.

Harold Ickes, the deputy White House chief of staff, reportedly got asked about his cats. George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, fielded questions about his use of a pen on the set of the ABC News program he now hosts, “This Week.” After Klayman queried Stephanopoulos about the contents of a course he was teaching at Columbia University, the political strategist and his attorney walked out of the deposition, in a scene reminiscent of several from the Stone videos.

Klayman’s aggressive use of the legal system for political ends seems like the kind of tactic Stone, known for his bare-kunckled brand of politics, might have eagerly endorsed before he became an unwitting target.

How big a fan Stone was of Klayman’s anti-Clinton crusades is unclear, but the two men did work together briefly in 2003 and 2004 as Klayman mounted a longshot bid for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat. The brief collaboration doesn’t seem to have gone well.

During the deposition earlier this month, Stone complained that Klayman repeatedly lied to him about his ability to raise money for that race.

That prompted Klayman to shoot back: “Money is all that’s important to you, right?”

“Money is important in terms of getting you elected to the Senate, yes,” replied Stone.

“And it’s important to fill your pockets,” Klayman countered.

“You never paid me a dime,” Stone said.

While most of the deposition evoked schoolyard combat and Stone generally refused to discuss matters related to his criminal trial, Klayman did elicit one claim that Stone didn't make during his D.C. trial, at which he declined to testify. In the sworn questioning in the civil cases, Stone denied he ever talked to then-candidate Trump about WikiLeaks and its publication of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton supporters and the Democratic National Committee.

“I’ve never spoken to him about WikiLeaks,” Stone said. He added of his conversations with Trump: “None of them regard WikiLeaks. There was no evidence of that presented during the trial. It was an assertion by the government, but that does not make it true.”

Many of the most heated exchanges during the deposition came as the two combatants probed what they perceived as each other’s chief weaknesses.

Klayman repeatedly needled Stone over the guilty verdict in his D.C. trial, which stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The conservative lawyer also taunted Stone over an episode in 1996 when the National Enquirer got a hold of a swingers’ magazine that appeared to contain an ad taken out by Stone. That prompted Stone’s firing from Sen. Bob Dole’s presidential campaign.

Stone, in turn, regularly invoked Klayman’s long history of run-ins with judges and bar discipline authorities.

In 1997, a federal judge in Manhattan banished Klayman after finding the attorney conducted “abusive and obnoxious” questioning, gratuitously invoked the judge’s Chinese origins and pursued “preposterous” arguments.

In 2011, Klayman was formally reprimanded in Florida for taking a woman’s retainer fee and failing to return some of the payment after she demanded it back. According to a consent judgment filed with the Florida Supreme Court, Klayman agreed to repay a small portion of the retainer, said financial distress precluded him from making the payments on time and eventually provided the agreed refund.

Two bar discipline cases are currently pending against Klayman in Washington, D.C. In one, a hearing committee recommended a 90-day suspension over conflict-of-interest claims involving suits against his former employer, Judicial Watch. In the other, a panel urged that Klayman be suspended from practicing law for nearly three years over his conduct towards a female client who spurned his romantic advances. Klayman is fighting the charges and contends he is the victim of a political vendetta.

At one point during the Fort Lauderdale deposition, Stone invoked an even more disturbing episode in Klayman’s past: a magistrate handling a custody dispute a decade ago found that Klayman engaged in “grossly inappropriate” touching of his own children. Klayman denied any sexual contact with the children and submitted a lie detector test he said backed up his claim.

Despite the alarming allegations Stone leveled at him, Klayman posted the full-length videos of the deposition online. He told POLITICO the recordings are unedited.

“He showed his true colors,” Klayman said of Stone. “A lot of the things he said are false.”

Klayman specifically denied claims of sexual harassment and molestation. “Those are false,” he said. “I didn’t sexually harass anybody. ... I’ve never been found to have molested anybody.”

Asked about the pending bar complaints, Klayman said: “There’s been no final decision and they’re on appeal. ... I’m confident of ultimately succeeding.”

Buschel, a lawyer for Stone, declined to comment on the contentious exchange.

In an email, Stone declined to comment on the deposition, instead attacking POLITICO's credibility.

"While commenting on these frivolous and baseless civil suits would not fall under my current gag order I have a firm policy of only responding to inquiries from legitimate news organizations of which POLITICO is no longer one," he wrote.

A look back at Klayman’s professional career indicates Stone’s claim that Klayman hadn’t ever won a case is an overstatement. But it is fair to say that in many cases winning seems to have taken a back seat to using the legal process to inflict maximum pain on his adversaries.

His highest-profile courtroom triumph proved to be short-lived. In 2013, a federal judge in Washington, acting on a suit brought by Klayman, ruled that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of details about American's telephone calls was likely unconstitutional.

The judge’s preliminary injunction against the controversial surveillance program triggered shock waves across Washington, but that order was never enforced and was ultimately overturned by an appeals court in 2015. Congress also passed a law that restructured the program and effectively mooted the lawsuit.

After leaving Judicial Watch in 2003, Klayman founded a new organization: Freedom Watch. He borrowed the name from a thinly-fictionalized version of Judicial Watch immortalized in “The West Wing.”

In the heated deposition that stretched over two days, the real-world characters Stone and Klayman duked it out over which of them would be felled first by the legal system.

After Stone said he was looking forward to turning the tables and deposing Klayman in the pending suits, Klayman shot back: “You may be in prison by then.”

“You’ll be disbarred by then,” Stone replied.

“They’ll let you out,” Klayman offered.

That prompted Stone to declare confidently: “The clock’s ticking faster on you than me, pal.”