Prosecutors refute Roger Stone's claim that Russia didn't hack DNC

[DonViejo]

By KYLE CHENEY 05/31/2019 06:14 PM EDT

Federal prosecutors directly refuted for the first time Friday out-of-the-mainstream arguments lodged by Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump, that Russia may not have been responsible for the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee.

Stone, fighting charges that he obstructed the House's Russia probe, argued in a filing earlier this month that FBI investigators relied on a private firm — CrowdStrike — to assess that Russia was behind the hacks and failed to properly preserve DNC servers, an argument that Trump has regularly echoed on Twitter and in public statements.

To support his argument, Stone submitted affidavits from two former intelligence officials who agreed that Russia was an unlikely source for the files, citing metadata, time stamps and even time zone data as evidence that the removal of DNC files may have originated in the United States. Stone argued that if the evidence Russia was behind the hacks was faulty, the search warrants used to ultimately indict him.

But prosecutors, who revealed they obtained 18 search warrants on Stone to support their charges against him, rebutted the arguments forcefully Friday, taking aim at the two former intelligence officials he cited.

"Even if those claims were correct and well supported (which they are not), they would not come close to suggesting that any statements about Russia conducting the hacks were false," wrote prosecutors in the office of Washington’s U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu, who assumed oversight of the case after special counsel Robert Mueller began winding down his work.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/31/roger-stone-russia-hack-dnc-1349432

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Guess neither Stone nor his lawyers have read Mueller's report.

It clearly explains how Russia got the files.