The StoneZONE with Roger Stone

00:00:00.000 And we're back in the stone zone. Joining me now, retired Colonel Rob Maness. Rob Maness has a

00:00:07.820 lifelong record of providing dedicated service to our country. He made the decision as a 17-year-old

00:00:14.740 high school senior to enlist in the United States Air Force and has served in uniform as the country

00:00:20.760 faced multiple crises around the world. He worked his way up from the enlisted ranks to be a full

00:00:27.600 colonel and retired from active duty in 2011, ending his military service of more than 32 years.

00:00:34.580 Now, we only have about 15 minutes in this segment. If I read his entire biography and all the service

00:00:41.880 he has rendered to this country, well, we'd use the whole segment and we wouldn't get to talk to

00:00:46.740 Colonel Maness. So I'm going to skip through this other than to say that Rob Maness is one of the

00:00:52.640 gentlemen that I look to for analysis of any geopolitical or geo-military question. Someone

00:01:00.500 who has my enormous respect. He is, as a private citizen, also an outspoken supporter of President

00:01:07.880 Donald Trump and his America First agenda. And it is a great honor to have him today in the stone zone.

00:01:15.080 Uh, Colonel Maness, welcome. Hey, Roger. Thanks for having me. So, uh, in our earlier segment,

00:01:24.120 we focused on the strategic, uh, and commercial importance of the Panama Canal. Now, uh, I worked

00:01:31.380 in three presidential campaigns, uh, on the staff of Ronald Reagan in 1976 when he challenged Gerald

00:01:39.220 Ford for the Republican nomination. Uh, I was the national director of youth for Reagan, uh, working

00:01:47.000 directly for Senator Paul Laxalt, the national chairman of our campaign. Uh, in 1980, when I was

00:01:53.860 the Northeastern regional director for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, handling New York,

00:01:59.560 New Jersey, and Connecticut. Uh, and then in 1984, uh, when I handled those three states, uh, plus all the

00:02:08.380 states in New England, all the way to the Canadian border. Plus, uh, at the recommendation of President

00:02:14.440 Nixon, uh, the Reagan campaign also assigned me Ohio on the theory that if you took one large state

00:02:22.060 and you kept it out of, uh, Walter Mondale's clutches, uh, that he could not possibly win.

00:02:30.600 Remember it very well. Uh, Nixon told Reagan, assign Ohio to stone. He said, stone's an animal.

00:02:37.880 Uh, I always considered that a compliment, but Ronald Reagan was right when he warned us

00:02:43.680 that this day would come. Uh, tell us what's going on today in Panama and about the strategic

00:02:50.160 importance of the canal and the canal zone. Well, from a national security perspective,

00:02:56.700 uh, uh, you know, I think most people know, but especially those of us that practice that as a

00:03:02.240 profession, that it's the largest choke point, uh, for Navy traffic, uh, U S Navy, uh, international

00:03:09.320 Navy traffic in the world. Uh, you know, and, uh, we're, we're risking lives to protect the

00:03:15.300 international traffic and the dead in the Red Sea, uh, because this is a critically important

00:03:22.060 shipping lane. The Panama Canal is probably to the United States a hundred times more important

00:03:27.460 than that. Uh, uh, uh, not, but not, but it goes way beyond just Navy traffic. Uh, you know, China

00:03:34.040 controls the companies at each end of the canal, the port companies at this point, and every company

00:03:40.920 that's Chinese, uh, has a part of it, if not wholly owned by the communist Chinese party or the people's

00:03:47.180 liberation army and Navy. Uh, so it's extremely important that, uh, we get control of that back.

00:03:54.800 Uh, and, uh, I think the president had lined up, uh, president Trump had lined up to have a company,

00:04:00.060 uh, buy those ports. Uh, but China's, uh, uh, obviously pushing back against that deal,

00:04:05.960 but you know what else is going on? Uh, economically, uh, I don't know if you guys talked about this in

00:04:11.660 your last segment, but, uh, we're trying to expand our liquefied natural gas LNG marketing,

00:04:18.420 uh, out to new markets. And the Panama Canal is crucial to that because the LNG,

00:04:24.740 the exporter capability in the United States, it's on the Gulf coast and Louisiana and places like

00:04:31.800 that. Uh, so that canal, uh, has to be able to carry that type of energy type product, uh, for us

00:04:40.000 so that we can easily get through there, get to the, uh, to the Pacific theater of operations and

00:04:46.020 deliver that, uh, to potentially new customers. So, uh, it's very much, uh, tied together from a

00:04:53.160 national security and an economic security perspective. Uh, and obviously with everything

00:04:58.520 that's going on in the world, the more that we can have direct control over from a trade perspective,

00:05:04.700 the better off our country is going to be. And I think the president's done the exact right thing

00:05:09.360 with the tariff issue. Uh, I was pleased to see the liberation day yesterday. I still have a smile

00:05:15.420 on my face with that because, uh, because it puts the manufacturing capability is going to come back

00:05:22.040 to the United States, uh, that we have been offshoring for decades now. And it's made us weak.

