Roger Stone offers preposterous excuse for telling Mueller witness to lie to Congress

Frank Pentangeli was a character in Francis Ford Coppolla’s classic 1974 crime drama “The Godfather, Part II” who lied to Congress about his involvement in the Corleone mafia family—and according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, veteran GOP operative Roger Stone told radio host Randy Credico to “do a Frank Pentangeli” when addressing the House Intelligence Committee. Mueller’s indictment alleges that Stone encouraged Credico to commit perjury and lie to Congress, but in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, Stone insists that Mueller is taking the Pentangeli reference out of context.

“This is all wrong,” Stone told Toobin. “Randy is an impressionist. He does impressions. I was asking him to do his Frank Pentangeli impression. I wasn’t telling Randy to lie.”

On Friday morning, January 25, Roger became the latest associate of President Donald Trump to be arrested as a result of Mueller’s Russia investigation. The 66-year-old Stone (who testified before the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017) is facing seven criminal charges, including obstruction of justice, witness tampering and making false statements.

Mueller's probe has been investigating the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 presidential race. A hacker who went by “Guccifer 2.0,” according to Mueller, stole the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign manager) and passed them along to WikiLeaks—which published them online. Mueller alleges that “Guccifer 2.0” was a Russian government intelligence official based in Moscow, which Stone has denied. The Trump ally has maintained that there is no evidence that “Guccifer 2.0” was Russian.

In his New Yorker article, Toobin notes that Mueller’s indictment “does not charge Stone with any involvement in the hacking” of Democratic Party e-mails in 2016 but “accuses him of lying” to the House Intelligence Committee about his and far-right author/conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi’s “efforts to pry loose the hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks.”