Voters have rejected Jon Stone, a former Trump campaign chair, three times since his police records went public. He’s running again anyway as county GOP chair, with an endorsement Kelly Ayotte has never taken back.
Jon Stone, the former Claremont police officer whose disciplinary records revealed threats to murder his police chief and carry out a mass shooting at the city’s police station, is on the Republican primary ballot this September for his old seat in the New Hampshire House.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte, now seeking a second term, has never renounced his support, even as voters have rejected Stone three times in three years.
He lost his Claremont City Council seat in 2023, lost his House seat in 2024 months after the New Hampshire Supreme Court ordered the release of internal affairs records he had fought for years to keep sealed, and last November lost a council comeback bid nearly 2-to-1, 457–257.
None of it has pushed him out of Republican politics.
Stone now chairs the Sullivan County Republican Committee, the county party apparatus that will spend this fall working to re-elect Ayotte, and he is one of three Republicans competing for two nominations in Sullivan District 8, alongside Catherine Peschke and Sebastian Zyzdorf.
Democratic incumbent Hope Damon, who publicly condemned Stone in 2024, is running for re-election alongside Democrat Samuel Deering.
The records, released in April 2024 after Stone lost at the state Supreme Court, detail how Stone, while a Claremont officer in the early 2000s, talked openly about killing then-Police Chief Alex Scott, sexually assaulting Scott’s wife and children, and staging a mass shooting at the police station.
The threats came after the department suspended Stone for an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old high school student.
Stone was the subject of at least 14 internal affairs investigations during his time with the department, and his misconduct later led prosecutors to drop multiple drug cases tied to his police work, according to reporting by InDepthNH.
Stone’s record did not end in Claremont. In 2021, he was fired from his job as a corrections officer in Vermont for harassing and intimidating coworkers with racist, sexist, and homophobic insults.
None of it stopped Ayotte from embracing him.
Stone was an early endorser of Ayotte’s 2024 campaign for governor, writing a letter of support published in the Valley News in October 2023. In March 2024 weeks before the records became public,Ayotte campaigned at Stone’s Claremont gun store, Black Op Arms, and posted a photo on X thanking him: “Loved seeing one of our signs outside Black Op Arms in Claremont!”
When the records becamem public weeks later, Ayotte adopted a familiar strategy when faced with a difficult political decision: She went completely quiet.
Her campaign declined to comment as Democratic leaders condemned her for accepting Stone’s endorsement, and then-House Democratic Leader Matt Wilhelm called for Stone’s removal from the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee—a seat he kept through the end of his term.
When Ayotte finally addressed the issue that April, she shrugged it off: “I have hundreds of endorsements,” she said, adding, “I don’t agree with or condone his behavior. He has to answer for the allegations of what happened 18 years ago.”
She never asked him to step aside. Stone’s name remained on her campaign’s list of endorsers even as the controversy raged, and it was still listed that October, weeks before the election.
The system’s failure ran deeper than one campaign. The New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council—the state body that licenses police officers, on which Ayotte served as attorney general—received Stone’s internal affairs reports and took no action, according to InDepthNH.
Stone appealed his firing and reached a union-negotiated settlement under which the city effectively turned back the clock so he could resign without findings entered against him. Based on that negotiated resignation, the council concluded in 2007 that it could not pursue his decertification, though he gave it up as a bargaining chip. He left New Hampshire policing and was soon hired as a corrections officer in Vermont.
Granite Post previously reported that Stone held multiple roles in Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign in New Hampshire, including serving as his Sullivan County campaign chair. A Granite Post review of Stone’s social media activity later that year found a pattern of posts featuring Holocaust and Nazi imagery, racist and anti-LGBTQ+ comments, and threats of violence.
Two years later, the question Ayotte refused to answer in 2024 is on the ballot again—twice. Stone is asking Sullivan County voters to send him back to Concord, and Ayotte is asking New Hampshire for a second term, with the county party Stone chairs working to deliver it.
