Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s indictment of Roger Stone on charges of lying to Congress, obstructing an official proceeding, and witness tampering plops the political provocateur in the hot, deep soup of the Russia scandal, and holds him under for what seems like an eternity.

Stone promptly surfaced Friday—arms flung wide in Nixonian victory signs—to claim his arrest was “politically motivated” and promise he’ll plead not guilty. President Donald Trump used the occasion to reprise his “Witch Hunt” and “No Collusion” themes on Twitter. But the indictment trusses and binds Stone with emails and text messages of remarkable specificity that not even the best defense attorney will find easy to untangle.


Stone, the indictment alleges, lied to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks, Julian Assange’s organization that released the Russian-hacked Democratic National Committee emails and later the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. Stone impeded the congressional investigation with his false testimony and failure to surrender requested records, according to the indictment, and he tampered with a witness in the investigation, radio show host Randy Credico, whom the indictment refers to as Person 2 and whom Stone called his “intermediary” to Assange and the WikiLeaks trove.

Stone allegedly coached Credico to do a “Frank Pentangeli” before the House Select Committee on Intelligence—Pentangeli being the character in The Godfather Part II who lies to a congressional committee as part of a conspiracy to protect mob boss Michael Corleone from prosecution. According to the indictment, Stone, after Credico decided that acting wasn’t for him, also threatened Credico’s therapy dog, Bianca. That can probably be dismissed as standard Stone barking. But the ominous “Prepare to die [expletive],” might be harder to explain.

The indictment doesn’t try to draw a direct line from Russia to the Trump campaign, though it does trace some very large dots for readers to connect. Instead, it demonstrates how interested the Trump campaign was in what Stone knew about what WikiLeaks had cooking. Trump campaign officials keep popping up like cartoon toast to chat with Stone in the summer of 2016 about WikiLeaks and “information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign.” The indictment states that in June or July, Stone told Trump officials WikiLeaks had Clinton-damaging documents. After the July 22, 2016, release of the stolen DNC emails, a “senior Trump campaign official” was directed to ask Stone what else WikiLeaks had on Clinton. That’s a vague construction for Mueller to use in an otherwise specific indictment, because it prompts close readers to ask, “Directed by whom?” Surely not Donald Trump! CNN leaned on Sarah Huckabee Sanders to get her to deny that the director in question was Trump, but the best she would deliver was a claim the charges against Stone “have nothing to do with the president.” CNN’s Erin Burnett had better luck when she asked Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), whom he thought did the directing. “Donald Trump or possibly Donald Trump Jr.,” Blumenthal said. “Remember, this campaign was very small.”

In early October, Stone wrote this to a Trump supporter: “Spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.” At about the same time, a Trump official sent Stone an email “asking about the status of future releases” from WikiLeaks. (CNBC and other news organizations say the official was Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who has spoken with Mueller.) After the October dump of Podesta’s email, an associate of a high-ranking Trump campaign official texted “well done” to Stone, perhaps because it distracted the public from the just-released Access Hollywood tape.

All of the players had to have had a good idea they were playing with Russia-tainted goods. Remember the timeline: On June 14, 2016, the DNC reported it had been hacked by Russians, and on July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks released the stolen DNC emails. Trump displayed his awareness several days after the DNC email dump, saying at a news conference, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing [from Clinton’s private server]. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”

The indictment’s convincing assertion that Stone repeatedly and aggressively lied about his WikiLeaks connections to a congressional committee after previously boasting about his intimacy with Assange’s group doesn’t make him a Russian agent. But it poses a leading question: After crowing about his close WikiLeaks association and knowledge of what sort of information it had, after leaving so much indelible evidence in emails and texts with so many people about that closeness, why did Stone then beat his furious retreat denying practically all connections when called to testify before Congress? As recently as last fall, he denied in a Washington Post interview having discussed WikiLeaks with the Trump campaign.

What might Stone be hiding that was worth risking nine felony counts? He has predicted for months that he would soon be indicted by Mueller, so he’s not surprised. His behavior could be explained as standard Stone defiance of authority, or equally standard Stone loyalty to the big boss—Richard Nixon then, Trump now. Or it could be that beneath the skin of the Stone indictment can be found the meat and fat of the Russia connection to the Trump campaign that scandal hound Mueller was charged to fetch. In this, least-charitable interpretation, Stone, the bodybuilder in the British suit, has decided to take the temporary heat because he’s been promised a pardon by you know who. To quote Stone’s own text to Credico, when he urged him to “stonewall” investigators: “Anything to save the plan.” I just don’t know.

It’s a bad time to lie to Congress is one takeaway from the Stone indictment and from Michael Cohen’s confession. Donald Trump Jr. suffers similar legal exposure, especially since Cohen spilled his lies and stated that Moscow Trump Tower development continued into June 2016. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), has also complained, saying that Junior “provided false testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Said Blumenthal on the day Junior’s testimony was made public, “I have no confidence that he has told the whole truth.”

Busting liars is great legal sport, but as former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal told the Guardian in November, the richest question isn’t: Who else lied? It’s: Why did they lie? As Katyal said: “At whose direction? Who stood to gain from the lies? What did they know and when?”

If Stone lied, he’s not alone. One common denominator for the liars in the scandal—Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates and Paul Manafort—is Russia or Russian proxies. Any investigation of who directed, who stood to gain, and who knew what, must take this into account, and if that investigation leads to Trump, we cannot flinch from holding him accountable.

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Use Uber Eats to send steaming bowls of Stone soup to [email protected]. My email alerts love chicken noodle. My Twitter is a fan of tomato. My RSS feed would rather eat dirt than shovel gruel into its mouth.

