Objecting to gag order, Roger Stone’s lawyers say he’s no Kim Kardashian

Legal

“He is hardly ubiquitous in the larger landscape of popular consciousness,” they write.

Roger Stone’s lawyers downplayed their client’s political celebrity Friday in urging a federal judge not to slap a gag order on the longtime Donald Trump associate.

The court filing is the latest maneuver by Stone’s team as the Republican operative fights back against special counsel Robert Mueller’s charges that Stone lied to Congress and obstructed lawmakers’ Russia investigation.

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“While Roger Stone may be familiar to those who closely follow American politics, he is hardly ubiquitous in the larger landscape of popular consciousness,” Stone’s attorneys wrote in an eight-page memo pushing back on U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s concern that Stone’s media blitz since being indicted could taint the jury pool ahead of a criminal trial later this year in Washington, D.C.

To make their point about Stone’s limited footprint in the wider world beyond politics and media, his lawyers explained that his work as a writer and speaker is restrained to topics like politics, government and men’s fashion.

“To foreclose Mr. Stone’s exercise of his First Amendment rights on any subject would serve no compelling governmental interest,” they said.

Stone’s lawyers also cited celebrity Kim Kardashian’s 59.5 million Twitter followers and her 126 million Instagram followers, contrasting the numbers with Stone’s social media footprint. Stone has no Twitter account — he was actually banned from the social media platform in October 2017 after an expletive-laden series of posts about CNN anchors. On Instagram, he has just 39,000 followers.

Jackson floated the need for a gag order last week during Stone’s first hearing since his indictment. While she acknowledged that such a restriction would limit his First Amendment right, she explained that she needed to weigh that against ensuring Stone’s constitutional right to a fair trial was also protected.

“The upshot of treating the pretrial proceedings in this case like a book tour could be that we end up with a much larger percent of the jury pool that’s been tainted by pretrial publicity than we have now, and that’s what it’s my job to balance here,” Jackson said in explaining the prospect of a gag order.

Jackson has previously hit other Mueller targets with gag orders, imposing one in November 2017 on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates and their lawyers just days after their first indictment.

In Friday filing, Stone’s lawyers argued that media coverage of the case “will subside” from the “first wave” tied to his indictment.

“To be sure, the interest in this case will continue, but nothing compels the conclusion that the Court’s present expressed confidence in seating an unbiased jury will, in months hence, be compromised by the press and/or Mr. Stone as we move forward,” they added.

On a separate front, Stone’s lawyers also filed an objection Friday to the fact that their case was assigned to Jackson, given her links to the earlier Mueller indictment against a dozen Russian military officials accused of hacking into the Democratic Party’s computer systems. Mueller’s investigators have accused Stone of lying about his attempts to communicate with WikiLeaks, which U.S. intelligence agencies said received stolen Democratic emails from Russian cutouts during the 2016 campaign.

“At first blush and without the benefit of discovery, there is nothing about these cases that suggests they are suitably related, other than they are both brought by the office of special counsel,” Stone’s lawyers wrote in a 13-page notice that requests a new random assignment to a different judge.

Mueller’s case against the 12 Russian military officials, while assigned to Jackson, hasn’t moved since the indictment was unsealed last July. None of the defendants are in the U.S., and no one has entered a plea responding to the charges, which center around allegations that the members of Russia’s military intelligence agency stole and released Democratic documents after planting malicious computer codes in the networks of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

While Stone isn’t named in the July indictment, the document does describe communications between an unnamed person and Guccifer 2.0, an online persona seen as a cover for the Russian hackers. The indictment included communications with Guccifer 2.0 that match those that Stone sent and received to the online persona.

Stone has acknowledged the chatter, but he claimed it was innocuous.

In an order issued later Friday, Jackson gave Mueller until Feb. 15 to respond to Stone’s objection on who presides over the case.