Roger Stone knocks Barbara Bush: ‘Her attack on me from beyond the grave required an answer’

Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former adviser of President Trump, on Thursday accused the late First Lady Barbara Bush of lying about his work for George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in a column for The Spectator.

In the column, Stone defended comments he made last week defending Trump’s criticism of Barbara Bush, saying “she’s dead and [Trump] is the president.”

{mosads}“I always found Barbara to be vindictive, inebriated, self-important and rude. Her attack on me from beyond the grave required an answer,” he wrote. “I pointed out that, while she had set a countdown clock for the end of Trump’s presidency, she had died and Trump was still president.”

Stone’s claim that Bush attacked him “from beyond the grave” stems from a recent USA Today report on the late first lady’s diaries. 

Stone said Bush wrongly wrote in her diary that she had him fired from her husband’s 1988 presidential campaign. He said he heard about the claim on MSNBC 

“I was never hired for H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign and never wanted to be,” Stone wrote.

Stone also took credit for the media strategy that led to Bush winning California in the election.

“After the election, I got a nice hand-written note from then Vice President George H.W. Bush thanking me for my effort,” Stone wrote. “I guess he didn’t show it to Barbara.”

Stone has also leveled a series of attacks on Bush via his Instagram account in recent weeks, claiming she “once berated me in a drunken tirade” after Ronald Reagan defeated George H.W. Bush in the New York and New Jersey Republican primaries.

View this post on Instagram

Barbara Bush / too “sick” to attend Nancy Reagan’s funeral but not too sick to campaign for her smug, entitled low energy son Jeb in New Hampshire the next day. She once berated me in a drunken tirade after the campaign I managed for Ronald Reagan beat her husband in the New York and New Jersey Republican primaries and took half the delegates in Connecticut. She had a “countdown clock” for @realdonaldtrump presidency ? Well she’s dead and he’s president- who won that one? Nasty, rude, vindictive, entitled , self-important – that’s the woman I had several unpleasant encounters with.#stonecoldtruth #maga

A post shared by Roger Stone (@rogerjstonejr) on Apr 5, 2019 at 7:16am PDT

Stone’s initial comments were prompted by Trump’s interview with the Washington Times in which he said Bush was entitled to be “nasty” to him, saying “look what I did to her sons.”

In “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of a Dynasty,” her recent biography of Bush, USA Today journalist Susan Page writes that Bush referred to Trump as a “symbol of greed” and blamed him for a heart attack she suffered.

Stone was indicted in January in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s now-concluded investigation.