Special Counsel Robert Mueller just revealed that his indictments against Roger Stone and Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers came from the same search warrant against Trump’s longtime political operative in a court filing today. (embedded below)
In addition, Mueller’s team announced for the very first time in today’s filing that it has copies of direct communications between Roger Stone and Wikileaks.
NEW: Prosecutors said for the first time that they have evidence of Roger Stone communicating with Wikileaks, according to a new court filing from special counsel prosecutors.
—@kpolantz reports
— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) February 15, 2019
The Special Counsel’s Office indicted Stone on seven total counts of lying to Congress and obstruction charges, and today’s revelation arrived in a filing asking for the same judge to be assigned to the former Trump campaign manager’s case as is assigned to the Russian hackers.
Mueller’s team made two main arguments which necessitate having the same judge oversee the two cases over Stone’s objections, firmly tying his criminal indictment to Wikileaks dissemination of hacked emails from Democrats. They wrote:
A. This Case and Netyksho [the Russian hacker’s case] Arise from Common Search Warrants.
B. This Case and Netyksho Involve Activities That Are Part of the Same Alleged Criminal Event or Transaction.
Russian hackers ripped off confidential documents from Democratic National Committee and the House fundraising operation, the D.C.C.C. Russian operatives then allegedly distributed those hacked emails and later stolen Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails through the Wikileaks transparency organization, but many speculated that they had help.
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Donald Trump mentioned Wikileaks over 160 times in the last month of the 2016 presidential election, which made them his number one campaign topic.
Mueller’s probe and the FBI investigated the thefts after Trump’s shocking electoral college win, which led to search warrants against Roger Stone, and that they say, is what led to Wikileaks and later the Russians. They wrote:
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Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1. [which is Wikileaks]
Evidence obtained from those search warrants resulted in the allegations that the Netyksho defendants hacked and stole documents for release through intermediaries, including [Wikileaks], and that Stone lied to a congressional committee investigating, among other things, the activities of [Wikileaks] regarding those stolen documents.
Federal prosecutors made the second point in their filing by explaining that Roger Stone’s lying and witness tampering activities were an active cover-up into the indictment of Russian GRU hackers, which also permits them to apply for a single judge overseeing both cases.
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The White House, Trump, and Stone have spent years lying about their involvement with Russians during the 2016 election, particularly, with the slimy Florida-based operative saying he had no idea about the timing of the explosive email releases that sunk Clinton’s campaign after the first publicly known FBI complaints were filed during the campaign.
Today’s news from the Special Counsel’s Office means that Roger Stone’s involvement with Russian hackers is central to the start of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to collude with Putin’s political operatives.
It also makes perfect sense of why Mueller is charging Stone, for material lies central to covering up Trump’s electoral help from Russia, because he is the person that led authorities to the GRU in the first place.
Here is a copy of the complete filing from the Special Counsel’s Office:
