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Stone Wants Mueller to Prove Court Order Wasn't Violated

Stone Wants Mueller to Prove Court Order Wasn't Violated

(Bloomberg) -- Roger Stone asked a judge in Washington to order Special Counsel Robert Mueller to prove his office didn’t violate a court order by leaking Stone’s sealed indictment to the news media.

In the request filed Wednesday, Stone said a CNN reporter sent him a copy of the draft indictment, which appeared to come from the Special Counsel’s Office, 2 1/2 hours before it was posted on the district court’s electronic docket.

Stone’s filing fails to mention that a copy of the unsealed indictment was posted on the Justice Department’s web site just before 6:13 a.m., nine minutes before Stone received the copy from the reporter.

Stone was arrested by the FBI on Jan. 25 at his Florida home. A CNN crew was at the site and recorded the raid.

Stone, a self-described political dirty trickster and adviser to President Donald Trump, was charged with lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, witness tampering and obstructing Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He pleaded not guilty.

Mueller’s office identified Stone’s case as being related to one filed last year against 12 Russian intelligence agents accused of hacking Democratic Party computers before the election.

The case is U.S. v. Stone, 19-cr-18, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Schneider in New York at jschneider5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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