No one should be charged in the United States for publishing truthful information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s defense attorney in the US, said in response to the Mueller report release on Monday.Īnd Grant Smith, a defense attorney for Stone, said the newly released version of the report vindicated Stone because he “in no way” knew in advance the timing or content of the emails the Russians stole and released. Mueller decided not to indict Julian Assange. In combination, those factors created sufficient doubt that the Office could obtain and sustain a conviction” about WikiLeaks. “The Office also considered whether WikiLeaks and anyone connected to the Trump Campaign had liability in connection with WikiLeaks’ months-long releases of stolen emails and other documents, possibly with the aim of influencing the 2016 presidential election,” Mueller wrote.īut his team “concluded that substantial questions exist about whether the release of emails could be treated as an ‘expenditure,’ whether the government could establish willfulness, and whether prosecution of this conduct would be subject to a First Amendment defense. Mueller explained how his team faced additional hurdles in potential cases against WikiLeaks or Trump campaign affiliates. Assange has not yet appeared in US court and his attorneys have criticized the indictment and fought his extradition from Great Britain to the US. Assange faces charges in the US for a hacking conspiracy, though the case is unrelated to the 2016 election. Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness intimidation about his efforts to reach WikiLeaks in 2016, though he avoided prison after receiving clemency from Trump. “While the Office cannot exclude the possibility of coordination between Stone and WikiLeaks or that additional evidence could come to light on that issue, the investigation did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government’s burden to prove facts establishing such coordination beyond a reasonable doubt,” the newly released portion of the Mueller report said. Mueller’s team couldn’t find evidence beyond a reasonable doubt “at the present time” that Stone or other campaign advisers coordinated with WikiLeaks, the report said. In his discussion of a potential case against Stone, Mueller acknowledged “the existence of some evidence that Stone played a role in coordinating the October 7 release” of hacked emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The Mueller report’s revelations on Monday add a new layer of nuance to the understanding of what the former FBI director found about the Trump campaign’s receptiveness and the Russian hack and dump of stolen Democratic emails, noting that Stone could have been a more active player than was previously believed. But ultimately, Mueller wrote, the Justice Department “did not have admissible evidence,” such as proof of an agreement and knowledge that the hack was ongoing, to secure conspiracy convictions. Mueller reasoned that Stone and Assange could have been liable for the hacking conspiracy because they had helped to disseminate and maximize the impact of the stolen documents. Separately, other Russians have been indicted for operating a sprawling social media propaganda campaign intended to destabilize American politics. ![]() ![]() Several Russians affiliated with the military intelligence unit the GRU were charged with the hack of the Democrats and the leak of the stolen emails, which shaped politics in the 2016 presidential race and gave Trump’s campaign fodder to attack Clinton. The new version also revealed details about how Russians specifically sought to harm Hillary Clinton and support Trump in 2016. The latest version of the report was released because the transparency group Electronic Privacy Information Center and BuzzFeed News sued for it. Mueller ultimately decided there was not enough proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The l atest version of the report showed Mueller looked at whether Stone, a longtime political confidant of President Donald Trump, along with WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, should have faced criminal conspiracy charges related to the Russian government’s hack of the Democrats in the 2016 presidential campaign. The Justice Department released a less-redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Monday, lifting redactions on a handful of pages about the intersection of Roger Stone, WikiLeaks and the Russian hack of the Democrats.
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