Lauren Boebert faced an embarrassing moment during a House hearing Tuesday when it became clear she had confused filmmaker Oliver Stone with the longtime Republican strategist Roger Stone.
Oliver Stone—the director of JFK, a political thriller about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination—was testifying to the House’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets about newly released assassination records, when Boebert asked a perplexing question.
“Mr. Stone, you wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Do these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?” the Colorado congresswoman asked.
Stone, appearing confused, turned to another witness at the hearing, author Jefferson Morley, before telling Boebert, “No I didn’t,” explaining that his film implicated President Lyndon B. Johnson in a potential coverup of the case, but not in the assassination itself.
Morley, an independent journalist who has written extensively on the subject, then delivered a brutal fact check.
“I think you’re confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump’s former political strategiest and a self-described “dirty trickster.”
A clearly flustered Boebert replied, “I may have misstated it, yeah,” before adding, “Sorry.”
“It’s Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president, it’s not my friend Oliver Stone,” Morley repeated as Boebert apologized again.
Roger Stone indeed released The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ in 2013, accusing Johnson of orchestrating Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Oliver Stone, on the other hand, is an Oscar-winning filmmaker. He too has dabbled in conspiratorial works, portraying Kennedy’s assassination as a CIA conspiracy in 1991’s JFK, which was nominated for eight Oscars, winning two.
At the hearing, he called for Congress to reopen the investigation, and disparaged the CIA as an agency that “arrogantly believes it is outside our laws.”
“Can we return to a world where we can trust our government to level with us, the people for which this government exists?” Stone said. “This is our democracy. This is our presidency. It belongs to us.”
The hearing comes after Trump ordered thousands of government documents related to Kennedy’s assassination to be released in March.
In the thousands of pages of documents, however, scholars have not found new evidence refuting the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot the president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
