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Roger Stone has called Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly a traitor who deserves to die for questioning the president.
On Thursday, Stone took to X to accuse the Navy veteran, former astronaut, and current Democratic Senator of treason and called for his execution. The crime? Questioning Trump’s crypto connections.
Last week, Kelly co-sponsored the End Crypto Corruption Act, a Senate bill that seeks to “end crypto corruption” by banning the president, vice president, and their immediate families from “issuing, endorsing, or sponsoring crypto assets.”
The bill specifically names meme coins, which would present an issue for the president, whose controversial meme coin, $TRUMP sends about 75 percent of its revenue to his family.
Kelly took direct shots at Trump while publicizing the bill, writing in a press release, “Trump is cashing in on his presidency and making millions from his own crypto coins—this is corruption in broad daylight.”
The press release also pointed out that the Trump family’s net worth has increased by $2.9 billion as a result of his crypto investments, which Kelly says now make up nearly 40 percent of his wealth.
Stone’s response to the bill was, in a word, strong. On Thursday, the Trump adviser quote-tweeted Kelly’s post about the bill, writing that Kelly was “cashing in on his US Senate seat as a partner in a Chinese communist company that makes surveillance balloons.” For this, Stone says Kelly should be “charged with treason and if convicted executed.”
For context, Kelly co-founded the company World View Enterprises in 2012, which originated in the space tourism sector before pivoting to defense contracting, and now sells aerial surveillance balloons to both government and private agencies. World View received around $3 million in investment funding from Tencent, a Chinese tech company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. World View no longer receives funding from Tencent, and Kelly left the company in 2019, before his Senate run.
Though Kelly still owns stock in World View through a blind trust, the company has said he no longer has any “access, interest, or control.” World View has also said that Tencent has “zero access, zero input, and zero control,” and that accepting funding in the first place was a “mistake.”
Kelly’s past involvement with World View became a target for Republican opponents last year, when he was rumored to be a strong contender for the VP nomination in the Harris campaign. While World View has denied involvement with the Chinese spy balloon shot down over the U.S. in 2023, the incident did draw attention to Kelly’s ties to the company, as aerial surveillance balloons are now its primary product.
This is not the first time that one of Trump’s MAGA cronies has accused the 25-year Navy veteran of being a traitor against the United States, though Stone’s reasoning is novel. In March, Elon Musk called the Arizona Senator a traitor for visiting Ukraine. If you’re keeping track, that makes two unelected Trump officials who have called for Kelly to be tried for treason for disagreeing with the president.
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