A former aide to political operative Roger Stone has turned over to a grand jury all of his text messages with Stone between October 2016 and March 2017, as well as the written agenda for Stone while he was at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
The aide, Andrew Miller, turned over the documents in response to a federal grand jury subpoena following his two-hour testimony last Friday before the body, according to communications between Miller’s lawyer and the government that were reviewed by POLITICO.
The subpoena offers a glimpse into the government’s ongoing investigation of Stone, an informal Trump campaign adviser who was indicted in January on charges of lying to Congress and the FBI about his dealings with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a trial, set for November.
Under Justice Department policy and court rulings, grand juries are not supposed to be used to investigate a criminal case that’s already been filed, although they can be used to add new charges or to charge new defendants.
It’s still unclear what additional crimes D.C. prosecutors are investigating, however. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Miller testified before a new grand jury rather than the one convened by Mueller that Miller was initially fighting, and that he was held in contempt over.
In the emailed communications obtained by POLITICO, Miller’s pro bono attorney, Paul Kamenar of the National Legal Policy Center, asked D.C. U.S. Attorney Michael Marando for an explanation.
“I simply noted that the original grand jury my client was ordered to appear before was 17-1 and that the contempt order was for not appearing before that one,” Kamenar wrote Marando. “While you may have the authority to have a witness appear before other grand juries as you assert, I believe, as I asked at the hearing last week, that a new subpoena issue would have clarified the matter.
”Marando replied only that prosecutors planned “to seek immediate contempt” before the judge if Miller did not plan to comply with the new grand jury subpoena for documents.
The new subpoena suggests that the grand jury wants to know more about Stone’s involvement in the RNC — where he gave speeches and schmoozed with journalists — and about his conversations with one of his most trusted aides during a period that included WikiLeaks’ release of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, the presidential transition, and Trump’s inauguration.
Mueller’s team scrutinized the Trump campaign’s activities at the RNC after it was reported that they’d softened an amendment to the Republican platform to be more favorable to Russia. It was during the RNC, moreover, that Russian hackers sent a file to WikiLeaks with instructions on how to download stolen Democratic National Committee documents. WikiLeaks released the internal emails on July 22, 2016, the last day of the RNC and just before the start of the Democratic National Convention.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine