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Roger Stone Asks Judge to Suppress All Evidence Against Him

Roger Stone Asks Judge to Suppress All Evidence Against Him

(Bloomberg) -- Roger Stone asked a federal judge to suppress all evidence against him in the government’s lying-and-obstruction case, saying it’s the “fruit of illegal search warrants” filed under seal.

Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, was charged in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He said in a court filing on Friday that Mueller’s evidence against him should be tossed out because U.S. agents made “reckless misrepresentations” in their applications to search his emails, cell phones and computers.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington will weigh Stone’s request at a hearing set for June 21, according to the filing.

Stone, a self-styled political dirty trickster, was indicted in January for lying to Congress and obstructing lawmakers’ probe into the Russian meddling, including its hack into the Democratic National Committee’s servers.

But Stone said there’s no evidence to support Mueller’s charges because the U.S. can’t prove the Russian government hacked the servers or sent the stolen emails to WikiLeaks for publication -- the very events Stone allegedly lied about. While Mueller’s long-awaited report concluded that Russia had carried out the hack, it cited the findings of a private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate, rather than the FBI, Stone said.

“The government has relied on the assumptions made by a source outside of the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian State was involved in the hacking and that the data taken from the various servers were given to WikiLeaks,” Stone’s lawyers said in the filing. “The government cannot prove either since it did not participate in the investigation at the earliest stage.”

Also on Friday, Stone asked the judge to give him access to unredacted copies of reports by CrowdStrike Inc., the cybersecurity company the DNC hired in 2016 to investigate the breach of its computer systems.

“These reports contain information that has been relied on by the government and media sources to claim that the DNC was a victim of a hostile former government, aka Russia,” Stone’s attorneys said in the filing. Stone “is entitled to full access of these reports as the issue of whether or not the DNC was hacked is central to the defendant’s defense.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment on Stone’s filing.

To contact the reporters on this story: Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net;Andrew Harris in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Heather Smith at hsmith26@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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