00:05:28.800 You know, China controls 90% of the, uh, precursor materials for antibiotics. Uh, we can't make

00:05:35.280 antibiotics on our own without the Chinese communist party. So we have to bring that type of manufacturing

00:05:40.420 back, but we also need to come out for a free flow of our goods, especially with this LNG exporting

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00:06:18.900 code pod. Uh, as someone who served his country at the highest levels of our military, I have to ask

00:06:26.920 you about what has become known as signal gate. Now I'm amused to see, uh, senators, uh, like, uh, Mark

00:06:37.000 Warner of Virginia, who I went back and looked, uh, he had no problem whatsoever when Robert Malley,

00:06:44.600 a high level Biden state department official was sharing classified documents with the Iranians.

00:06:51.560 Uh, he actually never even got fired. They just, they just suspended his security clearance. Uh, they

00:06:57.560 also left, let his Confederates who were involved, uh, in the, in the, uh, uh, transfer of these classified

00:07:04.760 documents to Iran, uh, uh, continue in their positions, uh, at state. He never said a word, uh,

00:07:11.720 when Hillary Clinton got caught sending 30 plus thousand classified documents over an illegal

00:07:18.040 computer server located in her bathroom. Once again, not a peep from Mark Warner, but now he's in a

00:07:27.240 lather, uh, uh, uh, about, uh, a signal, uh, exchange in which based on what I've seen, no classified

00:07:35.720 information was exposed. Give us your take on, uh, on a signal gate, if you will.

00:07:43.960 Uh, well, let's talk about the information itself. There's been a lot of, uh, uh, uh, angst about that

00:07:49.960 and lathering up, as you said, uh, with Senator Warner, uh, and his ilk over that information.

00:07:56.600 None of that information was classified, not one iota of it. Uh, there were not enough specifics

00:08:04.440 in that thread, uh, for anything to be classified, but, but even if Secretary Hague said, uh, and that's

00:08:10.680 the information that most people are talking about is what he put into the chat or his phone did,

00:08:14.840 uh, is, uh, put in. He is the original classifying authority on there, just like President Trump is

00:08:21.960 the overall original classifying authority for every single piece of classified. Uh, uh, Secretary

00:08:27.240 Hague said the defense secretary is the OCA for that information. And even if it had been classified,

00:08:33.640 if he chose to put that in there, it's declassified, uh, from that perspective. So now let's talk about

00:08:39.720 signal, uh, itself. It's an end-to-end encrypted chat. And this is one of the areas that I'm

00:08:45.000 concerned about is that the national security team and national security council team, especially

00:08:49.160 under Mike Walts, they got to get that, that stuff together. They have to investigate the,

00:08:53.800 how that reporter Goldberg from the Atlantic, I mean, the worst, uh, fake news guy, Russiagate,

00:09:01.800 all of it, the suckers and losers lie, all of that, that they tried to use to hurt President Trump

00:09:07.400 and the team, uh, was due to that one guy. So that's a major issue. And I'm not seeing anything

00:09:13.000 yet that makes me satisfied that that team is cleaned up, uh, uh, internally and that they don't

00:09:18.520 have people that have access to their information threads, like the signal chat, uh, that shouldn't

00:09:23.800 have access to it. So Walts has got to get that fixed. Now let's talk about the senators, because you

00:09:28.600 didn't mention the Republican senator that has also joined in with Warner and is demanding a DOD

00:09:34.040 inspector general investigation of Hegseth, uh, over the signal thing. Uh, you know,

00:09:38.840 my Senator Roger Wicker, I agree with him on a lot of things like increasing ship building and,

00:09:43.400 uh, get returning to peace through strength instead of being in endless war policies when

00:09:48.280 it comes to China. But I disagree with him on a lot too. On this, I disagree with him. It's

00:09:53.640 absolutely unnecessary. Number one, because the national security council is the team that set that

00:09:59.560 chat up. It wasn't the department of defense, uh, so there is no reason whatsoever to investigate

00:10:06.040 secretary Hegseth or the department of defense over that particular issue. Look, I'm all for

00:10:11.320 investigating the government. I don't trust hardly anybody in the government, but I do trust president

00:10:16.040 Trump's appointees, uh, uh, and that they need the maximum flexibility, uh, possible so we can move

00:10:22.680 forward and get the president's policies that we all voted for in place and throttled up so that we're,

00:10:29.160 they're running, uh, uh, appropriately and calling for investigations when it's not necessary.

00:10:34.920 It's just the wrong thing to do. Yeah, I agree with that. This is beginning to look to me like an

00:10:40.600 effort to get, uh, Hegseth to oust Hegseth. Uh, that's because he was an outside the box

00:10:48.680 anti-establishment choice. Uh, he's the right choice. I strongly supported the president's nominee. Uh,

00:10:55.560 when I defended this, uh, uh, uh, uh, on a show with Chris Cuomo, uh, it was amazing the way they

00:11:02.920 twisted what I said. See, I don't trust any online, uh, service encrypted or unencrypted. I frankly

00:11:10.920 think they're all vulnerable to being, uh, hacked. They're all vulnerable to being monitored. So I always

00:11:17.320 operate on the assumption that anything you put in writing online, you should have seen that someone

00:11:22.200 else is going to have the ability to see it. So don't say stupid things online. That's kind of my

00:11:27.640 attitude. Uh, I was defending these people, but if you read their story, it makes it appear like

00:11:32.760 that I was criticizing them, which I was not. Uh, but it, the Democrats have spun this up

00:11:40.120 because frankly, they don't have anything else to talk about. It was interesting to see

00:11:45.240 Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, uh, breaking the previously held, uh, filibuster

00:11:51.880 record held by, uh, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes,

00:12:00.520 uh, without a bathroom break, I might add, uh, uh, back in 1957. Cory Booker has now broken that record.

00:12:10.520 He spoke for slightly longer, but strangely enough, with all that time, he never explained why when

00:12:17.960 he was the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, he authorized the New York city, the New York, Newark city water

00:12:24.760 authority known as watershed to pay $200,000 to his law firm, which he then put in his pocket.

00:12:33.000 And when confronted by reporters, he said, uh, that he didn't vote for that yet. Uh, if you,

00:12:39.320 and they're hard to find, but when I found the actual formal minutes of the meeting, he was not

00:12:45.080 only in the chair, but he also voted for the disbursement. Then he came up with three different

00:12:51.240 explanations as to why he got that money. Once he said it had no connection, uh, to watershed,

00:12:57.640 that it was the buyout of his, uh, uh, and his, uh, uh, portion of the law firm. Another point,

00:13:05.240 he said it was deferred compensation. I'll tell you what it was. It was graft. That's what it was.

00:13:11.000 And he's never been, never answered that question. I actually wrote a biography on him. It's called

00:13:17.080 Spartacus, the real Cory Booker story. It's now out of print, but I might bring it back to tell you the

00:13:23.240 truth. Uh, it may be time to put it back in truth. By the way, what you saw there was the launch of

00:13:29.080 Cory Booker's presidential campaign, uh, because he sees himself as a presidential candidate. By the

00:13:36.440 way, he is the Senator from Greenwich village. He doesn't even live in New Jersey. Uh,

00:13:44.920 sorry. I hope to get a copy of that book, sir. Uh, I'm going to, I got to pull it out of mothballs.

00:13:49.720 I, I published it when he was running for president, but his campaign was such a flop.

00:13:54.360 Uh, didn't sell many copies, but if he's going to run again, I may have to republish it again.

00:13:59.720 When we come back, I'm going to ask a Colonel Manus about, uh, Cuba and the fact that, um,

00:14:06.200 the Chinese have a very sophisticated spy station set up in Cuba. But I also want to know,

00:14:13.560 do they have missiles? And if they have missiles, are they offensive missiles or defensive missiles?

00:14:19.880 And do they pose the same danger that Russian missiles, uh, pose to this nation in 1962 when

00:14:28.440 the Russians put them in Cuba? We'll be right back with Colonel Rob Manus right here in the stone

00:14:33.960 zone. So don't go away. And we're back with Colonel Rob Manus, a retired Colonel Manus led numerous

00:14:41.400 combat operations during his military service, including as a bomb squadron commander in operation

00:14:48.120 enduring freedom and operation Iraqi freedom. Colonel Manus also served as an enlisted bomb disposal

00:14:55.240 technician in three assignments, countering terrorism before being commissioned and selected

00:15:01.240 for flight training. Uh, he is a man who has put his life on the line for his country, and we are

00:15:07.640 honored to have him with us today. I want to focus on that question, uh, regarding Cuba that I raised

00:15:14.120 before the break. Uh, my wife is a Cuban American. Uh, she is one of those who fled the Castro regime,

00:15:22.040 her family, uh, and she as a child. Uh, and, uh, therefore I have a special interest in the, the, uh, uh,

00:15:30.520 the regime 90 miles off of our shore. Uh, Cuba was a great danger to the United States. Then with the fall of the

00:15:40.360 the, uh, iron curtain, uh, and the collapse really of the Russian economy, when they could no longer

00:15:45.640 subsidize, uh, their comrades, uh, in Cuba, uh, they became less of a danger to us. Uh, but now they seem

00:15:54.280 to have been scooped up by the Chinese. Uh, it is indisputable that Joe Biden's administration knew

00:16:00.120 they had a sophisticated spying operation set up on the Cuban island, uh, about which he did nothing.

