Joe Conason is reporting that Republican political operative Roger Stone is alleging that Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan because the Koch brothers promised to spend $100 million on his campaign in exchange:

Veteran Republican political consultant, unrepentant dirty trickster, and recently reborn libertarian Roger Stone yesterday published a startling accusation against Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on his personal website, The Stone Zone. According to Stone, the billionaire Koch brothers purchased the Republican vice presidential nomination for Ryan from Romney in late July by promising to fork over an additional $100 million toward “independent expenditure” campaigning for the GOP ticket.

Any such transaction would represent a serious violation of federal election laws and perhaps other statutes, aside from the ethical and character implications for all concerned. Although Stone is not the most reputable figure, to put it mildly, he has been a Republican insider, with access to the party’s top figures, over four decades. His credentials date back to Nixon’s Committee to Reelect The President and continue through the Reagan White House, the hard-fought Bush campaigns, and the Florida fiasco in 2000, when he masterminded the “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade. Peruse his site and you’ll see his greatest hits and the attention he has drawn from major publications.

If this is true and Roger Stone’s biography is not something that convinces me of his reliability, thenMitt Romney is a fool.

When someone offers you a lot of money to take on a potential successor, it is because they are thinking about getting rid of you.

I’m not sure though that this is true though. The source, Roger Stone, was one of the leading rat-f%$#ers (that’s what they called themselves) in the Nixon administration, and if reports are true, he has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.

He could be telling the truth, but his background does not convince me that places a high value on the truth in the context of politics, and he is supporting Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, so YMMV.