A new court filing made on Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller suggests there may be a conspiracy involving Robert Stone, a longtime friend of Donald Trump and associate of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and two entities who took part in the cyber attack on that election — Wikileaks and the Russian intelligence agency GRU, whose agents allegedly hacked Democratic party servers and stole thousands of private emails, according to documents submitted to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia .
The filing explains why the indictment of Stone, handed down on January 25, as Inquisitr reported, is “related” to Mueller’s earlier indictment from July 13, 2018, of 12 GRU officers who hacked into the Democratic servers and stole emails while collectively posing as a Romanian hacker calling himself “Guccifer 2.0.” But the “Guccifer 2.0” character was pure fiction, according to the hacking indictment, which is posted online via Document Cloud .
In Friday’s filing, according to CNN , Mueller, for the first time, said he possessed evidence that Stone was in direct communication with Wikileaks, the so-called “radical transparency” site that published the Democratic emails stolen by the Russian cyber-spies.
Wikileaks released the hacked emails online in document dumps that some have said were strategically timed to disrupt the Democratic National Convention and, in a second release, to divert attention from Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, as Inquisitr reported.
Stone asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to rule that his case was not, in fact, “related” to the GRU case, and he also asked that Jackson withdraw from the case and allow another judge to take over, according to a Vox report. Mueller’s Friday filing was a response to those petitions by Stone and his lawyers. In the document, Mueller went into detail about why Stone’s case is related to the Russian hacker indictments, a case known as U.S. v. Netyksho .
“The criminal conduct alleged in Netyksho was a central focus of the congressional investigation that the defendant is alleged to have obstructed, and therefore the activities underlying the crimes charged in that case are part of the same activities underlying the crimes charged in this case,” Mueller wrote, as quoted by Law & Crime .
Stone was charged with lying to Congress about his and the Trump campaign’s efforts to use the hacked emails as a political weapon against the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, as Reuters reported.
But Stone’s lies “did not arise in a vacuum,” Mueller said in Friday’s court filing. Instead, they were meant to obstruct the investigation into what Mueller described in the filing as “possible links” between Stone, Wikileaks, and the Russian hackers.