00:16:06.680 And some military experts tell me that they also have missiles, uh, and that all those missiles,

00:16:12.680 although those missiles may be defensive with a very slight technological fix, they could be

00:16:18.120 offensive missiles. What is the situation going on today, uh, between us and Cuba?

00:16:25.240 Well, I think, uh, with President Trump coming into office, uh, you're gonna see the view of the

00:16:32.520 United States from a, an official perspective change back to one of questioning why are, uh,

00:16:40.600 why are the Chinese armed forces allowed to have bases on the island? Uh, why are they being allowed

00:16:48.760 to run these surveillance operations, uh, on the island? They're so close. As you reminded us, you

00:16:56.440 know, it's 90 miles away. Uh, so electronic surveillance, uh, capability that we have today,

00:17:02.280 uh, is, uh, much more effective than it would have been even 10 years ago. Uh, not just that, but, uh,

00:17:10.040 there are, uh, cable lines that they give them access to the digital networks inside the United States

00:17:17.560 that they are able to get access to, uh, being in such close proximity and uncontrolled. Uh, and I think,

00:17:24.280 uh, and I hope that, uh, we're going to see the national security team, uh, start putting pressure

00:17:30.120 on the Cuban government again to get those forces removed. Uh, uh, but, uh, you know, one of the,

00:17:37.640 one of the conflicting issues, though, is the Russia-Ukraine war, Roger, and as the president tries to stop

00:17:44.120 the killing over there, uh, and, uh, uh, I wish it could happen tomorrow, uh, because that's going to be

00:17:51.480 a conflicting issue, uh, when every time we talk about China being 90 miles away, uh, the other

00:17:58.600 side gets to talk about what we're letting, uh, you know, uh, Russia, expecting Russia to allow, uh,

00:18:05.960 NATO to be right up against its border. And so that kind of debate, uh, will get generated out of that.

00:18:12.120 But, uh, knowing President Trump, he'll ignore that and push through, uh, to take care of the

00:18:17.240 interests of the United States of America in both of those situations. And, uh, I'm so glad

00:18:22.040 that he's in office because we're going to stop. We're going to get the killing stopped, uh, in

00:18:26.440 Europe, uh, and get that situation resolved. Yeah. I don't think it's an illegitimate argument,

00:18:31.240 by the way, uh, we signed, uh, the Budapest memorandum in which we promised when the Russians

00:18:36.840 united East and West Germany, or they allowed us to have it reunited. We agreed not to push Ukraine

00:18:43.080 into NATO, which means not to mount NATO missiles on the ground in NATO aimed at Russia. We reaffirmed

00:18:49.160 that in the Minsk Accords. We are in violation. Putin has made it abundantly clear, uh, that that

00:18:55.320 was his line in the sand. No, I'm not pro Putin. I have many of my own family relatives mowed down

00:19:01.480 by Russian tanks in Budapest in 1956. Uh, so they'll, they'll say, oh, Roger Stone's a rollover for

00:19:07.480 Putin. He's a pro Russian. No, not, not, not even an iota. Uh, but I understand, uh, why the

00:19:14.440 Russians might not want, uh, intercontinental ballistic missiles on their border pointed at

00:19:22.360 the nation. All right. We're out of time. I want to thank my special guest, retired Colonel Rob Maness.

00:19:27.960 He has a killer, uh, uh, sub stack that you might want to check out. Uh, but, uh, I appreciate your

00:19:34.280 being with us, Colonel, and I appreciate your bringing your real world defense and national

00:19:40.760 security expertise to my listeners here in the stone zone. My friend, thank you for being with us

00:19:46.520 and God bless you. Thank you, sir. And I hope to get you on the show to spend an hour with me talking

00:19:51.880 about who killed John F. Kennedy, uh, now that all these documents have been released. I would be

00:19:57.160 most honored to do so. Uh, for you out there listening to the stone zone, I want to thank you

00:20:03.240 as well until we meet again. God bless you and God speed and yes, God bless America.

Col. Rob Maness ｜ 04-03-25

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