"What made Stone stand out in that tawdry scene was his utter shamelessness. He bragged about being a 19-year-old bit player in the Watergate scandal and about his friendship with , Joe McCarthy’s notorious henchman. Along with his partners, among them Trump adviser Paul Manafort, he engaged in campaign tactics no one else would admit to and took lobbying clients no one else would represent, including murderous foreign dictators. ...Stone was less power player than con artist. ...[H]e was mostly shaking down his clients, who paid him a lot of money based on the largely false impression that he had real influence. He was a bluffer... and a leaker, ratting out his allies in pursuit of his own agenda. ..He would emerge every so often at the center of some bizarre gambit or scandal... publishing preposterous conspiracy books... giving interviews in Miami sex clubs, he was the definition of a marginal political figure. .. For many years, Stone was a lobbyist for Trump’s casino business. He was also the perennial leader of the “Draft Trump” campaign—the person who encouraged Trump’s birther obsession and finally got Trump to run this year. ...[H]e remains a Trump surrogate and dirt-dealer, most recently smearing Khizr Khan as a terrorist and predicting a “bloodbath” if the Democrats try to “steal” the election. Thirty years ago, I called him the state-of-the-art political sleazeball. And I’ve got to hand it to him—in the years since, no one has come close..."