Roger Stone Covering Up ‘Bigger Secret’ Than WikiLeaks Contacts, Legal Expert Says — Here’s What It Could Be

In the 24-page indictment of longtime Donald Trump associate Roger Stone handed down by Russia investigation special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday morning, Stone is accused of telling a Mueller witness that he would kill his dog, and apparently encouraging him to commit suicide.

As CNBC reported, Stone is accused of telling radio host Randy Credico, a Mueller witness, to “do a Frank Pentangeli,” a reference to the 1974 film The Godfather Part II, in which a potential mob witness kills himself rather than testify against his fellow mobsters.

But why was Stone so adamant about silencing a witness against him? That’s the question asked by former Justice Department official Matthew Miller on Friday, Miller notes that, as Inquisitr reported, Stone in 2016 had publicly boasted about the very communications with Wikileaks that he is now accused of trying to cover up.

“Stone’s behavior as described in the indictment is so incredibly reckless,” Miller wrote on Twitter. “Find it hard to believe he takes such a huge risk just to protect outreach to Wikileaks that he had already bragged about publicly. Has to be a bigger secret.”

Stone was also charged with lying to Congress about those contacts, per a CNBC report.

If Stone’s desperation portrayed in the indictment to cover up some sort of secret, what could that secret actually be? The indictment provides a possible clue, as pointed out on Twitter by NBC News correspondent Katy Tur, who noted the proximity in time between when — according to the indictment — a Trump campaign official was “directed” to contact Stone about the Wikileaks releases of hacked Democratic emails, and when Russian hackers attempted to infiltrate the personal email accounts of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

As Inquisitr covered, on July 27, 2016, Trump issued a public call to Russian hackers to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to emails supposedly deleted from Clinton’s server. Just hours after Trump made that public statement, Russian hackers made their first attempts to break into Clinton’s private server, Mueller revealed in an earlier indictment.

As Tur noted, Trump’s public appeal to the Russians and the Russian hackers’ attack on Clinton’s servers came just five days after the Trump campaign official was “directed” to find out what Stone knew about future Wikileaks releases of hacked emails.

Whether there was a connection between anything the Trump campaign officials may have learned from Stone, and Trump’s public appeal to Russia to do more digging into Clinton’s emails is not addressed by Friday’s indictment. But any potential advance knowledge by the Trump campaign of what the Russian hackers were up to would be at least one possible “bigger secret” that Stone, according to Miller, sought to cover up.