How about lawyer Michael Cohen, now sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress? If Trump and the gang were a Sopranos remake, Cohen would be “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, who turned on Tony after being busted himself.

Really, there’s so much talent there, it could have been anybody.

Stone and Trump go way back. They were introduced about 40 years ago by their good mutual friend Roy Cohn, the guy who gave us the McCarthy witch hunts. Trump still burbles about how great Cohn was. And he enthused to a documentary interviewer that Stone is “a quality guy” who “always wanted me to run for president.”

Can’t get a better recommendation than that. Stone has a talent for identifying presidential talent — he’s got a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back. He was partners with Paul Manafort in a Washington lobbying firm that specialized in representing the most terrible dictators on the planet. If you had a million dollars, a need for support from the United States government and a small problem with torture, rape and terrorism, these were the guys to see.

(A third partner, Charlie Black, said that when reporters called him to ask if Stone was the connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, he replied, “With all due respect, Roger couldn’t find Russia on a map.” As always, when we’re considering possible crimes committed during the 2016 campaign, the best defense of Trump and his associates is that they were too dumb to be capable of plotting.)

“I’m proud of the job I did at Black Manafort and Stone because I made a lot of money,” Stone told those documentarians, getting right to the point.

Stone’s political career almost came to a crashing end in 1996 when he ran into a scandal that forced him to resign from the Bob Dole campaign. (The candidate was touchy about headlines like “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group Sex Ring.”) Stone blamed the story on a lying, disgruntled former employee. Later, he admitted that it was true, and explained that he needed to deny it because “my grandparents were still alive.”

But no matter, he would go on triumphantly to organize a wild protest that stopped the recount of votes after the Gore-Bush election in Florida. Or maybe not. Stone bragged that he was the guy who staged one of the most spectacular assaults on the democratic process in recent history, but there was competition for the title.