O.J. Simpson told Roger Stone on Tuesday to “stop crying” about having his Florida home raided by FBI agents last month.
The disgraced football star-turned-felon briefly discussed Mr. Stone, President Trump’s embattled former election campaign adviser, during an impromptu interview recorded outside a Las Vegas shopping center, TMZ first reported.
“You know, I got raided by the FBI in Miami,” Simpson, 71, recalled in a video of the exchange shared by the website. “Thirty-something FBI agents. Five o’clock in Miami. I had more than dogs, I had kids there. They were a little traumatized … for nothing. … They were wrong. You never heard another word about it after the media made a big deal out of them being there. So the FBI can be wrong.”
“But to try to compare it to El Chapo and bin Laden? Hey man, bin Laden was carried out in a bag, not walked out in handcuffs. So, you know, man up, stop crying,” Simpson added.
A longtime Republican strategist and lobbyist, Mr. Stone, 66, was arrested during a predawn raid of his Fort Lauderdale home late last month and charged in a seven-count criminal indictment filed as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into matters related to the 2016 elections. He had pleaded not guilty to all charges and is currently free on bond.
In a flurry of media appearances in the days following his arrest and release Jan. 25, Mr. Stone repeatedly accused the FBI of using excessive force and “Gestapo tactics” by raiding his home rather than arranging his surrender. He said 29 agents were involved in the raid, and that authorities used “greater force than was used to take down bin Laden or El Chapo or Pablo Escobar.”
“I think I will decline to take either legal or public relations advice from OJ,” Mr. Stone told The Washington Times in response to Simpson’s remark.
Mr. Trump told The Daily Caller last week that the raid on Mr. Stone’s resident was a “very, very disappointing scene” and that he would “think about” asking the FBI to review its use of force.
Simpson was arrested and charged in 1994 with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, but was ultimately acquitted by a jury the following year. He was arrested again more than a decade later and subsequently convicted on charges related to robbing a Las Vegas memorabilia dealer in 2008. He was paroled in late 2017 after serving nine years in federal prison.
Mr. Stone is the 34th individual to be charged as a result of the special counsel’s investigation into the 2016 race. He is accused of lying to Congress about his conversations during the election involving WikiLeaks, a website that published stolen Democratic Party documents in the race’s final months, as well as obstruction of justice and witness tampering.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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