Troy Smith
On January 8th, 2024, Mediaite, a news organization that is owned and operated by a man called Dan Abrams, published a sensationalized article which claimed that Trump advisor and political operative Roger Stone had plotted to assassinate two Democrat members of Congress four years ago.
Videos by Rare
In their initial article on the subject, reporter Diana Falzone claimed that she had obtained exclusive audio of Roger Stone calling for the assassination of Democrat Representatives Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler in October of 2020. Falzone claims that this audio was recorded by an anonymous source, and was alleged to have been taken out of a conversation between Stone and former New York Police Officer Sal Greco in a restaurant called Caffé Europa in Fort Lauderdale. Falzone produces no actual evidence that Greco was present for the alleged statement she claims Stone made, nor does she document the alleged location where she claims it took place. Falzone alleges that Stone said:
“It’s time to do it. Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.”
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/exclusive-roger-stone-spoke-with-cop-pal-about-assassinating-eric-swalwell-and-jerry-nadler/
Despite Falzone’s entire article hinging on the existence of the alleged recording of Stone, Mediaite failed to include the audio in their preliminary piece.
Immediately, Roger Stone responded to this article in the Daily Mail, telling the publication, “If there is such an audio, why don’t they post it? Why won’t they send it to me? If there is such an audio, it would have to be illegally obtained and if there is such an audio it would have to be an AI generated fraud since I never said any of the words attributed to me.”
Stone was vehement from the very beginning that he never said the words that Falzone charged him with saying, and that any clip that Mediaite ultimately produced would have to have been falsified with AI technology.
After Stone’s comments were recycled in many publications, Mediaite followed up their first sensationalized article, and expanded upon it. On January 12th, 2024, the same reporter, Diana Falzone, published another article about the subject entitled, “EXCLUSIVE: Here’s The Tape of Roger Stone Discussing Assassination of Democrats — Which He Denied Ever Doing“
This time, Falzone includes an audio clip of what she claims is Stone making the statement alleged in her first article. That audio can be heard in the Mediaite video, including Falzone. Find it HERE.
Additionally, Falzone freely admits within this video that the alleged audio of Stone has been ‘lightly edited’. What does ‘lightly edited’ mean? Why did the clip have to be edited at all? Then, Falzone denies on her own X feed that the audio was edited. So was it edited or wasn’t it?
Stone maintains that the clip has been falsified with AI. What kind of editing did Falzone conduct of this audio clip, and, more importantly, how do we know that it was not simply fabricated and sent to Mediaite in order to falsely and maliciously target Roger Stone (especially in the midst of a heated presidential election cycle and given Stone’s longtime association with President Donald Trump?)
In order to back up his claims, Roger Stone cited the conclusions of an AI-detection software that is readily available to the public. The results verified Stone’s claims, with the software determining that there is a 92.63% chance that the audio has been falsified with AI technology.
Stone posted the results of the forensic examination of the audio first posted by Mediate by Hitesh Ceon, a longtime sound technician who dissected the audio and posted his conclusions on X. Rare reached out to Hitesh Ceon.
Here is what Ceon told Rare: “I have spent a lot of time on vocal recording, vocal editing, melodyning, tuning vocals. And that has given me a pretty good ear for what sounds natural in terms of tonal flow, inflection, character and vocal qualities. I also do a lot of sound design and all kinds of audio processing, mixing and engineering… So when I heard the recording of Roger Stone, there was something that immediately struck me as unnatural about the tonal flow, especially on the part that starts just after ‘how brave the rest of them are’ on the recording. The background noise and the filtered/low quality sound of the recording is very useful for masking any very obvious flaws in the AI generated voice.
I decided to create a similar AI generated “recording” with Joe Biden’s voice, where I put similar background noise behind it, using a similarly, rather dull, frequency response and mono audio, like the “recording” of Roger Stone. Very easy to do and took me only around five minutes—demonstrating how easily a fake “recording” like this can be produced. I was looking into different AI solutions for detection of fake/AI generated voices, and then co-incidentally the website AI Voice Detector (http://aivoicedetector.com) contacted me on X and confirmed that their AI had concluded that there was a 92.6% chance that the Roger Stone “recording” was AI generated. AI audio has been developing very fast recently, and I think that is really going to make recordings (real recordings, not AI audio) irrelevant as evidence in a court of law. AI audio can already be used in quite convincing ways, like this fake recording of Roger Stone,” Ceon told Rare.
Stone himself also cited a second AI software detector, DeepFakeDetector.ai, which he utilized to examine the audio posted by Mediaite. In this case, the detection software said there was a 95.80 likelihood that the audio was AI-generated.
It appears that, in an attempt to potentially harm his credibility and reach in the midst of a presidential election, that Mediaite has published a glaringly false audio clip in search of a sensationalized story to generate advertising revenue, via clicks, on their site. It should be noted that Dan Abrams, who owns Mediaite, has a storied history of attacking Roger Stone. In 2020, when Stone’s sentence was reduced by a federal judge after federal prosecutors initially recommended he serve a 7-9 year prison sentence, Abrams said that the reduction represented a “dark, dark day for the Department of Justice.” Stone’s nearly three-year sentence would ultimately be commuted by President Donald Trump, who also issued Stone an unconditional presidential pardon on December 23rd, 2020.
On November 3rd, 2020, by order of a federal judge, the U.S. Department of Justice was ordered to release the long-redacted, long-hidden sections of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final Report, in which even Mueller could not sugarcoat the fact that he had found “no evidence” of Russian collusion or collaboration with WikiLeaks by Stone in the 2016 presidential election. Abrams has not commented on the DOJ release which strangely took place at midnight on November 3rd, 2020 – Election Day – the busiest media day of the year.
Mediaite has produced zero evidence to suggest that the audio clip they published is legitimate or authentic. At the same time, they shield the anonymous source, who they say provided the audio to Mediaite without commenting on whether the audio has been authenticated or whether the source claims that it was legally obtained.
There is no way of verifying that it is Stone speaking on the clip. An AI-detection software has clearly and overwhelmingly stated that the clip has serious authenticity issues and is most certainly a deep fake.
UPDATE: At the time of publication, several news outlets reported that the Capitol Police had opened an investigation into the alleged comments of Stone contained in the audio published by Mediaite. Interestingly, virtually none of these news outlets appear to have reached out to Stone for comment, a rather standard practice among real journalists. Reached by Rare to comment on these reports of a Capitol Police investigation, Stone said, “I never said the words attributed to me. I have published substantial proof that the audio published by Mediaite is an AI-generated deep fake and I am confident that any honest investigation will prove this.”
