Last week, during Roger Stone's interviewed with Anderson Cooper, Mr. Stone exhibited numerous nonverbal deception tells - one of these (a textbook classic) is discussed here.
When a person's rate of blinking and/or duration of blinking increases over their baseline (e.g., what is normal for them) - it's a reliable indicator of increased anxiety. Both of these parameters - the frequency and duration of blinking - dramatically increase whenever Stone is interviewed regarding certain subjects. We see this blinking behavior dynamic during this interview.
Yet we can nuance Stone's nonverbals much further.
Now watch the following segment of this interview.
ANDERSON COOPER (continuing at 7:17): So did you ever give anything to Julian Assange?
ROGER STONE: No, I did not ∆
ANDERSON COOPER: Okay. The, the email that you sent to Sam Nunberg, where said, ah, that you had dinner with Assange - you also said it on the phone to him, as we said in Randi's piece, as a way to end a lengthy, boring conversation - essentially - you said it was a joke. Of [stutter] I just - I was just wondering, of all the things to joke about - why that? How does that get you off the phone faster? If anything, I would think if somebody said to me, 'Oh, I'm having dinner with Julian Assange' - I would stay on the phone with them longer.
When a person gets some dust in their eye - or their eyes are suddenly dry - they will blink more frequently - and it often becomes prolonged. But when one blinks to moisten their eye, as the eyelids close - the eyebrows and forehead muscles move downward.
Yet on multiple occasions during this exchange and during this entire interview, when Roger Stone blinks - his eyebrows and forehead don't move in the same direction as his upper eyelids (downward as we would expect, to assist in the action of blinking) rather, they ELEVATE. His forehead and eyebrows move in the OPPOSITE direction as the eyelids. So, rather than facilitating the natural act of blinking - they are resisting it. Thus, we have two adjacent tissues moving away from each other. RED FLAG.
A particularly excellent example of this nonverbal tug-of-war tell occurs during 7:21 - 7:22, with the last word in Stone's sentence ("... not ...") and afterward (notated above by the ∆ symbol).
Summary: When confronted with giving anything to or having dinner with Julian Assange, Roger Stone's nonverbal behavior indicates, with very high probability, that he's lying. Specifically, we see both the rate and duration of his blinking dramatically increase during difficult interviews. Additionally, that Stone's eyebrows and forehead are elevating during these blinks (essentially fighting against the blinking) indicates an unnatural blink consistent with particularly heightened anxiety.
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