WASHINGTON -- A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Roger Stone's request to suppress all evidence gathered through 18 search warrants at his November trial, finding that the Justice Department properly obtained court approvals before charging the longtime confidant of President Donald Trump with lying to Congress and witness tampering.
Stone, 67, has pleaded innocent to a seven-count indictment connected to his allegations that he tried to gather information about Democratic emails that prosecutors say were stolen by Russia during the 2016 campaign and released through the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and other groups.
Attorneys for Stone had argued that prosecutors illegally relied on unproven assumptions about Russia's involvement and sought to force them to prove in court the role of Russian operatives in hacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta, among others.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Stone had "not come close" to showing the government misled the magistrates or judges who approved the warrants, that federal agents knowingly or intentionally lied to them or that the warrants were premised on Russia's role in the hacking.
"Even absent any representation that it was believed to be Russia that was behind the intrusion, there was probable cause for the issuing courts to conclude that the requested searches of defendant's premises, records, and electronic accounts, would uncover relevant evidence about the unlawful intrusion and related offenses," Jackson wrote in a 14-page opinion.
"The officers executing the searches relied in good faith on valid warrants, and there is no basis to suppress the evidence they obtained," Jackson concluded in a decision issued Thursday and unsealed Tuesday.
Jackson's ruling was made public one day before Stone and his defense team are due in court for a hearing in the run-up to his Nov. 5 trial date.
In clearing the way for prosecutors to mount their case, Jackson swept aside Stone's use of a theory backed by some Trump supporters that denies a central finding by former special counsel Robert Mueller that Moscow had a primary role in "sweeping and systemic" cyber-interference in the 2016 election.
The Mueller probe in July 2018 publicly indicted members of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU in the hack.
The FBI and U.S. intelligence community have made similar assessments about Russian intelligence agencies' roles.
Stone's filing alleged that redacted versions of Mueller's report and reports by CrowdStrike -- the private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the June 2016 attack -- that have been turned over to his defense team lack the necessary authentication to be admitted as evidence in a U.S. criminal court.
"The government does not have the evidence, and it knew it did not have the evidence, when it applied for these search warrants" for Stone's papers, emails, cellphones, computers and other devices, his attorneys argued, adding, "If that foundation collapses, then the warrants must fail for lack of probable cause."
Jackson said that Stone's allegations were conclusory and that he had not shown that federal agents made any statements that were deliberately false or in reckless disregard of the truth.
"Defendant has not offered any grounds to find that it would be reckless for an FBI agent to recite a finding of the U.S. intelligence community," a declassified version of a classified assessment provided to the president, drafted by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency and released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Jackson wrote.
Even if false, she added, such statements "were not necessary" to the courts' decisions to issue the warrants, which were based on the theft and release of the DNC data and Stone's alleged actions to impede a House Intelligence Committee investigation into foreign interference in the election, Jackson found.
Separately, a federal judge tossed out the convictions of a one-time business partner of former national security adviser Michael Flynn who was accused of acting as a Turkish foreign agent.
U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ruled Tuesday that the evidence against Bijan Kian was insufficient to sustain a conviction even though a jury convicted him at a trial earlier this year.
Information for this article was contributed by Spencer S. Hsu of The Washington Post; and by staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 09/25/2019